In recent years, 'semantical partiality' has emerged as an important concept in philosophical logic as well as in the study of natural language semantics. Despite the many applications, however, a number of mathematically intriguing questions associated with this concept have received only very limited attention. Partiality, Truth, and Persistence is a study in spatial model theory, the theory of partially defined models. First, with the introduction of truth value gaps in semantics, there are many ways to generalize the classical truth definition for the sentences of a first order predicate language. We know what it means for a sentence to be true or false in a classical, complete model, but how do we extend this relation when partial models are introduced? Various alternatives exist, and a detailed comparison is carried out between them. Since these studies concern a full first order predicate language, many distinctions appear that do not arise in the case of pure propositional logic. A condition of monotonicity or 'persistence' of truth relative to partial models has a prominent position among conditions that are not expressible in the framework of standard, complete model theory. The final chapter investigates the relation between such conditions and expressibility properties in general. These discussions culminate with a combined Lindstrom and persistence characterization theorem. Tore Langholm is a research fellow in mathematics at the University of Oslo. He is a co-author of Situations, Language and Logic.

In the past thirty years, two fundamental issues have emerged in the philosophy of science. One concerns the appropriate attitude we should take towards scientific theories--whether we should regard them as true or merely empirically adequate, for example. The other concerns the nature of scientific theories and models and how these might best be represented. In this ambitious book, da Costa and French bring these two issues together by arguing that theories and models should be regarded as partially rather than wholly true. They adopt a framework that sheds new light on issues to do with belief, theory acceptance, and the realism-antirealism debate. The new machinery of "partial structures" that they develop offers a new perspective from which to view the nature of scientific models and their heuristic development. Their conclusions will be of wide interest to philosophers and historians of science.

Situation Theory grew out of attempts by Jon Barwise in the late 1970s to provide a semantics for 'naked-infinitive' perceptual reports such as 'Claire saw Jon run'. Barwise's intuition was that Claire didn't just see Jon, an individual, but Jon doing something, a situation. Situations are individuals having properties and standing in relations. A theory of situations would allow us to study and compare various types of situations or situation-like entitles, such as facts, events, and scenes. One of the central themes of situation theory of meaning and reference should be set within a general theory of information, one moreover that is rich enough to do justice to perception, communication, and thought. By now many people have contributed by the need to give a rigorous mathematical account of the principles of information that underwrite the theory.

Cognitive science, with its guiding metaphor of the mind as a computer, has made substantial progress towards an understanding of how people comprehend and produce discourse. The essays in this book apply these insights to problems in the interpretation of literature. The first two chapters present the outline of a cognitive theory of discourse and use it to shed light on some classic issues in literary theory, including the roles of the author's intention and the reader's brief systems in the meaning of a literary work. The next three chapters are more technical investigations of discourse interpretation, metaphor, and discourse coherence. The framework developed is then used in the examination of two literary works, a sonnet by Milton and the novella Sylvie by Gérard de Nerval.

This 1992 collection explores the syntax/semantics interface, introducing the disciplines of computational linguistics and formal semantics.

Mary Dalrymple provides a theory of the syntax of anaphoric binding, couched in the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar. Cross-linguistically, anaphoric elements vary a great deal. One finds long- and short-distance reflexives, sometimes within the same language; pronominals may require local noncoreference or coreference only with nonsubjects. Analyses of the syntax of anaphoric binding which have attempted to fit all languages into the mold of English are inadequate to account for the rich range of syntactic constraints that are attested. How, then, can the cross-linguistic regularities exhibited by anaphoric elements be captured, while at the same time accounting for the diversity that is found? Dalrymple shows that syntactic constraints on anaphoric binding can be expressed in terms of just three grammatical concepts: subject, predicate, and tense. These concepts define a set of complex constraints, combinations of which interact to predict the wide range of universally available syntactic conditions that anaphoric elements obey. Mary Dalrymple is a member of the research staff of the Natural Language Theory and Technology group at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

Since its inception in 1967, the Forum has provided an informal but critical setting for the presentation of new ideas and research on first language acquisition. The Forum itself is sponsored by the Linguistics Department at Stanford and is organised by graduate students. In this volume the contributors explore their findings in language acquisition in a variety of the world's languages. The papers presented here reflect the diversity of interests in the field and the range of languages being studied. This volume makes an empirical, as well as a theoretical, contribution to linguistic research.

A first attempt to develop a standardized agent communication language (ACL) resulted in KQML, probably the most widely used such language. However, a lot of technical work remains to be done. Even worse, so far, there seems to be little consensus on the basics of agent communication and there is no clear understanding of the semantics of individual speech acts or even of the basic concepts that should be used to define the semantics. This book documents two workshops on communication in MAS held in 1999, one on Specifying and Implementing Conversation Policies (SICP) and the other in Agent Communication Languages and presents the current state of the art of research in the field. A detailed introductory overview by the volume editors highlights a number of issues that play an important role in agent communication.