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Newsletter Jan. 10, No. 11


                       C S L I   N E W S L E T T E R
___________________________________________________________________________
January 10, 1985               Stanford                      Vol. 2, No. 11
___________________________________________________________________________

         A weekly publication of The Center for the Study of Language and 
	 Information, Ventura Hall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
                           ____________ 
         CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *THIS* THURSDAY, January 10, 1985

12 noon                 TINLunch
  Ventura Hall          Godehard Link's
  Conference Room       ``Prespie in Pragmatic Wonderland or: 
                         The Projection Problem for Presuppositions Revisited''
                        Discussion led by Dietmar Zaefferer

2:15 p.m.               CSLI Seminar
  Redwood Hall          David Israel
  Room G-19             ``A Not-So-Olympian Overview of Area F (from
			 the heights(?) of the Area Coordinator)''
			Discussant will be John Perry

3:30 p.m.               Tea
  Ventura Hall		

4:15 p.m.               CSLI Colloquium
  Redwood Hall          ``On Comparatives and Superlatives''
  Room G-19             Irene Heim, University of Texas
			(Abstract on Page 2)
                           ____________ 

         CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *NEXT* THURSDAY, January 17, 1985

12 noon                 TINLunch
  Ventura Hall          Nils Nilsson's ``AI, Employment, and Income''  
  Conference Room	Discussion led by Hans Uszkoreit
			Nils Nilsson will be present
			(Abstract on Page 2)

2:15 p.m.               CSLI Seminar
  Redwood Hall          No seminar this week
  Room G-19       
			
3:30 p.m.               Tea
  Ventura Hall		

4:15 p.m.               CSLI Colloquium
  Redwood Hall          No colloquium this week
                          _________________

                           NEW CSLI REPORT

A new CSLI Report by C. Raymond Perrault, ``On the Mathematical
Properties of Linguistic Theories'' (Report No. CSLI--84-18), To
obtain a copy of this report write to Dikran Karagueuzian, CSLI,
Ventura Hall, Stanford 94305 or send net mail to Dikran at SU-CSLI.


Page 2                   CSLI Newsletter                   January 10, 1985
___________________________________________________________________________
                  ABSTRACT OF THIS WEEK'S COLLOQUIUM
                 ``On Comparatives and Superlatives''

Consider a phrasal comparative like (1).

    (1) Little died earlier than Dolphy.

(`Phrasal' comparatives, as opposed to `clausal' ones, are those which
instead of a clause have a single phrase after ``than.'')  There are
(at least) two ways of approaching the semantic analysis of (1).  One
is to view ``than Dolphy'' as essentially an elliptical description
for a certain degree, viz. the degree x such that Dolphy died x-early,
and to construe the whole sentence as basically a comparison between
that degree and another one, namely the degree y such that Little died
y-early.  The other approach is to read (1) as primarily a comparison
between two people, Little and Dolphy, who are being compared with
respect to a certain `dimension'.  The dimension is earliness-of-death
and may be formally represented as a function from people to degrees
which maps every person x onto the degree y such that x died y-early.
This talk adopts the second approach and explores its empirical and
theoretical implications.  While the scopes of the comparison
operators themselves seem to obey constraints that have emerged from
studies of quantifier scope, this is not the case for the putative
scopes of certain other phrases.  To accommodate this finding, I will
draw on recent work by Rooth and suggest a refinement of the analysis
which recognizes a distinction between scope-assignment proper and
something like association-to-focus.              ---Irene Heim

                              _________
                   ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH
                      AI, Employment and Income

In a recent article in the AI Magazine, Nils Nilsson explores the
profound effects Artificial Intelligence is likely to have on
employment and the distribution of income.  He presents an economic
and a psychological reason for his opinion that we should greet the
work-eliminating consequences of AI with enthusiasm, since they will
liberate people from unfulfilling work without necessarily harming
them economically.  The article has drawn a number of interesting
responses, some of which have been published in a later issue of the
AI Magazine.  This issue also contains a reply by Nils Nilsson to the
readers' letters.  The variety of arguments, in the article and the
letters, both for and against an optimistic view of the social impact
of AI will serve as the basis for our TINLUNCH discussion.  Nils
Nilsson will be present.


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