* Treats LISP as a language for commercial applications, not a language for academic AI concerns. This could be considered to be a secondary text for the Lisp course that most schools teach . This would appeal to students who sat through a LISP course in college without quite getting it – so a "nostalgia" approach, as in "wow-lisp can be practical..." * Discusses the Lisp programming model and environment. Contains an introduction to the language and gives a thorough overview of all of Common Lisp’s main features. * Designed for experienced programmers no matter what languages they may be coming from and written for a modern audience—programmers who are familiar with languages like Java, Python, and Perl. * Includes several examples of working code that actually does something useful like Web programming and database access.

During the last thirty years, most linguists and philosophers have assumed that meaning can be represented symbolically and that the mental processing of language involves the manipulation of symbols. Scholars have assembled strong evidence that there must be linguistic representations at several abstract levels—phonological, syntactic, and semantic—and that those representations are related by a describable system of rules. Because meaning is so complex, linguists often posit an equally complex relationship between semantic and other levels of grammar. The Semantics of Syntax is an elegant and powerful analysis of the relationship between syntax and semantics. Noting that meaning is underdetermined by form even in simple cases, Denis Bouchard argues that it is impossible to build knowledge of the world into grammar and still have a describable grammar. He thus proposes simple semantic representations and simple rules to relate linguistic levels. Focusing on a class of French verbs, Bouchard shows how multiple senses can be accounted for by the assumption of a single abstract core meaning along with background information about how objects behave in the world. He demonstrates that this move simplifies the syntax at no cost to the descriptive power of the semantics. In two important final chapters, he examines the consequences of his approach for standard syntactic theories.

Investigations of the Syntax-Semantics-Pragmatics Interface presents on-going research in Role and Reference Grammar in a number of critical areas of linguistic theory: verb semantics and argument structure, the nature of syntactic categories and syntactic representation, prosody and syntax, information structure and syntax, and the syntax and semantics of complex sentences. In each of these areas there are important results which not only advance the development of the theory, but also contribute to the broader theoretical discussion. In particular, there are analyses of grammatical phenomena such as transitivity in Kabardian, the verb-less numeral quantifier construction in Japanese, and an unusual kind of complex sentence in Wari' (Chapakuran, Brazil) which not only illustrate the descriptive and explanatory power of the theory, but also present interesting challenges to other approaches. In addition, there are papers looking at the implications and applications of Role and Reference Grammar for neurolinguistic research, parsing and automated text analysis.

Language is a system of communication in which grammatical structures function to express meaning in context. While all languages can achieve the same basic communicative ends, they each use different means to achieve them, particularly in the divergent ways that syntax, semantics and pragmatics interact across languages. This book looks in detail at how structure, meaning, and communicative function interact in human languages. Working within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), Van Valin proposes a set of rules, called the 'linking algorithm', which relates syntactic and semantic representations to each other, with discourse-pragmatics playing a role in the linking. Using this model, he discusses the full range of grammatical phenomena, including the structures of simple and complex sentences, verb and argument structure, voice, reflexivization and extraction restrictions. Clearly written and comprehensive, this book will be welcomed by all those working on the interface between syntax, semantics and pragmatics.

This indispensable volume contains articles that represent the best of Huang's work on the syntax-semantics interface over the last two decades. It includes three general topics: (a) questions, indefinites and quantification, (b) anaphora, (c) lexical structure and the syntax of events.

Offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to a novel theory of syntax, which analyzes grammar from a semantic perspective.

The standard view of the form-meaning interfaces, as embraced by the great majority of contemporary grammatical frameworks, consists in the assumption that meaning can be associated with grammatical form in a one-to-one correspondence. Under this view, composition is quite straightforward, involving concatenation of form, paired with functional application in meaning. In this book, we discuss linguistic phenomena across several grammatical sub-modules (morphology, syntax, semantics) that apparently pose a problem to the standard view, mapping out the potential for deviation from the ideal of one-to-one correspondences, and develop formal accounts of the range of phenomena. We argue that a constraint-based perspective is particularly apt to accommodate deviations from one-to-many correspondences, as it allows us to impose constraints on full structures (such as a complete word or the interpretation of a full sentence) instead of deriving such structures step by step. Most of the papers in this volume are formulated in a particular constraint-based grammar framework, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. The contributions investigate how the lexical and constructional aspects of this theory can be combined to provide an answer to this question across different linguistic sub-theories.

This book is the first and so far only formally precise machinery converting well-motivated semantic sentence representations into actual sentences of English, French, German and Dutch. It focuses on the auxiliary and complementation systems of the languages concerned.