This volume about words, and the extraordinary human capacity to store and retrieve them. We hold effortlessly at least 50,000 of them in our minds, the majority of which can be summoned in a split second. No computer has yet come anywhere near simulating the complexities of the internal word-store.

J. L. Austin famously distinguished between 'constative' utterances that convey information and 'performative' utterances that perform actions. In this groundbreaking new book, Douglas Robinson argues that Austin's distinction can be used to understand linguistic methodologies.

This comprehensive collection of current research in the development of speech perception and perceptual learning documents the striking changes that take place both in early childhood and throughout life and speculates about the mechanisms responsible for those changes. The findings reported from this rich and active field address the role of growing linguistic knowledge and experience and demonstrate that speech perception develops in a bidirectional interplay with several levels of linguistic structure and cognitive processes.

Ontologies provide a common vocabulary of an area and define - with different levels of formality - the meaning of the terms and the relationships between them. Ontologies may be reused and shared across applications and groups Concepts in the ontology are usually organized in taxonomies and relations between concepts, properties of concepts, and axioms are typically used for representing the knowledge contained in ontologies. With the growth of information available, e.g. on the WWW, they are popularly applied in knowledge management, semantic web, natural language generation, enterprise modelling, knowledge-based systems, ontology-based brokers, e-commerce platforms and interoperability between systems. This book looks at questions such as: * What is an ontology? * What are the uses of ontologies? * What types of ontologies exist? What are the most well-known ones? * How do I select the best ontology for my application? * What are the principles for building an ontology? * What methodologies should I use to build my own ontology? Which techniques are appropriate for each step? * How do software tools support the process of building and using ontologies? * What language can I use to implement ontologies? * How can I integrate ontologies in a given language? The book presents the theoretical foundations of ontological engineering and covers the practical aspects of selecting and applying methodologies, tools and languages for building ontologies. The applications of ontologies are also illustrated with case studies taken from the areas of knowledge management, e-commerce and the semantic web.

 

Cleft and Pseudo-Cleft Constructions in English is a corpus-based investigation of cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions in contemporary English. It is the first study of such constructions to fully explore the view--now widespread among linguists--that any attempt to satisfactorily explain their structural and functional characteristics must refer to concepts directly related to their use in communication. Peter Collins states that it is necessary to invoke such discourse-relevant notions as information, topic and theme. By using a standard written corpus and a standard spoken corpus of British English, the author is able to analyze systematically the discourse-functions of clefts and pseudo-clefts, provide information on the frequency of these constructions in different genres, and prevent the 'tidying-up' found in examples devised by the linguist. Cleft and Pseudo-Cleft Constructions in English is an excellent study of the interrelations of grammar, pragmatics, and discourse, and a persuasive illustration of the importance of corpus-based approaches to linguistic description.