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Newsletter May 30, No. 31



                      C S L I   N E W S L E T T E R
_____________________________________________________________________________
May 30, 1985                    Stanford                       Vol. 2, No. 31
_____________________________________________________________________________
                                
     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, May 30, 1985

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       ``Computers and Emotion''
     Conference Room    Discussion led by Helen Nissenbaum

   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Seminar
     Redwood Hall       ``On Modelling Shared Understanding''
     Room G-19          Jon Barwise, CSLI

   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall		

   4:15 p.m.		CSLI Colloquium
     Redwood Hall       ``Natural Kinds, Homeostasis, and the Limits of
     Room G-19		Essentialism'' 
			Richard Boyd, Prof. of Philosophy, Cornell University
                               ___________

            CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *NEXT* THURSDAY, June 6, 1985

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       ``Speech Act Distinctions in Syntax''
     Conference Room    by Jerrold Sadock and Arnold Zwicky
			Discussion led by Dietmar Zaefferer
			(Abstract on page 2)

   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Seminar
     Redwood Hall       ``Existential Sentences''
     Room G-19          Edit Doron, CSLI
			Discussion led by Larry Moss
			(Abstract on page 2)

   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall		

   4:15 p.m.		CSLI Colloquium
     Redwood Hall       ``An Assumption-Based Truth-Maintenance System''
     Room G-19		Johan De Kleer, Xerox PARC, Intelligent Systems Lab.
			(Abstract on page 2)			


Page 2  		     CSLI Newsletter   	                  May 30, 1985
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                    ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH
                  ``Speech Act Distinctions in Syntax''

      There is an apparent mismatch between what speech act theorists
   claim to be the prototypical speech act types (promises, requests,
   etc.)  and the speech act types indicated by syntactical means in most
   natural languages (assertions, questions, etc.). This paper by Sadock
   and Zwicky gives an excellent survey of the sentence types in a sample
   of twenty-three languages. It contains a lot of interesting
   observations (e.g., ``imperatives have characteristically bare verb
   stems'') and raises a lot of interesting questions (e.g., how to
   explain the above mentioned fact). It is also a good starting point for
   a discussion of the role of typology in the CSLI research program.
							--Dietmar Zaefferer
                              ____________
                     ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S SEMINAR
                        ``Existential Sentences''

      I will be concerned with the old puzzle concerning existential
   sentences: why is sentence 1 odd in a way that sentence 2 is not?
      1.  There is every man in the garden.  
      2.  There is a man in the garden.
   I will discuss a semantic solution, and compare it to proposals by
   Barwise and Cooper, Keenan, Higginbotham.		--Edit Doron
                              ____________
                   ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S COLLOQUIUM
            ``An Assumption-Based Truth-Maintenance System''

      This paper presents a new view of problem solving motivated by a
   new kind of truth maintenance system. Unlike previous truth
   maintenance systems which were based on manipulating justifications,
   this truth maintenance system is, in addition, based on manipulating
   assumption sets.  As a consequence it is possible to work effectively
   and efficiently with inconsistent information, context switching is
   free, and most backtracking (and all retraction) is avoided.  These
   capabilities motivate a different kind of problem-solving architecture
   in which multiple potential solutions are explored simultaneously.
   This architecture is particularly well-suited for tasks where a
   reasonable fraction of the potential solutions must be explored.
						--Johan De Kleer


Page 3                       CSLI Newsletter                     May 30, 1985
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                     WORKSHOP ON LANGUAGE PROCESSING
                       sponsored by CSLI and Sloan
               Monday, June 10 through Wednesday, June 12

      Several research groups at CSLI are holding an open, informal
   workshop on language processing, with invited speakers from the United
   States and abroad.  The goal of the workshop is to examine current
   psychological issues in language processing at the sentence and
   discourse level, with particular focus on the relation of language
   processing to language structure and the situations in which language
   is used.  Participants include:

   Tom Bever, Herb Clark, Stephen Crain, Gary Dell, Marilyn Ford, Ken
   Forster, Don Foss, Willem Levelt, William Marslen-Wilson, James
   McClelland, Mark Seidenberg, Dave Swinney, Michael Tanenhaus, and
   Lorraine Tyler.

      The schedule is available from Suzanne Parker at the front desk of
   CSLI (to receive a copy by mail, contact Sandy McConnell-Riggs
   (Sandy@csli)).  Copies of papers by the speakers relevant to their
   workshop presentations are available in the CSLI Reading Room and the
   Psychology Library, Jordan Hall.  For further information, contact
   members of the organizing committee: Herb Clark, Phil Cohen, Marilyn
   Ford, Barbara Grosz, Ron Kaplan, Marcy Macken, Stanley Peters and Ivan
   Sag.					--Marcy Macken (mmacken@su-csli) 
                              ____________
                      SITUATION SEMANTICS MADE EASY
                      Three lectures by John Perry
            Monday, Wednesday, Monday, June 3, 5, 10, at 3:15
                             Redwood G-19

      The first lecture will be aimed at those who know nothing at all
   about situation semantics.  Please note that the day for the third
   meeting has been changed from Friday, June 7 to Monday, June 10.
                              ____________





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