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Newsletter June 6, No. 32



                      C S L I   N E W S L E T T E R
_____________________________________________________________________________
June 6, 1985                    Stanford                       Vol. 2, No. 32
_____________________________________________________________________________
                                
     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, 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

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

   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.
                               ___________

            CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *NEXT* THURSDAY, June 13, 1985

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       ``Type Raising, Functional Composition, 
     Conference Room    and Non-Constituent Conjunction''
			David Dowty, Center for the Advanced Study of
			the Behavioral Sciences
			(Abstract on page 2)

   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Seminar
     Redwood Hall       No seminar
     Room G-19          

   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall		

   4:15 p.m.		CSLI Colloquium
     Redwood Hall       No colloquium
     Room G-19		
                              _____________
                              ANNOUNCEMENT

      No seminars or colloquiums are scheduled for June 6 or June 13
   because of the University, end-of-quarter break.  TINLunch will be
   held on these days.  Regular activities will resume on June 20.


Page 2  		     CSLI Newsletter   	                  June 6, 1985
_____________________________________________________________________________
                    ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH
                 ``Type Raising, Functional Composition,
                    and Non-Constituent Conjunction''

      Examples of so-called non-constituent conjunction, like the
   following, remain an outstanding problem for base-generated syntactic
   theories:
        John eats beans on Tuesday and rice on Thursday
        John gave Mary a book and Susan a record
        John went to Chicago on Tuesday and Detroit on Thursday
        John painted the chair red and the table blue
      It will be shown that such examples are correctly generated by a
   syntactic theory that involves (i) a categorial, rather than
   phrase-structure grammar, (ii) a generalized syntactic rule of
   functional composition (such as has been frequently suggested in the
   categorial literature), and (iii) category assignments for verbs and
   NPs that are similar to but differ crucially from those suggested by
   Mark Steedman and Partee/Rooth.
      It will also be pointed out that the theory recently proposed by
   Mark Steedman, in which functional composition alone is supposed to
   describe ``extraction'' constructions (without appeal to SLASH
   features), predicts that non-constituent conjunction constructions
   will be subject to the same island constraints as extractions are.
   Though this prediction seems to be borne out in some cases, it is
   problematic in others.  Comparison will therefore be made between
   theories, like Steedman's, which treat both conjunction and extraction
   by functional composition, and theories which use functional
   composition for conjunction and other local dependencies (like
   reflexives) but use SLASH features for long-distance dependencies.
							--David Dowty
                                ---------
                               CSLI REPORT

      Report No. CSLI-85-24, ``Computationally Relevant Properties of
   Natural Languages and Their Grammar'' by Gerald Gazdar and Geoffrey K.
   Pullum, has just been published.  This report may be obtained by
   writing to David Brown, CSLI, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305 or
   Brown@SU-CSLI.


Page 3                       CSLI Newsletter                     June 6, 1985
_____________________________________________________________________________
                     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.  Schedule of speakers follows:

   Monday    morning	Jay McClelland.  Marilyn Ford.
	     afternoon	Don Foss.  Lorraine Tyler.

   Tuesday    morning	Willem Levelt.  Gary Dell.
	      afternoon	William Marslen-Wilson. Mark Seidenberg. 
			Michael Tanenhaus.

   Wednesday  morning	Tom Bever.  Herbert Clark.
	      afternoon	Kenneth Forster.  Stephen Crain and Janet Fodor.

       Morning sessions begin at 9; afternoon sessions begin at
   1:15 (Monday) or 1:30 (Tuesday and Wednesday).
      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) 


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