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Announcement of talks

		SEMINAR ON COMPUTERS, WORK, AND DESIGN
		   The Negotiation of Expert Status
			  William D. Rifkin
			 Stanford University
		     Wednesday, 6 December, 12:15
			      Ventura 17

Expert ability differs from expert status.  I argue in this paper that
the office of "expert" represents a provisional social status.  This
negotiated status emerges as a measure of authority in a relationship
conducted between a relative specialist, who is a candidate for expert
status, and someone who is effectively a client consulting the
specialist for help in making a decision.  The client, in attempting
to evaluate whether the specialist has something credible and relevant
to say, gauges the person, the specialist, as much as the utterance.
The client's joint selection of whom and what to heed rests on
understandings of the discourse and social structure of an issue-based
community.  This "issue arena," like other types of communities, is
wrought through with internal stratification (here, based on
occupational affiliation) and interest group conflict.  In presenting
this interpretation, I am engaging in an exercise in discourse design
based on grounded theory.  I am borrowing from literature on language
and community and illustrating my points with examples from three
years of observations of a local water board concerned with toxic
waste issues.  I am designing a discourse for laypersons to link their
feelings of disenfranchisement as relative nonexperts to cultural
understandings of occupational culture, status, and the ritual nature
of relationships between specialists and clients.
			     ____________

			PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIUM

	   Mencius and Hsun-tzu: Two Views of Human Agency
			   Bryan Van Norden
		       Department of Philosophy
			 Stanford University

		    Friday, 8 December 1989, 3:15
			  Bldg. 90, Room 92Q

No abstract available.
			     ____________

	    COMMONSENSE AND NONMONOTONIC REASONING SEMINAR
   Implementing Autoepistemic Logic on a Reason Maintenance System
			    Kurt Konolige
			  SRI International
		      Monday, 11 December, 3:15
		       Margaret Jacks Hall 252

Recent work shows that a Reason Maintenance System (RMS) can be
formalized as a type of autoepistemic theory.  In this paper, we
consider the inverse transformation: trying to implement an arbitrary
autoepistemic theory as an RMS.  In so doing, we provide a
computationally attractive theorem-proving methodology for
autoepistemic logic.
			     ____________

			   SYNTAX WORKSHOP

	     Switch-reference in Jiwarli (and elsewhere)
			     Peter Austin
			 La Trobe University

		      Tuesday, 12 December, 7:30
			  CSLI, Cordura 100

Switch-reference is a syntactic device found in many languages whereby
the subjects of two clauses are indicated to be coreferential (SS -
same subject) or noncoreferential (DS - different subject).
Typically, switch-reference is coded on the dependent clause verb, as
in the following examples from Diyari (central Australia):

(1) Ngathu  nhinha  nhayiyi  yatha-rna
    I       him     see      talk-SS
    "I see him as (I'm) talking"

(2) Ngathu  nhinha  nhayiyi  yatha-rnanhi
    I       him     see      talk-DS
    "I see him as (he's) talking"

Switch-reference has been discussed in the G-B literature by Finer
1985, Hale 1989, and Jeanne and Hale 1989 in terms of a binding
relationship between the two clauses.  In LFG, Simpson 1983 and
Bresnan and Simpson 1983 discuss switch-reference in terms of a
relation of anaphoric control.

I will examine data from a number of Aboriginal languages, primarily
Jiwarli from Western Australia, describing their switch-reference
systems and discussing whether either the G-B or LFG accounts (or some
other account) best deals with the systems found in these languages.

The next workshop will be on 9 January 1990.