The Structural Design Of Language

Although there have been numerous investigations of biolinguistics within the Minimalist Program over the last ten years, many of which appeal to the importance of Turing's Thesis (that the structural design of systems must obey physical and mathematical laws), these studies have by and large ignored the question of the structural design of language. They have paid significant attention to identifying the components of language - settling on a lexicon, a computational system, a sensorimotor performance system and a conceptual-intentional performance system; however, they have not examined how these components must be inter-structured to meet thresholds of simplicity, generality, naturalness and beauty, as well as of biological and conceptual necessity. In this book, Stroik and Putnam take on Turing's challenge. They argue that the narrow syntax - the lexicon, the Numeration, and the computational system - must reside, for reasons of conceptual necessity, within the performance systems. As simple as this novel design is, it provides, as Stroik and Putnam demonstrate, radical new insights into what the human language faculty is, how language emerged in the species, and how language is acquired by children.

An examination of the structure of language and how it obeys physical and mathematical laws.

You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.

A compiler translates a program written in a high level language into a program written in a lower level language. For students of computer science, building a compiler from scratch is a rite of passage: a challenging and fun project that offers insight into many different aspects of computer science, some deeply theoretical, and others highly practical. This book offers a one semester introduction into compiler construction, enabling the reader to build a simple compiler that accepts a C-like language and translates it into working X86 or ARM assembly language. It is most suitable for undergraduate students who have some experience programming in C, and have taken courses in data structures and computer architecture.

Introduction: background and technical foundations; User aspects; Elements of procedural programming languages.

"The structural designs that occur in nature - in molecules, in crystals, in living cells - appear in this fully illustrated book as a source of inspiration and study of design of man-made structures" -- BOOK JACKET.