The literary imagination may take flight on the wings of metaphor, but hard-headed scientists are just as likely as doe-eyed poets to reach for a metaphor when the descriptive need arises. Metaphor is a pervasive aspect of every genre of text and every register of speech, and is as useful for describing the inner workings of a "black hole" (itself a metaphor) as it is the affairs of the human heart.
Language is a hallmark of the human species; the flexibility and unbounded expressivity of our linguistic abilities is unique in the biological world. In this book, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater argue that to understand this astonishing phenomenon, we must consider how language is created: moment by moment, in the generation and understanding of individual utterances; year by year, as new language learners acquire language skills; and generation by generation, as languages change, split, and fuse through the processes of cultural evolution.
Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse presents a novel framework and analysis of the ways we refer to abstract objects in natural language discourse. The book begins with a typology of abstract objects and related entities like eventualities. After an introduction to `bottom up, compositional' discourse representation theory (DRT) and to previous work on abstract objects in DRT (notably work on the semantics of the attitudes), the book turns to a semantic analysis of eventuality and abstract object denoting nominals in English.
In writing this book, I had several different purposes in mind. First, it is a textbook for students beginning graduate work in computer science or linguistics. It includes detailed technical material and exercises designed to help the student master a body of concepts and techniques. Second, it is a practical guide for people who are building computer systems that deal with natural language. It is not structured as a 'how-to' book, but it describes the relevant techniques in detail and includes an extensive outline of English grammar, which should be useful in both the design and testing of systems.
This book differs from other introductions to pragmatics in approaching the problems of interpreting language use in terms of interpersonal modelling of beliefs and intentions. It is intended to make issues involved in language understanding, such as speech, text, and discourse, accessible to the widest group possible – not just specialists in linguistics or communication theorists – but all scholars and researchers whose enterprises depend on having a useful model of how communicative agents understand utterances and expect their own utterances to be understood.
