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Newsletter Mar. 14, No. 20



                      C S L I   N E W S L E T T E R
_____________________________________________________________________________
March 14, 1985                  Stanford                       Vol. 2, No. 20
_____________________________________________________________________________
                               
     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, March 14, 1985

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       ``The Noun Incorporation Debate''
     Conference Room    Jerry Sadock, CASBS
			
   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Seminar
     Redwood Hall       ``Just a Matter of Convention''
     Room G-19          Douglas Edwards, CSLI
			Discussion led by Robert Moore, CSLI

   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall		

   4:15 p.m.		CSLI Colloquium
     Redwood Hall       ``From Socrates to Expert Systems:  The Limits of
     Room G-19		Calculative Rationality''
     			Hubert Dreyfus, UC Berkeley
			(Abstract on page 2)
                              ____________

         CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *NEXT* THURSDAY, March 21, 1985

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       To be announced
     Conference Room    
			
   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Seminar
     Redwood Hall       No TINlunch scheduled
     Room G-19          

   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall		

   4:15 p.m.		CSLI Colloquium
     Redwood Hall       ``The COMP Analysis of Free Relatives and Phrase
     Room G-19		Structure Grammar''
     			Pauline Jacobson, Brown University
			(Abstract on page 2)
                              ____________
                              ANNOUNCEMENT

      There will be no CSLI activities on Thursday, March 28.  Activities
   will resume on April 4.


Page 2                       CSLI Newsletter                March 14, 1985
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                   ABSTRACT OF THIS WEEK'S COLLOQUIUM

      An examination of the general epistemological assumptions of
   artificial intelligence with special reference to recent work in the
   development of expert systems.  I will argue that expert systems are
   limited because of a failure to recognize the real character of expert
   intuitive understanding.  Expertise is acquired in a five-step
   process; only the first of which uses representations involving
   objective features and strict rules.  A review of the successes and
   failures of various specific expert systems confirms this analysis.
							--Hubert Dreyfus
                              ____________
                   ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S COLLOQUIUM

      This paper argues that in certain cases the granddaughter of some
   constituent can function as its head, which suggests the need for
   phrase structure rules admitting chunks of trees rather than only
   rules admitting a node and its daughters.  This conclusion is based on
   an examination of Free Relatives (FRs) in English.  I give several new
   arguments for the ``Comp analysis'' of FRs, according to which the
   capitalized constituent in (1) is a daughter of S' (and hence a grand-
   daughter of the NP FR):

     1.  I like WHATEVER you like.

   Yet it is well known that this constituent functions as the Head of
   the FR (cf., Bresnan and Grimshaw, 1979), as the category of the
   entire FR must (in English) match that of the wh-constituent.  I will
   consider the implications of such ``granddaughter'' rules for a phrase
   structure framework.					--Pauline Jacobson
                                ________
                           COURSE ANNOUNCEMENT
                   ``Typology of Grammatical Systems''
                  William Croft and Joseph H. Greenberg
             9-11:50 am, Mondays, Education (Cubberley) 207
                        Linguistics 209, 4 units

      This course will be a survey of the typology of various grammatical
   categories and constructions.  It is intended to be a descriptive
   course to acquaint the student with the expected and the unexpected in
   natural language systems; theoretical discussion will be minimized
   (though not excluded) in order to make this course useful for
   linguists of all theoretical persuasions.  Topics to be covered: word
   order; syntactic categories; grammatical relations, verbal semantics,
   voice and valency-changing morphosyntax; numerals, classifiers and
   count/mass; tense/aspect/modality, quantification and specification;
   and coordination and relative clauses.  Prerequisites: none.  Course
   requirements: a paper consisting of a cross-linguistic analysis of
   some grammatical category or syntactic construction. The paper should
   cover at least 20 languages; a large number of good grammars and
   surveys will be placed on reserve at Green library.  Required reading:
   Lingua Descriptive Series Questionnaire (80pp.).  Croft will lecture
   on all topics except numerals, classifiers and count/mass.  Class will
   meet a total of eight times, beginning on April 8 (May 27 is a
   holiday).


Page 3                       CSLI Newsletter                    March 14, 1985
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                           COURSE ANNOUNCEMENT
                      Graduate Seminar - Philosophy
          ``Nonexistent Objects and the Semantics of Fiction''
                          Edward N. Zalta, CSLI

      The problem of how it is we can think about and tell stories about
   what does not exist is one of the foremost problems in the study of
   intentionality.  We'll begin by asking what an analysis of fiction,
   and stories in general, ought to do, and then quickly review the
   problems facing the semantic analysis of sentences about nonexistent
   objects developed by Meinong, Russell, Quine, and the free logicians.
   We then turn to a careful presentation of both Terence Parsons'
   neo-Meinongian views (developed in his book: Nonexistent Objects) and
   my own, which has a Meinongian flavor. There will be a comparison of
   how the language and logic of these theories represent the meaning of
   English sentences about nonexistents.  Then we shall ask whether these
   theories provide a better representation, and do a better job of
   analyzing fiction in general, than some current alternatives, some of
   which do without nonexistents (Plantinga, Searle, Fine, Lewis) and
   some of which appeal to some sort of abstract objects (Kripke, van
   Inwagen, Wolterstorff).  We'll conclude the course with a brief
   examination of how these axiomatized theories fit into a larger
   picture of the semantics of language and intensionality.

      The first meeting of this seminar will be held in the Venture Hall
   trailers conference room, Tuesday April 2, at 1:15.

                               ___________
                             NEW CSLI REPORT

      A new CSLI Report by Kokichi Futatsugi, Joseph Goguen, Jean-Pierre
   Jouannaud, and Jose Meseguer, ``Principles of OBJ2'' (Report No.
   CSLI-85-22), has been published.  To obtain a copy of this report
   write to David Brown, CSLI, Ventura Hall, Stanford 94305 or send net
   mail to Brown at SU-CSLI.
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