Bradford Books.In What Is Thought? Eric Baum proposes a computational explanation of thought. Just as Erwin Schrodinger in his classic 1944 work What Is Life? argued ten years before the discovery of DNA that life must be explainable at a fundamental level by physics and chemistry, Baum contends that the present-day inability of computer science to explain thought and meaning is no reason to do…
Adger proposes a new approach to phrase structure that eschews functional heads and labels structures exocentrically. The proposal simultaneously simplifies the syntactic system and restricts the range of possible structures, ruling out the ubiquitous (remnant) roll-up derivations and forcing a separation of arguments from their apparent heads. This new system has a number of empirical conseque…
"Contributors : Reem Al-Halimi, Robert C. Berwick, J.F.M. Burg, Martin Chodorow, Christiane Fellbaum, Joachim Grabowski, Sanda Harabagiu, Marti A. Hearst, Graeme Hirst, Douglas A. Jones, Rick Kazman, Karen T. Kohl, Shari Landes, Claudia Leacock, George A. Miller, Katherine J. Miller, Dan Moldovan, Naoyuki Nomura, Uta Priss, Philip Resnik, David St-Onge, Randee Tengi, Reind P. van de Riet, Ellen…
Before Steven Pinker wrote bestsellers on language and human nature, he wrote several technical monographs on language acquisition that have become classics in cognitive science. Learnability and Cognition, first published in 1989, brought together two big topics: how do children learn their mother tongue, and how does the mind represent basic categories of meaning such as space, time, causalit…
"Two senior scholars explain what language does to human beings, especially how it affects our intersubjective competence"--OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
"A syntactic analysis of and solution to the semantic problem: how can speakers convey the same meaning using different speech acts?"--OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
"This book answers both the 'what' and the 'why' question raised by indexical shift in crosslinguistic perspective. What are the possible profiles of an indexical shifting language, and why do we find these profiles and not various equally conceivable others? Drawing both from the literature (published and unpublished) and from original fieldwork on the language Nez Perce, Amy Rose Deal puts fo…
A biography of two troublesome words. Isn't it ironic Or is it Never mind, I'm just being sarcastic (or am I ). Irony and sarcasm are two of the most misused, misapplied, and misunderstood words in our conversational lexicon. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, psycholinguist Roger Kreuz offers an enlightening and concise overview of the life and times of these two terms…
In The Geometry of Meaning, Peter G?ardenfors proposes a theory of semantics that bridges cognitive science and linguistics and shows how theories of cognitive processes, in particular concept formation, can be exploited in a general semantic model. He argues that our minds organize the information involved in communicative acts in a format that can be modeled in geometric or topological terms …