Combinatory Linguistics

The book examines to what extent the mediating relation between constituents and their semantics can arise from combinatory knowledge of words. It traces the roots of Combinatory Categorial Grammar, and uses the theory to promote a Humean question in linguistics and cognitive science: Why do we see limited constituency and dependency in natural languages, despite their diversity and potential infinity? A potential answer is that constituents and dependencies might have arisen from a single resource: adjacency. The combinatory formulation of adjacency constrains possible grammars.

The book examines to what extent the mediating relation between constituents and their semantics can arise from combinatory knowledge of words. It traces the roots of Combinatory Categorial Grammar, and uses the theory to promote a Humean question in linguistics and cognitive science: Why do we see limited constituency and dependency in natural languages, despite their diversity and potential infinity? A potential answer is that constituents and dependencies might have arisen from a single resource: adjacency. The combinatory formulation of adjacency constrains possible grammars.

This book presents a detailed examination of the most important arguments for a process-based theory of morphology and offers a highly-constrained alternative to the powerful mechanisms proposed in processual theories of morphology.Data is presented from dozens of different languages from numerous language families around the world, much of it new to the linguistic forum. The importance of prosodic morphology in the analysis of linguistic phenomena is highlighted and the need for greater constraints on generative power is examined. This work addresses some of the thorniest problems in morphological theory in a novel alternative fashion, including the issues of ablaut, exchange rules, metathesis, reduplication and subtraction, and presents reanalyses based on moraic morphology and the traditional notion of 'combination' of morphemes along with the underlying theme of constraining the grammar of natural language to the utmost. Contributions to the field include: (i) new data from Nitinaht reduplicative constructions, Nootka hypocoristic formation, and Nootkan variable-length vowels; (ii) reanalyses of previous problems, including metathesis in Chawchila Yokuts, Hebrew, and Saanich, exchange rules in Luo, Dinka, and Diegueño, and truncation in Danish; (iii) analyses of new problems from reduplication in Nitinaht and Nootka templatic morphology; and (iv) new theoretical apparatus is introduced: the unification of templates and a new proposal for hierarchical syllable structure based on the mora as head of N.

This is the first English version of a text out of print for more than 40 years, summarising the positions and key concepts of an influential stream of linguistic thought. Using quotations as entries, J. Vachek (1909-1997), a leading advocate of the Prague School, employed more than 160 sources, papers and monographs, by well over 30 representatives of the school (Mathesius, Trnka, Skalička, Daneš, Dokulil, Mukařovský, Jakobson, Trubetzkoy, Isachenko, and others). The dictionary both captures the pioneering efforts and achievements of the school from its foundation in 1926, and provides a framework for assessing the current state of affairs, attesting to its originality and serving as a preventive to treading paths already explored. The headword concepts are provided with French, German and Czech equivalents and Vachek's original preface is supplemented by a foreword which traces the development of the school up to the present date and puts it into perspective.

This Handbook represents the development of research and the current level of knowledge in the fields of syntactic theory and syntax analysis. Syntax can look back to a long tradition. Especially in the last 50 years, however, the interaction between syntactic theory and syntactic analysis has led to a rapid increase in analyses and theoretical suggestions. This second edition of the Handbook on Syntax adopts a unifying perspective and therefore does not place the division of syntactic theory into several schools to the fore, but the increase in knowledge resulting from the fruitful argumentations between syntactic analysis and syntactic theory. It uses selected phenomena of individual languages and their cross-linguistic realizations to explain what syntactic analyses can do and at the same time to show in what respects syntactic theories differ from each other. It investigates how syntax is related to neighbouring disciplines and investigate the role of the interfaces especially the relationship between syntax and phonology, morphology, compositional semantics, pragmatics, and the lexicon. The phenomena chosen bring together renowned experts in syntax, and represent the consensus reached as to what has to be considered as an important as well as illustrative syntactic phenomenon. The phenomena discuss do not only serve to show syntactic analyses, but also to compare theoretical approaches with each other.

th CICLing 2009 markedthe 10 anniversary of the Annual Conference on Intel- gent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics. The CICLing conferences provide a wide-scope forum for the discussion of the art and craft of natural language processing research as well as the best practices in its applications. This volume contains ?ve invited papers and the regular papers accepted for oral presentation at the conference. The papers accepted for poster presentation were published in a special issue of another journal (see the website for more information). Since 2001, the proceedings of CICLing conferences have been published in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science series, as volumes 2004, 2276, 2588, 2945, 3406, 3878, 4394, and 4919. This volume has been structured into 12 sections: – Trends and Opportunities – Linguistic Knowledge Representation Formalisms – Corpus Analysis and Lexical Resources – Extraction of Lexical Knowledge – Morphology and Parsing – Semantics – Word Sense Disambiguation – Machine Translation and Multilinguism – Information Extraction and Text Mining – Information Retrieval and Text Comparison – Text Summarization – Applications to the Humanities A total of 167 papers by 392 authors from 40 countries were submitted for evaluation by the International Program Committee, see Tables 1 and 2. This volume contains revised versions of 44 papers, by 120 authors, selected for oral presentation; the acceptance rate was 26. 3%.