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Newsletter August 15, No. 41



                      C S L I   N E W S L E T T E R
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August 15, 1985                 Stanford                       Vol. 2, No. 41
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     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 15, 1985

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       No Lunch this week
     Conference Room    
		
   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Talk
     Ventura Hall	``Relevant Arithmetic and Automatic Theorem Proving''
     Conference Room	Bob Meyer, Australian National University
			(Abstract on page 1)

   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall		

                              ____________
                              ANNOUNCEMENT

   No activities have been scheduled for next Thursday, August 22.
                              ____________
                    ABSTRACT FOR THIS WEEK'S TALK
          ``Relevant Arithmetic and Automatic Theorem Proving''
                      Thursday, August 15, 2:15 pm

      Relevant logics were first developed in the 1950's, as systems
   satisfying improved versions of the deduction theorem, designed better
   to capture the relation between premises and conclusion in an ordinary
   valid argument.  The time has come to implement the design philosophy
   by exhibiting some valid arguments.  Those familiar with relevant
   deductive technique will appreciate the point that one would not wish
   to do this without a computer.  Relevant technique, whose major root
   has always been deduction-theoretic, does lend itself quite nicely to
   mechanization.  The program KRIPKE developed at LaTrobe, Melbourne,
   and Australian National universities with (and by, mainly)
   Thistlewaite and McRobbie realizes this technique for the system LR,
   applying a sophisticated decision procedure due to Kripke.  KRIPKE is
   Gentzen-based, but invokes semantic constraints to keep proof searches
   within reasonable bounds.  The pay-off is the obvious one; by limiting
   the supply of premises from which a conclusion can reasonably come
   (which was the idea behind relevant logics all along), the path to a
   proof is fast and efficient.  Our aim now is to adapt these methods to
   concrete theories, as part of a 5-year project beginning in early
   1986.  We have chosen arithmetic as our first area of concentration,
   since it has a smooth first-order relevant formalization (in the
   system R#), with many distinctive features.		--Bob Meyer


Page 2                     CSLI Newsletter                     August 15, 1985
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                                CSLI TALK
    ``On the Complementarity of Subject and Subject-verb Agreement''
                            Edit Doron, CSLI
           Wednesday, August 21, 1:30 pm, Ventura Seminar Room

      ``Pro-drop'' languages allow a null subject in conjunction with
   rich inflectional morphology on the verb.  This paper is concerned
   with the other side of the ``pro-drop'' coin: a null subject is
   sometimes REQUIRED under those conditions.  The Celtic languages
   typically impose such complementarity, and Hebrew does so to some
   extent.  I will point out some problems with McCloskey and Hale's
   ``agreement'' analysis for the data, and will propose a variant of the
   ``incorporation'' analysis.
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            INTERACTIONS OF MORPHOLOGY, SYNTAX, AND DISCOURSE
              Summary of the meeting on Thursday, August 8

      A class of five morphemes in Finnish, traditionally called
   possessive suffixes (henceforeward Px), raises interesting questions
   about the relationship of morphological structure to syntactic
   functions.  Px's appear to be pronominal (or anaphoric) elements
   attached to nominal words (nouns and some adjectives, including
   nominalized verbs and participals) following number and case suffixes.
   Recent analyses have treated Px's as clitics, that is, parts of
   phonological words that are not placed within words exclusively by the
   morphology.  I argue in two parts, however, that Finnish possessive
   suffixes are best analyzed as true suffixes.
      The talk, comprising part one of my argument, dealt with
   phonological, morphological, and semantic evidence for the suffixal
   (or morphological word-internal) status of the Px's.  I argued that
   any allomorphy or morphophonological alternation in Finnish that is
   sensitive to word boundaries treats the undisputed suffixes and Px's
   alike as being inside the word and treats a class of clitics as being
   outside the word.  Furthermore, a variety of semantically
   idiosyncratic lexical items containing Px's provide further support
   for a suffixal analysis of Px's, insofar as suffixes are more
   susceptible to idiosyncratic lexicalization than clitics.  I then
   argued against the possibility that Px's are lexical level clitics
   (i.e., clitics that attach to words at the morphological level) by
   showing that it is quite costly to the theory of lexical phonology to
   have a lexical level in Finnish that contains all of the undisputed
   suffixes yet excludes the Px's; hence Px's must occupy the same
   lexical level as other suffixes.  Considering, then, all of the
   evidence favoring a suffixal analysis for the Px's, it is extremely
   weak to set Px's apart from the other suffixes solely on the basis of
   morpheme order.  If the syntactic facts involving Px's can be analyzed
   competently from an entirely lexical basis, then a clitic analysis is
   unmotivated and a suffix analysis is correct.  Part two of my
   argument, to be presented in a later talk, involves such a syntactic
   analysis of the Px's.			--Jonni Kanerva

Page 3                     CSLI Newsletter                     August 15, 1985
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                             SDF BOARD VISIT

      The Board of Trustees of the System Development Foundation visited
   Ventura Hall last Monday morning (August 12). 
      The members of the Board who were here are:

	Arnold Beckman, Chairman
   	Chairman, Beckman Instruments, Inc.

   	Ralph Tyler, President
   	Director Emeritus, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral
          Sciences

   	Edwin Huddleson, Assistant Secretary and Financial Officer
   	Partner, Cooley, Godward, Castro, Huddlesson & Tatum

   	Lloyd Morrisett, Chairman, Investment Committee
   	President, The John and Mary R. Markle Foundation

   Carl York and Roberta Ishihara, two members of the SDF staff, were
   also here.
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