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Newsletter October 24, No. 51
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Subject: Newsletter October 24, No. 51
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From: csli@csli.stanford.edu
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Date: Wed 23 Oct 1985 16:56:02-PDT
C S L I N E W S L E T T E R
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October 24, 1985 Stanford Vol. 2, No. 51
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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, October 24, 1985
12 noon TINLunch
Ventura Hall ``A Problem for Actualism About Possible Worlds''
Conference Room by Alan McMichael
Discussion led by Edward Zalta
2:15 p.m. CSLI Seminar
Redwood Hall Discourse, Intention, and Action
Room G-19 Two talks given by Phil Cohen and Amichai Kronfeld
3:30 p.m. Tea
Ventura Hall
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CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *NEXT* THURSDAY, October 31, 1985
12 noon TINLunch
Ventura Hall The Formation of Adjectival Passives
Conference Room by B. Levin and M. Rappaport
Discussion led by Mark Gawron
(Abstract on page 2)
2:15 p.m. CSLI Seminar
Redwood Hall Foundations of Document Preparation
Room G-19 David Levy, CSLI and Xerox PARC
(Abstract on page 2)
3:30 p.m. Tea
Ventura Hall
4:15 p.m. CSLI Colloquium
Redwood Hall The Structure of Social Facts
Room G-19 Prof. John Searle, Dept. of Philosophy, UC Berkeley
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CORRECTION
The coordinator for the Situation Theory and Situation Semantics
(STASS) project is Jon Barwise not David Israel as stated in last
week's newsletter.
Page 2 CSLI Newsletter October 24, 1985
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ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH
The Formation of Adjectival Passives
B. Levin and M. Rappaport
This is Working Paper #2 in the MIT Lexicon Project, and though it
discusses some rather specific issues having to do with one (putative)
lexical rule of adjectival passive formation, it is an interesting
example of the lexicon at work in a GB-style theory, worked out in
unusual detail. It assumes no knowledge of the Lexicon Group's work
and only a minimal knowledge of GB.
Since Wasow 1977 it has been standard among generative grammarians
to assume two separate passivization rules, one for verbal passives,
another for adjectival passives. Levin and Rappaport argue against
the claim in Wasow 1980 that the second of these rules has a thematic
condition and propose an analysis of their own in which many of the
standardly-cited facts about adjectival passives fall out simply from
stipulating which arguments of a lexical item must be realized, and
assuming that such lexical facts are in the default case preserved in
the output of lexical rules. We thus have another case in which
thematic roles appear NOT to play the part they were claimed to play
in a specific morphological or syntactic process. Paradoxically,
although the paper is set in a framework which assumes specific
thematic roles, it presents an important negative result and casts
further doubt on the hypothesis that thematic roles play a significant
part in mediating the relation between syntax and lexical semantics.
--Mark Gawron
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NEXT WEEK'S CSLI SEMINAR
Foundations of Document Preparation
Document preparation, by which I mean the use of the computer to
prepare graphical presentations of verbal and pictorial information on
screens and on paper, is inherently a linguistic activity. This
statement is true in two senses: Documents, first of all, are
linguistic artifacts. But in addition, the use of the computer as a
marking tool is inherently linguistic: we *describe* to the computer
the documents we wish to create.
Current document preparation tools (the likes of TeX, Tedit, Emacs,
Scribe, etc.) are highly inadequate and unnecessarily restrictive.
This is because, I would claim, their designers have failed to take
explicit account of the linguistic nature of document preparation:
these tools have been built in advance of a theory of their subject
matter. In this talk, I will present an overview of research aimed at
developing a ``theory of marking'' to serve as the foundation for the
design of such tools. I will set forth the broad outlines of the
theory---one that lies at the intersection of a theory of production,
a theory of representation, and a theory of marks---and will
demonstrate that the issues of representation, reference, and action
with which the Center is concerned are central to this research. The
bulk of the talk will be devoted to illustrating the search for
founding concepts in the theory of marks---concepts such as figure,
ground, region, and blueprint. Such concepts are just as essential to
a future linguistics of written forms as to a foundation for document
preparation. --David Levy
Page 3 CSLI Newsletter October 24, 1985
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ENVIRONMENTS GROUP MEETING
The Rational Programming Environment - Summary
Wolfgang Polak, Kestrel
October 28, 1985, Ventura Trailer Classroom
In 1981 Rational commenced work on an Ada oriented software
development system. The goal was to create a commercial system
providing Lisp-style interactiveness and environment features for Ada.
The project encompassed a language oriented machine architecture,
specialized hardware, an integrated language based operating system
and programming environment, and project management support tools.
The original design used Ada's packages to create a hierarchy of
nested structures corresponding to conventional directory systems.
Permanent storage was provided by implementing persistent data objects
in the language. Programs and data are simply declarations within the
hierarchy of packages. Programs are only stored in internal
representation; semantic consistency (according to language semantics)
is maintained across the whole system. This organization allows
powerful program manipulation and query tools to be implemented
easily.
While very uniform, the use of packages as directories with the
associated semantic complexities proved cumbersome. In later versions
the directory structure was simplified and no longer subject to the
exact language rules.
The system is built around a powerful action mechanism. Any number
of directory/object manipulations can be associated with an action.
The action can later be committed, in which case all operations take
effect, or the action can be abandoned, in which case all operations
are undone.
The user interacts with the system via a multi-window editor. Each
window is of a particular type (e.g. text, program, status, etc.). The
system includes a general structure oriented editor which combines
structure operations with arbitrary text manipulation. Editor commands
are uniform across all windows; only the effect of structure
operations depends on the type of window.
Fast incremental compilation facilitates both interactive program
development and command execution.
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PIXELS AND PREDICATES
``Visual Programming Languages --
From Visual Assembler to Rocky's Boots''
Warren Robinett, with an assist by Scott Kim
CSLI trailers, Wednesday, October 30, 1:00 p.m.
A general view of the visual programming language problem is
presented, anchored by two concrete examples.
The first example is a visual assembly language, where patterns of
pixels are interpreted as low-level instructions which manipulate
patterns of pixels (and wherein one of the PnP themes is exemplified:
a very primitive `predicate made from pixels').
The second example is Rocky's Boots, a high-level visual
programming language based on the building circuits metaphor
(construed in some circles as an educational game).
Page 4 CSLI Newsletter October 24, 1985
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SUMMARY OF ENVIRONMENTS GROUP MEETING
October 21, 1985
Terry Winograd described research on an environment for use by
people who are developing and modifying languages, and need to be able
to produce and manipulate texts in those languages during this
evolutionary phase. It is based on a uniform way of treating grammars
(based on a hierarchical phylum/operator structure with attributes),
so that structure editing, structured storage and other facilities
that are based on the language structure can be easily created and
developed.
He raised a number of issues that come up in trying to make the
environment general (for at least a broad class of existing and
envisioned languages), display-oriented (allowing dynamic changes of
structure and view), incremental (dealing well with continual small
updates), and distributed (multiple users cooperating in a
heterogeneous not-totally-reliable networked environment).
The current system is fragmentary and has not been integrated or
written up. Future talks by others in the group working on it will
address some of the more specific technical issues.
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CSLI SEMINAR SUMMARY
Ontology and Intensionality
Summary of CSLI Seminar on October 10
In this seminar, I outlined two recent developments in the theory
of abstract objects---one concerning ontology (the theory of times)
and one concerning intensionality (a solution to the Morning
Star/Evening Star puzzle). Moments of time were identified as
abstract objects, and truth at a time was defined in terms of the
encoding relation. Such definitions yielded the following non-trivial
consequences: times are maximal and consistent with respect to the
propositions true at them; there is a unique present time; a
proposition is always true iff it is true at all times, every
tense-theoretic consequence of a proposition true at a time is also
true at that time. In the second half of the seminar, we demonstrated
that once one uses structured entities as the denotations of
sentences, modal and tense contexts are not, in and of themselves,
intensional. Intensionality arises when definite descriptions appear
in such contexts, and by assigning definite descriptions a second
``intensional'' reading, on which they denote the abstract object
which encodes the properties they imply, we get a solution to the
substitutivity puzzles which preserves our intuitions about the
logical form of the sentences involved. --Edward N. Zalta
Page 5 CSLI Newsletter October 24, 1985
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SITUATED ENGINE COMPANY
The STASS project has initiated a working group on the relation
between situation theory and computation. The aim is two fold: learn
what needs to be added to situation theory to enable it to give
adequate accounts of various computational agents, and to learn how we
might be able to use computers in doing situation theory. These two
aims cause us to distinguish between sigma-machines and tau-machines.
Sigma-machines are machines that are the subject matter for a
situation-theoretic analysis. Tau-machines are machines built to help
do situation theory.
In the long run, we expect that sigma and tau machines will merged,
that our theory machines will also be our subject matter machines.
For now, though, we are operating on two fronts simultaneously. A
simple robot, Gullible, has been designed and implemented by Brian
Smith, Mike Dixon and Tayloe Stansbury. It moves around on a grid,
meeting people, picking up information (and misinformation) and
answering certain questions about other people's locations based on
what it has experienced on its travels. This is to serve as our first
sigma-machine. Four groups have been formed to come up with
semantical analysis of this robot using situation theory.
On the other front, Jon Barwise has been lecturing about situation
theory and its logic, to give a feeling for the basic theory, raising
questions about what it might be reasonable to ask a computer to do,
and coming up with some vague ideas about how one might get it to do
it.
The group meets every Tuesday at Xerox PARC, at 2 p.m., for about
two hours. --Jon Barwise
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POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS
The Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) at
Stanford University is currently accepting applications for a small
number of one year postdoctoral fellowships commencing September 1,
1986. The awards are intended for people who have received their
Ph.D. degrees since June 1983.
Postdoctoral fellows will participate in an integrated program of
basic research on situated language---language as used by agents
situated in the world to exchange, store, and process information,
including both natural and computer languages.
For more information about CSLI's research programs and details of
postdoctoral fellowship appointments, write to:
Dr. Elizabeth Macken, Assistant Director
Center for the Study of Language and Information
Ventura Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, California 94305
APPLICATION DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 15, 1986
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