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Newsletter August 1, No 39



                      C S L I   N E W S L E T T E R
_____________________________________________________________________________
August 1, 1985                  Stanford                       Vol. 2, No. 39
_____________________________________________________________________________
                                
     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, August 1, 1985

   12 noon		CSLI Lunch
     Ventura Hall       ``Round Table Discussion on Semantics of
     Conference Room    Programming Languages'' 
			(Abstract on page 1)
		
   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Talk
     Ventura Hall	``Realism and Antirealism in Cognitive Artificial
     Conference Room	Intelligence''
			David H. Helman, Department of Philosophy, Case
			 Western Reserve University
			Discussion led by Ivan Blair

   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall		
                              ____________
                               CSLI LUNCH
    ``Round Table Discussion on Semantics of Programming Languages''
         12 noon, Thursday, August 1, Ventura Hall Seminar Room

      We are fortunate to have visiting CSLI two experts on the semantics
   of programming languages, who have unique and promising new
   approaches.  Rather than schedule yet another formal lecture, we will
   have a round table discussion, featuring short presentions by the
   speakers, followed by discussion among the speakers, followed by
   general discussion in which we hope the audience will play a very
   strong role.
      Speakers will include H. Ganzinger, P. Mosses, J. Meseguer, and J.
   Goguen plus strong audience participation.		--Joseph Goguen
                              ____________
                                CSLI TALK
          ``The Processing of Motives in Intelligent Systems''
                   Aaron Sloman, University of Sussex
           4 p.m., August 6, Tuesday, Ventura Conference Room
                              ____________
                             NEW CSLI REPORT

      Report No. CSLI-85-27, ``Semantic Automata'' by Johan van Benthem,
   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 2                     CSLI Newsletter                     August 1, 1985
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            INTERACTIONS OF MORPHOLOGY, SYNTAX, AND DISCOURSE
               Summary of the meeting on Thursday, July 25

      Sells, Zaenen, and Zec presented a typology of reflexive
   constructions, showing that there is no simple correlation between the
   way the reflexive is morphologically realized and the behavior of the
   form as a transitive or an intransitive. They defined three notions of
   transitivity and showed which combinations can occur in reflexive
   forms:

      1. Lexical transitivity, testable through the interactions with
   lexical rules that behave differently when applied to verbs that take
   objects and those that do not (e.g. causativization and impersonal
   passive in several languages)
      2. C-structure transitivity, the property of having an overt NP or
   pronoun as a PS-constituent separated from the verb in the position
   normally assigned to OBJECTS; c-structure intransitive then means to
   have no PS-constituent in object position
      3. Semantic transitivity, the property of being a two-place
   predicate; semantic intransitives then, are one-place predicates
   including the ones that are 'derived' from two-place predicates by
   variable binding.

      Reflexive constructions can be not only intransitive (e.g. Finnish)
   or transitive (e.g. English or Walpiri) along all these dimensions at
   once but the following cases are also found:

      a. Lexically intransitive, c-structure transitive and semantically
   intransitive (e.g. German and Serbo-Croatian)
      b. Lexically transitive, c-structure transitive and semantically
   intransitive (e.g. Dutch and Japanese)
      c. Lexically transitive, c-structure intransitive and semantically
   transitive (e.g. Chichewa).

      The combinations they postulate not to exist are the ones involving
   a lexically intransitive and a semantically transitive reflexive form.
   Another session will be devoted to the presentation of a theory that
   captures the generalizations presented, involving some developments in
   the format of lexical rules and a sketch of the integration of DRS and
   LFG.							--Annie Zaenen




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