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Newsletter July 4, No. 36



                      C S L I   N E W S L E T T E R
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July 4, 1985                    Stanford                       Vol. 2, No. 36
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     A weekly publication of The Center for the Study of Language and
     Information, Ventura Hall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
                              ____________
                              ANNOUNCEMENT

   This Thursday, July 4, is a National Holiday and no activities will
   take place.  No activities will take place on Thursday, July 11.
                              ____________
                 AREA P1 MEETING: PIXELS AND PREDICATES
                        ``The Bitmap as Reality''
                   Scott Kim, author of ``Inversions''
            3:00 pm, Wednesday July 10, Ventura Seminar room

      What would a truly graphic computer be like? Not just an iconic
   veneer on an underlying textual representation, but rather a system in
   which everything would be pictorial.  ``Viewpoint'' is a computer
   system that demonstrates my approach to this question.  In Viewpoint
   there is no underlying representation lurking behind the screen --
   what you see is what you AND the computer get. As consequences of this
   radical viewpoint, text and graphics can be treated homogeneously,
   bitmap-oriented and structured drawing systems can be truly
   integrated, and other graphic media such as paper and videodisks can
   be incorporated in computer-based communication.
                              ____________
   AREA NL2 MEETING: INTERACTIONS OF MORPHOLOGY, SYNTAX, AND DISCOURSE

      On June 26, the Working Group on Interactions of Morphology,
   Syntax, and Discourse had its first meeting, and Bresnan and Mchombo's
   ``Agreement and Pronominal Incorporation in Chichewa'' was discussed.
   This group will hold closed meetings throughout the Summer, but the
   results of the research will be presented in the Fall, and summaries 
   will be printed in the Newsletter.

                     SUMMARY OF THE FIRST MEETING

      In Bantu languages, there are highly systematic interactions
   between word structure, word order, and discourse structure.  Although
   these interactions are well known among Bantuists, it is not
   recognized in general that they pose deep problems for current
   linguistic theory.  These interactions are problematic because words,
   phrases, and discourses are independent systems in their grammatical
   form; yet, despite the autonomy of their structural formation, they
   are functionally interdependent to a high degree.  How then does
   functional information flow between word, phrase, and discourse?  The
   answer to this question suggests a radically different conception of
   the organization of linguistic information fromt that which has been
   prevalent in generative grammar.			--Joan Bresnan
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