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Newsletter Feb. 14, No. 16
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Subject: Newsletter Feb. 14, No. 16
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From: csli@csli.stanford.edu
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Date: Wed 13 Feb 1985 17:25:56-PST
C S L I N E W S L E T T E R
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February 14, 1985 Stanford Vol. 2, No. 16
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A weekly publication of The Center for the Study of Language and
Information, Ventura Hall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
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CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *THIS* THURSDAY, February 14, 1985
12 noon TINLunch
Ventura Hall ``Belief, Awareness, and Limited Reasoning''
Conference Room Ronald Fagin, IBM San Jose Research Laboratory
2:15 p.m. CSLI Seminar
Redwood Hall ``Logic and Functional Programming''
Room G-19 Joseph Goguen, CSLI
Discussion will be led by Fernando Pereira
3:30 p.m. Tea
Ventura Hall
4:15 p.m. CSLI Colloquium
Redwood Hall ``Against Theory''
Room G-19 Steve Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels,
English Department, UC Berkeley
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CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *NEXT* THURSDAY, February 21, 1985
12 noon TINLunch
Ventura Hall Donald Davidson's ``Communication and Convention''
Conference Room Discussion led by Douglas Edwards
(Abstract on page 2)
2:15 p.m. CSLI Seminar
Redwood Hall ``Emotion: Theory and Language''
Room G-19 Helen Nissenbaum, CSLI
Discussion led by Per-Kristian Halvorsen
(Abstract on page 2)
3:30 p.m. Tea
Ventura Hall
4:15 p.m. CSLI Colloquium
Redwood Hall ``Quine and Rorty, Analysis and Deconstruction''
Room G-19 Hilary Putnam, Harvard University
(No abstract)
Page 2 CSLI Newsletter February 14, 1985
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ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH
In the selected paper, Davidson challenges the notion that language
is founded upon conventions that link together (a) the intentions of
speakers, (b) the literal meanings of their utterances, (c) the words
they use. His central point is that we frequently interpret
utterances in ways that do not fall under any fixed or known rules,
whereas a convention must be common knowledge among the parties to it.
Davidson argues first that no convention can account for the relation
between an utterance's illocutionary force and the grammatical mood of
the sentence uttered. Then he proceeds to argue that the literal
meaning of words and sentences (as types) is not conventionally tied
to any standard use that they have. Finally, he denies that the
meanings given to words and sentences (as tokens, on particular
occasions of utterance) is conventionally assigned. He concludes by
expressing considerable skepticism as to whether the practice of
correct interpretation of natural language can be formalized,
conventionally or otherwise.
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ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S SEMINAR
``Emotion: Theory and Language''
Emotions are neither feelings, neuro-physiological processes, nor
cognitions. Existing views that incorporate any of these claims have
a flawed presupposition built into them regarding the fundamental
structure of emotion: they regard emotion as an occurrent property. I
argue, by contrast, that a significant class of emotions, including
love, envy, dread, and anger, are dispositional and relational.
Emotion terms, or concepts, refer to, or provide a means of
identifying, complex relations between one individual, who is the
subject of an emotion, and another individual, event, or object. This
picture offers, instead of an occurrence model of emotion, one of
emotion as a `syndrome'. Emotions span a number of heterogeneous
occurrences, dispositions, and variable time periods. Evidence for
this position is found in:
(1) Sentences that involve emotion predication.
(2) Emotions that cover great time spans.
(3) The fact that emotions have a number of other types of mental
and physiological states as essential componenents.
--Helen Nissenbaum
Page 3 CSLI Newsletter February 14, 1985
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CSLI TALK
``The Meaning of Accent''
Lisa Selkirk, University of Massachusetts
Ventura Hall Seminar Room
3:30 pm, Friday, February 15
Intonational pitch accents (in the sense of Pierrehumbert (l980))
serve to "mark" constituents of the sentence with respect to their
role in discourse. It is argued that the "accenting" of a noun phrase
may mean one (or more) of the following:
(a) the NP corresponds to a new discourse referent
(b) the NP is a FOCUS of a FOCUS/"Presupposition" structure
(c) the NP is a TOPIC of a TOPIC/Comment structure
An attempt is made to characterize (a - c) as a natural class,
given an elaborated conception of discourse representation in terms of
a file (Heim (l982)).
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SUMMARY OF AREA C MEETING
``The Compilation of Prolog Programs
Without the Use of a Prolog Compiler''
Ken Kahn, Xerox PARC
An efficient Prolog interpreter written in Lisp was presented. The
interpreter was then specialized to run different Prolog predicates.
These specializations are generated automatically by a partial
evaluator for Lisp programs called Partial Lisp. It transforms Lisp
programs to other Lisp programs and knows nothing about Prolog. It was
argued that the partial evaluation of interpreters can be a substitute
for compilation. The results of partially evaluating the Prolog
interpreter for simple Prolog predicates were presented. The speed of
the specialized interpreters has been found to be about ten times
faster than ordinary interpretation. These speeds compare favorably
with an optimizing compiler for the same Prolog dialect and computer
system. The advantages of using partial evaluation upon an interpreter
include a much smaller and easily modifiable implementation. The major
difficulty in generating thousands of small specialized interpreters
is that it currently takes about two orders of magnitude more time
than compilation. Different approaches to reducing partial evaluation
time were presented. The possibilities of specializing the interpreter
for different uses of the same Prolog predicate were discussed.
Page 4 CSLI Newsletter February 14, 1985
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CSLI TALK
``Quantified NP's and Plural Anaphors''
Rebecca Root, University of Texas
Ventura Hall Seminar Room
2:00 pm Friday, February 15
There is a type of anaphora construction, called "E-type" anaphora
by Evans, in which a quantified noun phrase serves as the antecedent
of an anaphor which it does not bind. This is illustrated by the
following discourse:
- Every farmer at the meeting raised a question
- They sounded hostile
Here the pronoun "they" can be construed to mean either the farmers
at the meeting or the questions which they raised. I will be
discussing this phenomena within the context of discourse
representation theory, which, because of its non-quantificational
treatment of singular indefinite descriptions, offers a good framework
in which to account for the possible meanings of a discourse such as
this.
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CSLI TALK
Talk by Andrew Jones, Institute for Philosophy, University of Oslo
10:30, Thursday, February 21
Ventura Conference Room
Jones is the author of a book entitled Communication and Meaning,
in which, "a new framework is proposed for the description of
interpersonal communication -- one flexible enough to cover various
ways in which agents exploit the communication systems they
use....[the framework is] expressed in a formal language employing
modal-logical techniques." He is currently working with others
(including Dagfinn Follesdal) at the University of Oslo to develop an
extended course (a one-year full-time program of studies, on the
introductory level) in communication theory and semantics. Its four
basic components will be:
1) Logic and Computability
2) Semantics (focusing on Montague semantics and situation semantics)
3) Communication and intention (including speech act theory and
additional topics such as human-machine communication)
4) Information and knowledge (based on Dretske)
He will describe the program and the intentions behind it and is
interested in general discussion of teaching programs in this area of
knowledge.
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