In the beginning, before there are words, or syntax, or discourse, there is speech. Speech is an infant's gateway to language. Without exposure to speech, no language--or at most only a feeble facsimile of language--develops, regardless of how rich a child's biological endowment for language learning may be. But little is given directly in speech--not words, for example, as anyone who has ever listened to fluent conversation in an unfamiliar language can attest. Rather, words and phrases, or rudimentary categories--or whatever other information is required for syntactic and semantic analyses to begin operating--must be pulled from speech through an infant's developing perceptual capacities. By the end of the first year, an infant can segment at least some words from fluent speech. Beyond this, how impoverished or rich an infant's representations of input may be remains largely unknown. Clearly, in the debate over determinants of early language acquisition, the input speech stream has too often been offhandedly dismissed as a potential source of information. This volume brings together internationally-known scholars from a range of disciplines--linguistics, psychology, cognitive and computer science, and acoustics --who share common interests in how speech, in its phonological, prosodic, distributional, and statistical properties, may encode information useful for early language learning, and how such information may be deciphered by very young children. These scholars offer a spectrum of viewpoints on the possibility that aspects of speech may provide bootstraps for language learning; contribute important, state-of-the-art findings across a variety of relevant domains; and illuminate critical directions for future inquiry. The publication of this volume represents a significant step in renewing the bonds between two fields that have long been sundered--speech perception and language acquisition.

This is the second volume of papers on sign-based linguistics to emerge from Columbia School linguistics conferences. One set of articles offers semantic analyses of grammatical features of specific languages: English full-verb inversion; Serbo-Croatian deictic pronouns; English auxiliary do; Italian pronouns egli and lui; the Celtic-influenced use of on (e.g., ‘he played a trick on me’); a monosemic analysis of the English verb break. A second set deals with general theoretical issues: a solution to the problem that noun class markers (e.g. Swahili) pose for sign-based linguistics; the appropriateness of statistical tests of significance in text-based analysis; the word or the morpheme as the locus of paradigmatic inflectional change; the radical consequences of Saussure’s anti-nomenclaturism for syntactic analysis; the future of ‘minimalist linguistics’ in a maximalist world. A third set explains phonotactic patterning in terms of ease of articulation: aspirated and unaspirated stop consonants in Urdu; initial consonant clusters in more than two dozen languages. An introduction highlights the theoretical and analytical points of each article and their relation to the Columbia School framework. The collection is relevant to cognitive semanticists and functionalists as well as those working in the sign-based Jakobsonian and Guillaumist frameworks.

Brian Skyrms offers a fascinating demonstration of how fundamental signals are to our world. He uses various scientific tools to investigate how meaning and communication develop. Signals operate in networks of senders and receivers at all levels of life, transmitting and processing information. That is how humans and animals think and interact.

This book constitutes the thoroughly revised selected papers from the 18th International Symposium, FACS 2022, which was held online in November 2022.The 12 full papers and 1 short paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 25 submissions. FACS 2021 is focusing on the areas of component software and formal methods in order to promote a deeper understanding of how formal methods can or should be used to make component-based software development succeed.

Is art a form of communication? If so, what does art express or represent? How should we interpret the meaning of works created by more than one artist? Is art an adaptation, via natural selection? In what ways is art similar to—and different from—language? Art as Communication: Aesthetics, Evolution, and Signaling employs information theory, the theory of evolution, and the newly developed sender-receiver model of communication to reason about art, aesthetic behavior, and its communicative nature. Shawn Simpson considers whether art, from a biological point of view, is the province of only humans or whether animals might reasonably be said to create art. Examining the work of evolutionary biologists, art theorists, linguists, and philosophers—including Charles Darwin, Stephen Davies, H. Paul Grice, and others—he addresses how well different theories of communication explain meaning and expression in art and argues that art is much more continuous with other forms of communication than previously thought.

“As an author, editor, and publisher, I never paid much attention to the competition—except in a few cases. This is one of those cases. The UNIX System Administration Handbook is one of the few books we ever measured ourselves against.” —Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media “This edition is for those whose systems live in the cloud or in virtualized data centers; those whose administrative work largely takes the form of automation and configuration source code; those who collaborate closely with developers, network engineers, compliance officers, and all the other worker bees who inhabit the modern hive.” —Paul Vixie, Internet Hall of Fame-recognized innovator and founder of ISC and Farsight Security “This book is fun and functional as a desktop reference. If you use UNIX and Linux systems, you need this book in your short-reach library. It covers a bit of the systems’ history but doesn’t bloviate. It’s just straight-forward information delivered in a colorful and memorable fashion.” —Jason A. Nunnelley UNIX® and Linux® System Administration Handbook, Fifth Edition, is today’s definitive guide to installing, configuring, and maintaining any UNIX or Linux system, including systems that supply core Internet and cloud infrastructure. Updated for new distributions and cloud environments, this comprehensive guide covers best practices for every facet of system administration, including storage management, network design and administration, security, web hosting, automation, configuration management, performance analysis, virtualization, DNS, security, and the management of IT service organizations. The authors—world-class, hands-on technologists—offer indispensable new coverage of cloud platforms, the DevOps philosophy, continuous deployment, containerization, monitoring, and many other essential topics. Whatever your role in running systems and networks built on UNIX or Linux, this conversational, well-written ¿guide will improve your efficiency and help solve your knottiest problems.

The Class Mammalia is amazingly diverse, ranging from whales to marsupials to bats to primates. The more than 5,400 species occupy many habitats, with mammals present on all the continents. They are rare only on Antarctica and a few isolated islands. Mammals present a complex set of conservation and management issues. Some species have become more numerous with the rise of human populations, while others have been extirpated or nearly so—such as the Caribbean monk seal, the thylacine, the Chinese river dolphin, and the Pyrenean ibex. In this new edition of their classic textbook, George A. Feldhamer and his colleagues cover the many aspects of mammalogy. Thoroughly revised and updated, this edition includes treatments of the most recent significant findings in ordinal-level mammalian phylogeny and taxonomy; special topics such as parasites and diseases, conservation, and domesticated mammals; interrelationships between mammalian structure and function; and the latest molecular techniques used to study mammals. Instructors: email [email protected] for a free instructor resource disc containing all 510 illustrations printed in Mammalogy: Adaptation, Diversity, Ecology, third edition.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 24th IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference on Formal Techniques for Networked and Distributed Systems, FORTE 2004, held in Madrid, Spain, in September 2004. The 20 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 54 submissions. Among the topics addressed are state-based specification, distributed Java objects, UML and SDL, algorithm verification, communicating automata, design recovery, formal protocol testing, testing and model checking, distributed real-time systems, formal composition, distributed testing, automata for ACTL, symbolic state space representation, pi-calculus, concurrency, Petri nets, routing protocol verification, and intrusion detection.

This volume showcases the contributions that formal experimental methods can make to syntactic research in the 21st century. Syntactic theory is both a domain of study in its own right, and one component of an integrated theory of the cognitive neuroscience of language. It provides a theory of the mediation between sound and meaning, a theory of the representations constructed during sentence processing, and a theory of the end-state for language acquisition. Given the highly interactive nature of the theory of syntax, this volume defines "experimental syntax" in the broadest possible terms, exploring both formal experimental methods that have been part of the domain of syntax since its inception (i.e., acceptability judgment methods) and formal experimental methods that have arisen through the interaction of syntactic theory with the domains of acquisition, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics. The Oxford Handbook of Experimental Syntax brings these methods together into a single experimental syntax volume for the first time, providing high-level reviews of major experimental work, offering guidance for researchers looking to incorporate these diverse methods into their own work, and inspiring new research that will push the boundaries of the theory of syntax. It will appeal to students and scholars from the advanced undergraduate level upwards in a range of fields including syntax, acquisition, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and computational linguistics.