This book is an investigation into the problems of generating natural language utterances to satisfy specific goals the speaker has in mind. It is thus an ambitious and significant contribution to research on language generation in artificial intelligence, which has previously concentrated in the main on the problem of translation from an internal semantic representation into the target language. The author’s approach, based on a possible-worlds semantics of an intensional logic of knowledge and action, enables him to develop a formal representation of the effects of illocutionary acts...
Language and Identity: An introduction (Key Topics in Sociolinguistics)
Written in a truly interdisciplinary spirit, this rich, lucid and irreverent book on language, culture and politics is bound to win admirers across the humanities and social sciences. Very readable, highly enjoyable, deeply enlightening.
Dimensions of Register Variation: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison
The book extends and refines the research and methodology reported in the author’s ground-breaking Variation Across Speech and Writing, and adds for the first time a diachronic dimension. In it he gives a linguistic analysis of register in four widely differing languages: English, Nukulaelae Tuvaluan, Korean, and Somali. Striking similarities as well as differences emerge, allowing to predict for the first time cross-linguistic universals of register variation.
This book focuses on the linguistic representation of temporality in the verbal domain and its interaction with the syntax and semantics of verbs, arguments, and modifiers. Leading scholars explore the division of labour between syntax, compositional semantics, and lexical semantics in the encoding of event structure, encompassing event participants and the temporal properties associated with events.
This book reviews current theories of the sound-structure of words and syllables. Dr. Coleman presents technical arguments showing that the contemporary theories are too complex and that a simpler theory, Declarative Phonology, is adequate. This theory is exemplified with detailed accounts of the sound-structure of words and syllables in English and Japanese.
