LINGUIST List 7.754

Fri May 24 1996

Books: Syntax, Logic & Linguistics

Editor for this issue: Ljuba Veselinova <lveselinemunix.emich.edu>

Directory

1. Justin Spence, New book: syntax

SYNTAX

Kawashima, Ruriko. THE STRUCTURE OF NOUN PHRASES AND THE
INTERPRETATION OF QUANTIFICATIONAL

NPs IN JAPANESE. Cornell dissertation submitted 1994, published 1996.
173 pp. Paperbound. cost: $12.00

This thesis, conducted within the Minimalist framework (Chomsky 1993),
investigates (i) the formal syntactic properties of noun phrases
containing numerals and quantifiers, and (ii) the varying
quantificational force exhibited by quantificational noun phrases in
Japanese, with particular attention to WH-pronouns and the suffix -mo.

To receive a full abstract of this dissertation, to find out how to
order, and to inquire about other titles available from CLC
Publications, please contact us at booksplab.dmll.cornell.edu.



LOGIC & LING

STUDIES IN LOGIC, LANGUAGE AND INFORMATION

Csirmaz, Laszlo (Hungarian Academy ofSciences, Budapest, Hungary),
Gabbay, Dov. M. (Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine,
London), and de Rijke, Maarten (Center for Mathematics and Computer
Science, Amsterdam) (Eds.) LOGIC COLLOQUIUM '92; ISBN: (cloth)
1-881526-97-6; ISBN (paper) 1-881526-98-4. pp. 319 CSLI Publications
& the European Association for Logic, Language and Information 1996;
http://csli.www.stanford.edu/publications/
email: pubsroslin.stanford.edu

This volume is a selection of papers from the European Summer Meeting
of the Association for Symbolic Logic, held in Veszprem, Hungary, in
August 1992. The papers included grew out of invited and contributed
talks on the two main themes of the conference, algebraic logic, and
the axiomatizability and decidability of logical systems. Written from
an interdisciplinary perspective, most of the contributions
investigate logical properties of formal systems by studying algebraic
properties of corresponding classes of algebras, or vice versa. The
remaining papers focus on connected areas from model theory and the
combination of logics. Significant and timely, LOGIC COLLOQUIUM '92 is
a collection of articles on algebraic logic and related areas written
by the leading scholars in these fields.


Doherty, Patrick (Linkoping University) PARTIALITY, MODALITY, AND
NONMONOTONICITY; ISBN: (cloth) 1-57586-031-7; ISBN (paper)
1-57586-030-9. pp. 300 CSLI Publications & The European Association
for Logic, Language and Information 1996;
http://csli.www.stanford.edu/publications/
email: pubsroslin.stanford.edu

This edited volume of articles provides a state of the art description
of research in logic based approaches to knowledge representation
which combines approaches to reasoning with incomplete information
that include partial, modal, and nonmonotonic logics. The collection
contains two parts: foundations and case studies. The foundations
section provides a general overview of partiality, multivalued logics,
use of modal logic to model partiality and resource-limited inference,
and an integration of partial and modal logics. The case studies
section provides specific studies of issues raised in the foundations
section. Several of the case studies integrate modal and partial modal
logics with nonmonotonic logics. Both theoretical and practical
aspects of such integration are considered. Knowledge representation
issues such as default reasoning, theories of action and change,
reason maintenance, awareness, and automation of nonmonotonic
reasoning are covered.


Hammer, Eric M. (Stanford University) LOGIC AND VISUAL INFORMATION;
ISBN (cloth) 1-881526-87-9; ISBN (paper) 1-881526-99-2 pp. 124
CSLI Publications & The European Association for Logic, Language and
Information 1996;
http://csli.www.stanford.edu/publications/
email: pubsroslin.stanford.edu

This book examines the logical foundations of visual information:
information presented in the form of diagrams, graphs, charts, tables
and maps. The importance of visual information is clear from its
frequent presence in everyday reasoning and communication, and also in
computation. Chapters of the book develop the logics of familiar
systems of diagrams such as Venn diagrams and Euler circles. Other
chapters develop the logic of higraphs, Peirce diagrams, and a system
having both diagrams and sentences among its well-formed
representations. Syntax, semantics, rules of inference, and soundness
and completeness results are provided for each of the systems. In
addition to developing the logic of diagrams, key questions about the
status of visual information Hammer discusses, such as the
relationship between language and visually-presented information.


Muskens, Reinhard (Tilburg University) MEANING AND PARTIALITY; ISBN
(cloth) 1-881526-80-1; ISBN (paper) 1-881526-79-8. pp. 141 CSLI
Publications & The European Association for Logic, Language and
Information 1996; http://csli.www.stanford.edu/publications/
email: pubsroslin.stanford.edu

This book radically simplifies Montague Semantics and generalizes the
theory by basing it on a partial higher order logic. The resulting
theory is a synthesis of Montague Semantics and Situation Semantics.
In the late sixties, Richard Montague developed the revolutionary idea
that can understand the concept of meaning in ordinary language much
in the same way as we understand the semantics of logical languages.
Unfortunately, however, he formalized his idea in an unnecessarily
complex way--two outstanding researchers in the field even compared
his work to a 'Rube Goldberg machine'. Muskens' work does away with
such unnecessary complexities, obtains a streamlined version of the
theory, shows how partialising the theory automatically provides us
with the most central concepts of Situation Semantics, and offers a
simple logical treatment of propositional attitude verbs, perception
verbs and proper names.


Seligman, Jerry (National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan) and
Westerstahl, Dag (Stockholm University, Sweden) (Eds.) LOGIC, LANGUAGE
AND COMPUTATION; ISBN (cloth) 1-881526-90-9; ISBN (paper) 1-881526-89-5
pp. 590 CSLI Publications 1996:
http://csli-www.stanford.edu/publications/
email: pubsroslin.stanford.edu

The fields of logic, linguistics and computer science are intimately
related, and modern research has uncovered a wide range of
connections. This collection focuses on the work that is based on the
unifying concept of information. Some of the papers contribute to a
general theory of information, others tackle specific problems using
an information-based approach. All the papers were presented at the
conference on Information-based Approaches to Logic, Language and
Computation held at St. Mary's College, Moraga, California in June
1994. The conference is a direct successor of three conferences on
Situation Theory and its Applications.