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Newsletter September 26, No. 47
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Subject: Newsletter September 26, No. 47
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From: csli@csli.stanford.edu
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Date: Wed 25 Sep 1985 16:54:08-PDT
C S L I N E W S L E T T E R
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September 26, 1985 Stanford Vol. 2, No. 47
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A weekly publication of The Center for the Study of Language and
Information, Ventura Hall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
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CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *THIS* THURSDAY, September 26, 1985
12 noon TINLunch
Ventura Hall ``The Concept of Supervenience''
Conference Room Discussion led by Carol Cleland
2:15 p.m. CSLI Talk
Ventura Hall No talk this week
3:30 p.m. Tea
Ventura Hall
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CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *NEXT* THURSDAY, October 3, 1985
12 noon TINLunch
Ventura Hall ``Idealized Cognitive Models'' and ``Metonymic Models''
Conference Room Sections 4, 5 of ``Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things''
by George Lakoff
Discussion led by Douglas Edwards
(Abstract on page 2)
2:15 p.m. CSLI Seminar
Ventura Hall ``Notes from the STASS Underground''
Seminar Room David Israel, CSLI and SRI
(Abstract on page 2)
3:30 p.m. Tea
Ventura Hall
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THIS YEAR'S THURSDAY ACTIVITIES
CSLI's year will be starting next Thursday, October 3, and several
changes have been made.
TINLunches will be organized by Chris Menzel and Mats Rooth, two
CSLI postdoctoral fellows. They will continue to meet at noon in
the Ventura Conference room.
Thursday Seminars will have a different format this year and will
consist of either individual presentations from the postdocs or a
presentation by one of the new projects of its goals and progress.
Thursday Colloquia will be rarer and of more general interest.
Each project will be responsible for one colloquium, and we hope to
have three colloquia a quarter. Time and location of the colloquia
may vary.
Next week's newsletter will contain a list of the new projects and a
tentative calendar for the Fall quarter.
Page 2 CSLI Newsletter September 26, 1985
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ABSTRACT FOR NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH
``Idealized Cognitive Models'' and ``Metonymic Models''
Sections 4, 5 of ``Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things''
According to Lakoff, many words are understood by reference to
``Idealized Cognitive Models'' (ICMs) which describe the ideal
circumstances in which the phenomena these words refer to are
conceived to exist. Some uses of a word can only be understood by
treating the word's ICM as true even when it is known to be false in
general. Other uses modify the word's meaning by more or less
explicitly calling the ICM in question or by focusing on cases to
which the ICM clearly fails to apply.
Thus linguistic puzzles can arise. For instance ``bachelor'' is
often defined as ``unmarried man,'' and ``to lie'' as ``to make a
false statement,'' even though it is well known that these terms are
not coextensive with their definitions. When a word is defined, its
ICM is taken for granted, but when a purported example is judged,
failure of applicability of the ICM can make the purported example
illegitimate or at least atypical. The ICMs for ``bachelor'' and
``lie'' fail partly or totally for priests, children, polygamists,
misleading true statements, polite nothings, and accidental errors.
Syncategorematic noun modifiers often affect the ICM. Thus we get
``social lie,'' ``white lie,'' ``eligible bachelor'' (this one
reinforces the ICM), ``foster mother,'' ``surrogate mother,'' and so
on.
ICMs are interesting in that they seem to be used in reasoning
generally, not just in lexical semantics. They are akin to, but not
identical with, various constructs developed for artificial
intelligence, such as frames, scripts, contexts, data pools, etc.
--Douglas Edwards
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ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S CSLI SEMINAR
``Notes from the STASS Underground''
I will try to explain the meaning and import of one of the hottest
acronyms at CSLI -- ``STASS.'' In particular, I will try to explain
why there should be a Situation Theory as well as a Situation
Semantics. --David Israel
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CSLI TALK
``Verbs and Time''
Dorit Abusch, Tel-Aviv University
Tuesday, October 1, 1 pm, Ventura Conference Room
In ``Word Meaning and Montague Grammar,'' David Dowty analyzed
aspectual clauses in terms of an ``aspectual calculus'' consisting of
stative predicates and operators such as BECOME and CAUSE. For
instance, achievements, including many morphological inchoatives, are
analyzed as having the form lambda x[Become(P(x))]. Accomplishments,
including many morphological causatives, are analyzed in terms of
CAUSE. Dowty and Lauri Carlson noted that some inchoatives, such as
(the verb) ``cool,'' meet the test for process verbs, I discuss these
inchoatives, and similar causatives. The relation between the
operators and the verb classification is complex. I argue that the
classification breaks down for certain causatives, such as the
transitive versions of ``gallop'' and ``darken.''
Page 3 CSLI Newsletter September 26, 1985
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AFA SEMINAR
This quarter there will be a small informal seminar going through
Peter Aczel's work on the anti-foundation axiom (AFA) in set theory,
together with some of the applications found by people here at CSLI.
We will start at the beginning, but assume familiarity with the
cumulative hierarchy and ZFC. The seminar will be Thursdays at 4:15
when there is no CSLI colloquium, in the Ventura Conference room. Jon
Barwise will give a brief introduction on September 26, and then we
will organize the rest of the quarter. If you would like to be added
to the AFA mailing list, contact Westerstahl@csli.
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NEW PROJECT MEETING ON ENVIRONMENTS
Mondays 1-2 in the trailer classroom, Ventura
Beginning Monday, September 30 there will be a weekly meeting on
environments for working with symbolic structures (this includes
programming environments, specification environments, document
preparation environments, ``linguistic workstations,'' and
grammar-development environments). As a part of doing our research,
many of us at CSLI have developed such environments, sometimes as a
matter of careful design, and sometimes by the seat of the pants. In
this meeting we will present to each other what we have done, and also
look at work done elsewhere (both through guest speakers and reading
discussions).
The goal is to look at the design issues that come up in building
environments and to see how they have been approached in a variety of
cases. We are not concerned with the particular details (``pop-up
menus are/aren't better than pull-down menus'') but with more
fundamental problems. For example:
What is the nature of the underlying structure the environment
supports: chunks of text? a data-base of relations? a tree or graph
structure? How is this reflected in the basic mode of operation
for the user?
How does the user understand the relation between objects (and
operations on them) that appear on the visible representation
(screen and/or hardcopy) and the corresponding objects (and
operations) on some kind of underlying structure? How is this
maintained in a situation of multiple presentations (different
views and/or multiple windows)? How is it maintained in the face
of breakdown (system failure or catastrophic user error in the
middle of an edit, transfer, etc.)?
Does the environment deal with a distributed network of storage and
processing devices? If so, does it try to present some kind of
seamless ``information space'' or does it provide a model of
objects and operations that deals with moving things (files,
functions, etc.) from one ``place'' to another, where different
places have relevant different properties (speed of access,
security, shareability, etc.)?
Page 4 CSLI Newsletter September 26, 1985
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How is consistency maintained between separate objects that are
conceptually linked (source code and object code, formatter source
and printer-ready files, grammars and parse-structures generated
from them, etc.)? To what extent is this simply left to user
convention, supported by bookkeeping tools, or automated?
What is the model for change of objects over time? This includes
versions, releases, time-stamps, reference dates, change logs,
etc., How is information about temporal and derivational
relationships supported within the system?
What is the structure for coordination of work? How is access to
the structures regulated to prevent ``stepping on each other's
toes,'' to facilitate joint development, to keep track of who needs
to do what when?
Lurking under these are the BIG issues of ontology, epistemology,
representation, and so forth. Hopefully our discussions on a more
down-to-earth level will be guided by a consideration of the larger
picture and will contribute to our understanding of it.
The meeting is open to anyone who wishes to attend. Topics will be
announced in advance in the newsletter. The first meeting will be
devoted to a general discussion of what should be addressed and to
identifying the relevant systems (and corresponding people) within
CSLI, and within the larger (Stanford, Xerox, SRI) communities in
which it exists. --Terry Winograd
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INTERACTIONS OF MORPHOLOGY, SYNTAX, AND DISCOURSE
``Cree Verb Inflection: Linking Features to Grammatical Functions''
Summary of the meeting on September 12
Cree (Algonquian) is a non-configurational language in which
grammatical functions are encoded by means of a complicated system of
verbal inflection. The verb has ten inflectional affix positions; no
single position is dedicated to a particular grammatical function.
The shape of the person and number affixes is the same for both
subject and object. The task of linking person and number feature
values with the appropriate grammatical function falls to a set of
morphemes traditionally called ``theme signs.''
The talk focussed on the role of the theme signs. Some recent
theoretical accounts have analyzed the theme signs as marking a voice
opposition; on these accounts, the theme signs would be derivational,
rather than inflectional. A subset of the theme signs would mark the
application of a rule like passive, or a rule of ergative relinking,
in which the theme argument is linked to subject, and the agent
argument is linked to object. However, syntactic tests (copying to
object, quantifier float, complement control) show that the passive
and the ergative relinking hypotheses must both be rejected.
In Dahlstrom's analysis, the theme signs are inflectional, acting
as a filter on possible linkings of person and number features to
grammatical functions. The other inflectional affixes carry specific
feature values for person and number, but are unspecified for
grammatical function. Ungrammatical linkings of feature values to
grammatical functions are ruled out by general conditions of
completeness, coherence, and consistency. --Amy Dahlstrom
Page 5 CSLI Newsletter September 26, 1985
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NEW CSLI REPORTS
Report No. CSLI-85-31, ``A Formal Theory of Knowledge and Action''
by Robert C. Moore, and Report No. CSLI-85-32, ``Finite State
Morphology: A Review of Koskenniemi'' by Gerald Gazdar, have just been
published. These reports may be obtained by writing to David Brown,
CSLI, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305 or Brown@SU-CSLI.
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