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Newsletter Apr. 25, No. 26



                      C S L I   N E W S L E T T E R
_____________________________________________________________________________
April 25, 1985                  Stanford                       Vol. 2, No. 26
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     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, April 25, 1985

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       ``Cell Psychology:  An Evolutionary Approach to
     Conference Room    the Symbol-Matter Problem'' by H. H. Pattee
			Ivan Blair, CSLI

   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Seminar
     Redwood Hall       ``Whither CSLI?''
     Room G-19          John Perry, Director, CSLI

   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall		

   4:15 p.m.		CSLI Colloquium
     Redwood Hall       ``The Representational Basis for Everyday Aesthetic
     Room G-19		Experience -- A Motivational Constraint on Learnable
			Systems of Knowledge''
     			Tom Bever, Columbia University and CASBS
                               ___________

            CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *NEXT* THURSDAY, May 2, 1985

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       ``Categorizing the Senses of `Take' ''
     Conference Room    by Peter Norvig
			Discussion led by Douglas Edwards
			(Abstract on page 2)
			
   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Seminar
     Redwood Hall       ``Property Theory and Second-Order Logic''
     Room G-19          Chris Menzel, CSLI
			(Abstract on page 2)
			

   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall		

   4:15 p.m.		CSLI Colloquium
     Redwood Hall       ``A Formal Theory of Innate Linguistic Knowledge''
     Room G-19		Janet Fodor, University of Connecticut
			Originally scheduled for April 11
			(Abstract on page 3)

Page 2  		     CSLI Newsletter  	               April 25, 1985
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                    ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH
                 ``Categorizing the Senses of `Take' ''

      Polysemy is a perennial problem for semantic analysis of natural
   language.  Most common words are highly polysemous, and in a way which
   is not plausibly construed as simple ambiguity among unrelated senses.
   Polysemy also, though less obviously, offers a serious challenge to
   efforts at understanding commonsense reasoning: apparently clear
   verbal statements of goals, beliefs, and modes of reasoning may
   conceal unanalyzed complexity due to systematic ambiguity of the terms
   in which they are stated.  (There may be an analogy between
   commonsense concepts and the ``generic operations'' in object-oriented
   programming environments, which apply to heterogeneous data types and
   are differently interpreted according to the data type operated upon.)
      In the paper under consideration, Norvig attempts to analyze about
   130 uses of the verb ``take'' into 15 main senses clustered in a graph
   about a single primary sense.  He considers syntactic differences
   between senses, pragmatic appropriateness of usage (in answering
   questions), as well as a wide variety of intuitions and prior theories
   about case structure, motivation and intended use of concepts, and
   metaphorical and metonymic extension.  Understanding the derivation of
   the senses of words, in the way that Norvig tries to come to grips
   with the derivation of the subsenses of ``take'' from its primary
   sense, will be a necessary step toward characterizing commonsense
   knowledge of the world.				--Douglas Edwards
                              ____________  		
                     ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S SEMINAR
               ``Property Theory and Second-Order Logic''

      Much recent work in semantics (e.g., Barwise and Perry, Chierchia,
   Sells, Zalta) involves an extensive appeal to abstract logical
   objects--properties, relations, and propositions.  Such objects were
   of course not unheard of in semantics prior to this work.  What is
   noteworthy is the extent to which the conception of these objects
   differs from the prevailing conception in formal semantics, viz.,
   Montague's.  Two ways in which they differ (not necessarily common to
   all recent accounts) stand out: first, these abstract objects are
   metaphysically primitive, not set theoretic constructions out of
   possible worlds and individuals; second, they are untyped--properties
   can exemplify each other as well as themselves, relations can fall
   within their own field, and so on.
      With properties, relations, and propositions playing this more
   prominent role in semantics (as well as in philosophy), it is
   essential that there be a rigorous mathematical theory of these
   objects.  The framework for such a theory, I think, is second-order
   logic; indeed, I will argue that second-order logic, rightly
   understood, just IS the theory of properties, relations, and
   propositions.  To this end, building primarily on the work of Bealer,
   Cocchiarella, and Zalta, I will present a second-order logic that is
   provably consistent along with an algebraic intensional semantics
   which yields significant insights into the structure of the abstract
   ontology of logic and the paradoxes.  Time permitting, I will apply the
   logic to two issues, one in semantics and the other in the philosophy
   of mathematics--specifically, to the analysis of noun phrases
   involving terms of order like `fourth' and `last', and the question of
   what the (ordinal) numbers are, to which I will give a logicist answer
   adumbrated by Russell.				--Chris Menzel

Page 3                       CSLI Newsletter                   April 25, 1985
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                   ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S COLLOQUIUM
           ``A Formal Theory of Innate Linguistic Knowledge''

      I assume that an infant is innately provided with some sort of
   representational medium in which to record what he observes about his
   target language.  It has occasionally been suggested that the formal
   properties of this mental metalanguage could be the source of
   universal properties of natural languages.  This differs from the
   standard ( = substantive) approach, which assumes in addition that
   certain statements of this metalanguage are innately tagged as true.
      I propose to take the formal approach seriously.  The way to do so
   seems to be to try for a theory which accounts for ALL universals in
   this way, i.e., solely on the basis of what can and cannot be
   expressed in the metalanguage. The attempt is very informative, even
   if ultimately it fails.
      Success is certainly not guaranteed, for the formal theory
   overthrows many familiar assumptions. For instance, it can be shown to
   be incompatible (on standard assumptions about children and their
   linguistic input) with the existence of any constraints on rule
   application or on derivational representations. All the work of
   distinguishing well-formed from ill-formed sentences must be done by
   rules only. Constraints can determine the shape of the rules, but
   cannot tidy up after them if they overgenerate.
      It is easiest to see how to set about formulating grammars of this
   kind within the framework of GPSG, and it is encouraging that a number
   of universals do fall out as consequences of the GPSG formalism. But
   there are problems too. Syntactic features, in particular, create
   headaches for learnability.				--Janet Fodor

   [Note to attendees of the Berkeley Cognitive Science Seminars -- this
   is the same as the paper presented there on 3/19.]
                              ____________  		
                LOGIC, LANGUAGE, AND COMPUTATION MEETINGS
                  July 8-19, 1985, Stanford University

      The Association for Symbolic Logic (ASL) and the Center for the
   Study of Language and Information (CSLI) will be combining the CSLI
   Summer School (July 8-13) with the ASL Meeting (July 15-19).  For
   further information and registration forms, write to Ingrid Deiwiks,
   CSLI, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305, or call (415)497-3084 or send
   computer mail to Ingrid@su-csli.arpa.  The deadline for registering is
   June 1, 1985.





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