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Newsletter June 13, No. 33




                      C S L I   N E W S L E T T E R
_____________________________________________________________________________
June 13, 1985                   Stanford                       Vol. 2, No. 33
_____________________________________________________________________________
                                
     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 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

   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		
                               ___________

            CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *NEXT* THURSDAY, June 20, 1985

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       ``How Many Possible Human Languages are There?''
     Conference Room    by Geoff Pullum, UCSC and CSLI
			Discussion led by Gerald Gazdar, CASBS
			(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 13 or June 20
   because of the University, end-of-quarter break.  TINLunch will be
   held on these days.  Regular activities will resume on June 27.


Page 2  		     CSLI Newsletter   	                  June 13, 1985
_____________________________________________________________________________
                    ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH
             ``How Many Possible Human Languages are There?''
                     Linguistic Inquiry 14, 447-467.

       Beginning with Chomsky (1980), a number of linguists have claimed
       (i) that their favored grammatical framework only allows for the
   existence of a finite number of grammars,
      (ii) that there only exist a finite number of possible human
   languages.
   Pullum's paper, published two years ago, argues that claim (i) is
   false in every relevant case, and that claim (ii) is uninteresting,
   even if true.  His paper has been greeted by a deafening silence.  How
   can this be?  Are his arguments so obviously invalid that it would be
   cruel and undignified to reply to them?  In which case, how did they
   get into print?  Or are they so obviously valid that those attacked
   are ashamed even to allude to the matter?  In which case, what are we
   to make of their intellectual integrity?		--Gerald Gazdar
                                ---------
                              RRR MEETINGS

      The RRR meeting of May 28 was on representationalism and was led by
   Ned Block.  He mentioned a number of distinctions among representationa-
   list views, most importantly the by now familiar (in RRR) distinction
   between (1) thoughts have representational parts and (2) thoughts are
   sentential.  He observed that the arguments usually given for the
   latter better support the former, and claimed that evidence for the
   latter view is not statable succinctly, but rather is suggested by a
   mass of experiments, no small group of which is very convincing.
      At the meeting of June 4, Kurt van Lehn gave an exposition and
   critique of ``connectionism''.  The view's opponents had different
   complaints.  Van Lehn argued that the successes of the connectionist
   movement have had little to do with its controversial architectural
   proposals.  Jerry Fodor faulted connectionist models for not handling
   the kind of thinking involving reasoning from one step to another,
   while Brian Smith pointed out that connectionism was committed to an
   overly ``iconic'' conception of representation.  Pentti Kanerva said
   that he was working on a connectionist theory that might be able to
   overcome the faults that had been pointed out.
      Upcoming meetings: There was NO meeting on June 11 (because of
   conflict with the Workshop on Language Processing.  The next RRR
   meeting will be on June 18; we will discuss Jerry Fodor's ``Why there
   STILL has to be a Language of Thought''.  Unless there is a change of
   plans, the June 18th meeting will be the last for the spring quarter.
   We won't meet over the summer; what will happen next year is far from
   clear.						--Ned Block
                                ---------
                               CSLI REPORT

      Report No. CSLI-85-25, ``An Internal Semantics for Modal Logic:
   Preliminary Report'' by Ronald Fagin and Moshe Vardi, has just been
   published.  This report may be obtained by writing to David Brown,
   CSLI, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305 or Brown@SU-CSLI.





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