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Talk by Ben Hayden of the Baylor College of Medicine.  Given to the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at UC Berkeley. Abstract: The ability to record responses of single neurons in awake humans allows us to understand the neurocomputational foundations of language. We recorded responses of neural populations in hippocampus and anterior cingulate cortex during speech listening and during interactive conversations. We find that single neurons in both regions use a dense code with mixed selectivity to encode both speaker identity and word meanings, consistent with the principles of vectorial coding. Meanwhile we find that morphosyntactic processes correspond to specific and consistent vectorial rotations. Bio: Ben Hayden received his Ph.D. In Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley in 2005 studying the neural basis of working memory and attention, and did a post-doctoral fellowship at Duke University until 2011. In 2023, he moved to the Department of Neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine, where he is a Full Professor and McNair Scholar.  His work has been supported by the Sloan Foundation, the Klingenstein-Simons Foundation, the Brain and Behavior Research foundation, Templeton Foundation, NSF, NIMH, and NIDA.

This paper is concerned with the role of meaning and understanding in the acquisition of computational skill in subtraction. Evidence on the syntactic nature of subtraction errors is reviewed, with common "bugs" described. Then, data collected from interviews with four children are summarized in terms of their semantics of concrete representations of the base system, procedures for adding and subtracting with concrete representations, semantics of the writing code, procedures for written subtraction and addition, and mapping. Finally, linking syntax and semantics and why mapping works are discussed. (MNS)

'Adjectives Formal Analyses in Syntax and Semantics Patricia Cabredo Hofherr Ora Matushansky'

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of varying the semantic content of active and passive sentences along a dimension of "personalness" on the comprehension of those sentences by preschool age children. The study focuses on a current linguistic controversy dealing with the relative adequacy of syntax-based and semantics-based theories of linguistic competence, evolving an hypothesis of "adaptive egocentrism" based on Piaget's theories of language development and preoperational thought. The subjects--homogeneous with regard to economic status, heterogeneous in race with non-white subjects distributed across age and sex groups--consisted of 120 children selected from five nursery school day-care centers in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, Michigan. Two experiments are reported in this study. Both lend support to the "adaptive egocentrism" hypothesis proposed by Piaget. (RB)

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of varying the semantic content of active and passive sentences along a dimension of "personalness" on the comprehension of those sentences by preschool age children. The study focuses on a current linguistic controversy dealing with the relative adequacy of syntax-based and semantics-based theories of linguistic competence, evolving an hypothesis of "adaptive egocentrism" based on Piaget's theories of language development and preoperational thought. The subjects--homogeneous with regard to economic status, heterogeneous in race with non-white subjects distributed across age and sex groups--consisted of 120 children selected from five nursery school day-care centers in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, Michigan. Two experiments are reported in this study. Both lend support to the "adaptive egocentrism" hypothesis proposed by Piaget. (RB)

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of varying the semantic content of active and passive sentences along a dimension of "personalness" on the comprehension of those sentences by preschool age children. The study focuses on a current linguistic controversy dealing with the relative adequacy of syntax-based and semantics-based theories of linguistic competence, evolving an hypothesis of "adaptive egocentrism" based on Piaget's theories of language development and preoperational thought. The subjects--homogeneous with regard to economic status, heterogeneous in race with non-white subjects distributed across age and sex groups--consisted of 120 children selected from five nursery school day-care centers in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, Michigan. Two experiments are reported in this study. Both lend support to the "adaptive egocentrism" hypothesis proposed by Piaget. (RB)

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of varying the semantic content of active and passive sentences along a dimension of "personalness" on the comprehension of those sentences by preschool age children. The study focuses on a current linguistic controversy dealing with the relative adequacy of syntax-based and semantics-based theories of linguistic competence, evolving an hypothesis of "adaptive egocentrism" based on Piaget's theories of language development and preoperational thought. The subjects--homogeneous with regard to economic status, heterogeneous in race with non-white subjects distributed across age and sex groups--consisted of 120 children selected from five nursery school day-care centers in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, Michigan. Two experiments are reported in this study. Both lend support to the "adaptive egocentrism" hypothesis proposed by Piaget. (RB)

This books presents the most comprehensive description and analysis to date of Hebrew morphology, with an emphasis on the verbal templates. Its aim is to develop a theory of argument structure alternations which is anchored in the syntax but has systematic interfaces with the phonology and the semantics. Concretely, the monograph argues for a specific formal system centered around possible values of the head Voice. The formal assumptions are as similar as possible to those made in work on non-Semitic languages. The first part of the book (four chapters) is devoted to Hebrew; the second part (two chapters) compares the current theory with other approaches to Voice and argument structure in the recent literature.

The paper attempts to provide an introduction to the techniques and results which have come out of work in computational linguistics which have special relevance to the design of speech understanding systems. The author attempts to trace the development of several important ideas and trends in parsing and syntax and in semantic interpretation.

This report formally defines both a syntax and a semantics for the GSPML visual language. The syntax is defined with a hypergraph grammar and the semantics is defined with Plotkin style structural operational semantics. A decorated trace semantics is derived from the labeled transition system of the structural operational semantics. GSPML itself is motivated by shortcomings in the visual security modeling capabilities of the Model Driven Architecture (MDA).

This report formally defines both a syntax and a semantics for the GSPML visual language. The syntax is defined with a hypergraph grammar and the semantics is defined with Plotkin style structural operational semantics. A decorated trace semantics is derived from the labeled transition system of the structural operational semantics. GSPML itself is motivated by shortcomings in the visual security modeling capabilities of the Model Driven Architecture (MDA).

This report formally defines both a syntax and a semantics for the GSPML visual language. The syntax is defined with a hypergraph grammar and the semantics is defined with Plotkin style structural operational semantics. A decorated trace semantics is derived from the labeled transition system of the structural operational semantics. GSPML itself is motivated by shortcomings in the visual security modeling capabilities of the Model Driven Architecture (MDA).

This report formally defines both a syntax and a semantics for the GSPML visual language. The syntax is defined with a hypergraph grammar and the semantics is defined with Plotkin style structural operational semantics. A decorated trace semantics is derived from the labeled transition system of the structural operational semantics. GSPML itself is motivated by shortcomings in the visual security modeling capabilities of the Model Driven Architecture (MDA).

In this paper, we present a propositional logic (called mixed logic) containing disjoint copies of minimal, intuitionistic and classical logics. We prove a completeness theorem for this logic with respect to a Kripke semantics. We establish some relations between mixed logic and minimal, intuitionistic and classical logics. We present at the end a sequent calculus version for this logic.

This paper attempts to bring information to a broad audience on children's utilization of semantic and syntax context clues in reading. It reviews the research of several contemporary theorists who indicate that semantics and syntax are overlapping processes. The simultaneous use of these processes enable young, particularly struggling readers to compensate for problem-words and difficult language in semantically and syntactically inaccessible texts. English Language Learners' ability to construct meaning from texts written with English vocabulary and sentence structure is also discussed. Finally, the question of how to link theory to practice is raised, and more semantically and syntactically accessible research literature is recommended to aid in this endeavor. (Contains 7 references.) (Author)

In this paper, an attempt is made to explicate the notion "equivalence" in contrastive analysis. It has been suggested that a learner formulates successive hypotheses about the nature of the target language at least partially on the basis of his knowledge of the native language. A deep contrastive study of the two language systems will reveal the areas which need to be focused on in a teaching situation in order to discourage the learner from setting up "false" equivalences between the two systems, or rather, to lead him to set up valid equivalences. The paper advocates a view of contrastive analysis which is based on meaning rather than structure, and also takes into account areas such as pragmatics and conversational implicature in establishing equivalences. The method of such an analysis is illustrated by a detailed discussion of some of the properties of the causative constructions in English and selected South Asian languages. (Author)

The quality of computer generated speech keeps getting better but people are still able to identify whether speech is produced by a human or not (Bruder & Larrouy-Maestri, 2023). The lack of humanness in synthetic speech might be linked to the naturalness or quality of its prosody. In order to understand this issue we focus on the role of syntactic and semantic aspects of language (which are known to be intrinsically linked to prosody (Cutler et al., 1997)) on the perception of humanness in speech. To do so, we propose an experiment testing the effects of voice type (natural versus synthetic) and of syntactic and semantic information on humanness perception. We created German sentences that were then manipulated to obtain three more conditions conveying syntactic but no semantic information (jabberwocky sentences), no syntactic but semantic information (wordlists), and no syntactic or semantic information (jabberwocky wordlists). This material was generated by text-to-speech tools (Microsoft, Elevenlabs, Murf, and Listnr) and recorded by human speakers. We will ask participants to rate these synthetic and natural spoken sentences on how human the voice sounds to them. Whether syntactic and semantic information interacts with voice category will inform us about the potential differences in processing synthetic and natural speech.

Semantic data fuels many different applications, but is still lacking proper integration into programming languages. Untyped access is error-prone while mapping approaches cannot fully capture the conceptualization of semantic data. In this paper, we present $\lambda_{DL}$,a $\lambda$-calculus with a modified type system to provide type-safe integration of semantic data. This is achieved by the integration of description logics into the $\lambda$-calculus for typing and data access. It is centered around several key design principles. Among these are (1) the usage of semantic conceptualizations as types, (2) subtype inference for these types, and (3) type-checked query access to the data by both ensuring the satisfiability of queries as well as typing query results precisely in $\lambda_{DL}$. The paper motivates the use of a modified type system for semantic data and it provides the theoretic foundation for the integration of description logics as well as the core formal specifications of $\lambda_{DL}$ including a proof of type safety.

Semantic data fuels many different applications, but is still lacking proper integration into programming languages. Untyped access is error-prone while mapping approaches cannot fully capture the conceptualization of semantic data. In this paper, we present $\lambda_{DL}$,a $\lambda$-calculus with a modified type system to provide type-safe integration of semantic data. This is achieved by the integration of description logics into the $\lambda$-calculus for typing and data access. It is centered around several key design principles. Among these are (1) the usage of semantic conceptualizations as types, (2) subtype inference for these types, and (3) type-checked query access to the data by both ensuring the satisfiability of queries as well as typing query results precisely in $\lambda_{DL}$. The paper motivates the use of a modified type system for semantic data and it provides the theoretic foundation for the integration of description logics as well as the core formal specifications of $\lambda_{DL}$ including a proof of type safety.

This report is a detailed empirical examination of Suppes' ideas about the syntax and semantics of natural language, and an attempt at supporting the proposal that model-theoretic semantics of the type first proposed by Tarski is a useful tool for understanding the semantics of natural language. Child speech was selected as the best place to find data on natural language because it presents a view of the real problems represented by natural language, and because it allows the study of the process of language development. The main body of data consists of a series of recordings between a 32-month-old girl, Erica, and several adults. The ERIC corpus is found to be syntactically simpler and semantically more straightforward than adult speech. It is divided into utterances; its vocabulary is compared to ADULT vocabulary; a word frequency count is made; and its words are classified gramatically. A discussion follows of the standard concepts and results of the theory of generative grammars. A grammar for ERICA is devised, with special attention to lexical ambiguity. Mathematical syntax and semantics are discussed, followed by a description of ERICA semantics, with special reference to grammatical and semantic ambiguity. Conclusions include: (1) a reasonable probabilistic grammar for ERICA can be constructed; (2) the grammar GE1 is the best model for lexical disambiguation; (3) the grammar functions reasonably well semantically; (4) the notion of probability can play a key role in the construction of a semantics; and (5) simple set-theoretical functions are often successful in describing the ERICA semantics. (Author/AM)

This report is a detailed empirical examination of Suppes' ideas about the syntax and semantics of natural language, and an attempt at supporting the proposal that model-theoretic semantics of the type first proposed by Tarski is a useful tool for understanding the semantics of natural language. Child speech was selected as the best place to find data on natural language because it presents a view of the real problems represented by natural language, and because it allows the study of the process of language development. The main body of data consists of a series of recordings between a 32-month-old girl, Erica, and several adults. The ERIC corpus is found to be syntactically simpler and semantically more straightforward than adult speech. It is divided into utterances; its vocabulary is compared to ADULT vocabulary; a word frequency count is made; and its words are classified gramatically. A discussion follows of the standard concepts and results of the theory of generative grammars. A grammar for ERICA is devised, with special attention to lexical ambiguity. Mathematical syntax and semantics are discussed, followed by a description of ERICA semantics, with special reference to grammatical and semantic ambiguity. Conclusions include: (1) a reasonable probabilistic grammar for ERICA can be constructed; (2) the grammar GE1 is the best model for lexical disambiguation; (3) the grammar functions reasonably well semantically; (4) the notion of probability can play a key role in the construction of a semantics; and (5) simple set-theoretical functions are often successful in describing the ERICA semantics. (Author/AM)

Teaching should reflect the facts of current language usage. This descriptive approach, when applied to reading, means that the child's reading education should focus on the realities of daily life. Syntactic analysis in reading has been handicapped by an overemphasis on lexical content at the expense of other syntactic structures. Thus, the student analyzes language in single words. If a broadened concept of syntactic analysis is to become a valid part of the reading program, it must follow the descriptive principle. Classical studies prepare students for the reading of classics but not for reading "Time" magazine or the daily newspapers. The following syntactic and semantic problems are involved in the intelligent reading of a newspaper: (1) headlines and their accuracy in relation to the story, (2) concentration of information in the lead paragraphs, and (3) frequent use of direct and indirect quotations. The reader should be aware of the verbal jugglings of the content possible within these three areas. Another untapped source of dynamic prose material is the spoken word of radio and television. Prose analysis will probably never be popular among students; however, if the material is pertinent, their interest will be greater. (WL)

In an effort to document demographic changes in the academic linguistics community, the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) has commissioned an annual report detailing information about job titles, students, degrees awarded, average salaries, and more. The report offers information about trends in student enrollment and employment by industry. Data for the report was compiled primarily from self-reported information to the LSA's online Directory of Linguistics Programs and Departments. It also includes information based on U.S. federal surveys of PhD linguists and institutions, along with data gleaned from the LSA membership database. Trends in linguistics for this year include: (1) The most common career outcome for linguistics PhDs is a position in higher education; (2) Within higher education, departments report that most members of their faculty are full professors, but the non-professorial category is growing, particularly for women in other full-time and part-time positions; (3) The field of linguistics is growing most rapidly for undergraduates, with an increase of approximately 120 more students awarded BA degrees annually for the past 13 years; (4) Most linguistics undergraduate degrees are awarded to women. Although women represent just over half of graduate students in linguistics, a number which has been increasing over the last 50 years, women comprise almost 65 percent of the undergraduate population; and (5) The top five specializations for graduate students in linguistics are: Syntax, Applied Linguistics, Phonology, Semantics, and Historical Linguistics. [This second edition is based on the original report prepared by Lauren Friedman and Alyson Reed. The data found in this edition were compiled with assistance from Dan Foley, Robert Townsend, and Michal Temkin Martinez. For the 2013 report, see ED607296.]

In an effort to document demographic changes in the academic linguistics community, the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) has commissioned an annual report detailing information about job titles, students, degrees awarded, average salaries, and more. The report offers information about trends in student enrollment and employment by industry. Data for the report was compiled primarily from self-reported information to the LSA's online Directory of Linguistics Programs and Departments. It also includes information based on U.S. federal surveys of PhD linguists and institutions, along with data gleaned from the LSA membership database. An overview of trends in linguistics for this year include: (1) The most common career outcome for linguistics PhDs is a position in higher education; (2) Within higher education, departments report that most members of their faculty are full professors, but the non-professorial category is growing, particularly for women in other full-time and part-time positions; (3) The field of linguistics is growing most rapidly for undergraduates, with an increase of approximately 120 more students awarded BA degrees annually for the past 13 years; (4) Most linguistics undergraduate degrees are awarded to women. Although women represent just over half of graduate students in linguistics, a number which has been increasing over the last 50 years, women comprise over 65 percent of the undergraduate population; and (5) The top five specializations for graduate students in linguistics are: Syntax, Applied Linguistics, Phonology, Semantics, and Language Acquisition. [This edition is based on the original report prepared by Lauren Friedman and Alyson Reed. The data found in this edition were compiled with assistance from Robert Townsend and Dan Foley. For the 2014 report, see ED607300.]

Progress includes continuing to port Pundit to the Trident domain of maintenance reports while at the same time extending coverage in the RAINFORMS and CASREPS domains. Parallel development in the three domains has had a synergistic effect on the overall system, as features implemented for one domain become available for the others. Keywords: Natural language comprehension, Computer programming.

The PUNDIT User's Guide is intended to provide a concise and general introduction to the facilities of the PUNDIT text-processing system. The intended audience is computational linguists familiar with Quintus Prolog. While this document is not a reference manual, and does not in itself contain sufficient information for you to either extend the system or port it to a new domain, we have tried to cover the operational basics: how to run PUNDIT (section 2) and how to interpret PUNDIT's output (Section 3). In addition, Section 4 documents the two main procedures for accessing the system (parse and pundit), as well as a number of other procedures which we make frequent use of as developers. Appendix A and Appendix B will help you set the system up. Appendix D identifies the core and domain files, and Appendix E lists papers, presentations, and technical documentation available for PUNDIT. The User's Guide is designed to accompany a subset of the text-understanding software which has been developed at the Paoli Research Center, as it exists on the date of publication: the core components of PUNDIT, together with the domain-specific components developed to process Navy tactical messages (RAINFORMs). This domain will be referred to henceforth as the MUCK domain (an acronym for the message understanding conference which occasioned the development of the software).

We provide the syntax and semantics of the LISA (for "Litmus Instruction Set Architecture") language. The parallel assembly language LISA is implemented in the herd7 tool (http://virginia.cs.ucl.ac.uk/herd/) for simulating weak consistency models.

${\rm \small CTT}_{\rm qe}$ is a version of Church's type theory that includes quotation and evaluation operators that are similar to quote and eval in the Lisp programming language. With quotation and evaluation it is possible to reason in ${\rm \small CTT}_{\rm qe}$ about the interplay of the syntax and semantics of expressions and, as a result, to formalize syntax-based mathematical algorithms. We present the syntax and semantics of ${\rm \small CTT}_{\rm qe}$ and give several examples that illustrate the usefulness of having quotation and evaluation in ${\rm \small CTT}_{\rm qe}$. We do not give a proof system for ${\rm \small CTT}_{\rm qe}$, but we do sketch what a proof system could look like.

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 12 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: the relationship of text organization to readability and reading ability; how advance organizers, outlining, and other preparatory procedures affect learning and reading comprehension; how syntax and semantics affect the recall of connected discourse; a model of affective and cognitive silent reading strategies; the strategic processes involved in beginning reading; grade level differences in reading comprehension; and differences between recognizing words on a word list and words in context. (RL)

The Semantics of Questions and the Questions of Semantics: Case Studies in the Interrelations of Logic, Semantics, and Syntax. by Jaakko Hintikka Review by: David Harrah

We investigate the possibility of modelling the syntax and semantics of natural language by constraints, or rules, imposed by the multi-dimensional type theory Nabla. The only multiplicity we explicitly consider is two, namely one dimension for the syntax and one dimension for the semantics, but the general perspective is important. For example, issues of pragmatics could be handled as additional dimensions. One of the main problems addressed is the rather complicated repertoire of operations that exists besides the notion of categories in traditional Montague grammar. For the syntax we use a categorial grammar along the lines of Lambek. For the semantics we use so-called lexical and logical combinators inspired by work in natural logic. Nabla provides a concise interpretation and a sequent calculus as the basis for implementations.

We focus on the production of efficient descriptions of objects, actions and events. We define a type of efficiency, textual economy, that exploits the hearer's recognition of inferential links to material elsewhere within a sentence. Textual economy leads to efficient descriptions because the material that supports such inferences has been included to satisfy independent communicative goals, and is therefore overloaded in Pollack's sense. We argue that achieving textual economy imposes strong requirements on the representation and reasoning used in generating sentences. The representation must support the generator's simultaneous consideration of syntax and semantics. Reasoning must enable the generator to assess quickly and reliably at any stage how the hearer will interpret the current sentence, with its (incomplete) syntax and semantics. We show that these representational and reasoning requirements are met in the SPUD system for sentence planning and realization.

A model theory in the framework of Univalent Foundations requires a logic that allows us to define structures on homotopy (n-)types, similar to how first-order logic can define structures on sets. We define such an "n-level" logic for finite n. The syntax is based on a generalization of Makkai's FOLDS, obtained by an operation that allows us to add equality sorts to FOLDS-signatures. We then give both a set-theoretic and a homotopy type-theoretic semantics for this logic and prove soundness for both with respect to an appropriate deductive system. As an application, we prove that univalent categories are axiomatizable in 1-logic.

Revisions to the grammar have been made to expand coverage of various complex object types and to ensure correct labeling of nodes for semantics in these objects. We implemented a new version of syntax/semantics interaction that uses the existing semantic interpreter and applies selection restrictions expressed in terms of constraints on thematic role assignments. The semantic interpreter was extended to analyze adjectives as prenominal modifiers in the same manner that it interprets prenominal past participles. The temporal relations specifying the temporal structure of situations and the partial ordering among them consist of binary Prolog terms. A graphic display of these relations was integrated into the X-window interface. Processing of the discourse prompt/response relationship has been implemented. Three pieces of documentation were prepared describing how to use the PUNDIT system; they are included as appendices to this report. Keywords: PUNDIT text processing system; User manuals; Computational linguistics; Lexicography.

We present Babel-17, the first programming language for purely functional structured programming (PFSP). Earlier work illustrated PFSP in the framework of a toy research language. Babel-17 takes this earlier work to a new level by showing how PFSP can be combined with pattern matching, object oriented programming, and features like concurrency, lazy evaluation, memoization and support for lenses.

The overall objective of the natural-language understanding work is to demonstrate capabilities for 'understanding' information contained in free narrative. This understanding can be demonstrated in several ways: simulation of events described in the narrative (as done by the current Proteus system); summarization of events described in the narrative (also done by the current Proteus system); or creation of database or knowledge base. Such an understanding depends on the application of many sources of information, including syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information, as well as detailed information about the specific domain in question. This report focused on several critical research issues in building Proteus: Portability, Modularity, Integration of multiple sources of information, Robustness, and a development environment for the construction of a large-scale natural language processing system.

The overall objective of the natural-language understanding work is to demonstrate capabilities for 'understanding' information contained in free narrative. This understanding can be demonstrated in several ways: simulation of events described in the narrative (as done by the current Proteus system); summarization of events described in the narrative (also done by the current Proteus system); or creation of database or knowledge base. Such an understanding depends on the application of many sources of information, including syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information, as well as detailed information about the specific domain in question. This report focused on several critical research issues in building Proteus: Portability, Modularity, Integration of multiple sources of information, Robustness, and a development environment for the construction of a large-scale natural language processing system.

The overall objective of the natural-language understanding work is to demonstrate capabilities for 'understanding' information contained in free narrative. This understanding can be demonstrated in several ways: simulation of events described in the narrative (as done by the current Proteus system); summarization of events described in the narrative (also done by the current Proteus system); or creation of database or knowledge base. Such an understanding depends on the application of many sources of information, including syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information, as well as detailed information about the specific domain in question. This report focused on several critical research issues in building Proteus: Portability, Modularity, Integration of multiple sources of information, Robustness, and a development environment for the construction of a large-scale natural language processing system.

The overall objective of the natural-language understanding work is to demonstrate capabilities for 'understanding' information contained in free narrative. This understanding can be demonstrated in several ways: simulation of events described in the narrative (as done by the current Proteus system); summarization of events described in the narrative (also done by the current Proteus system); or creation of database or knowledge base. Such an understanding depends on the application of many sources of information, including syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information, as well as detailed information about the specific domain in question. This report focused on several critical research issues in building Proteus: Portability, Modularity, Integration of multiple sources of information, Robustness, and a development environment for the construction of a large-scale natural language processing system.

The contribution of this paper is the development of the syntax and semantics of multi-sorted nominal abstract binding trees (abts), an extension of second order universal algebra to support symbol-indexed families of operators. Nominal abts are essential for correctly treating the syntax of languages with generative phenomena, including exceptions and mutable state. Additionally we have developed the categorical semantics for abstract binding trees formally in Constructive Type Theory using the Agda proof assistant. Multi-sorted nominal abts also form the syntactic basis for the upcoming version of the JonPRL proof assistant, an implementation of an extensional constructive type theory in the Nuprl tradition.

Semantic feedback is an important source of information that a parser could use to deal with local ambiguities in syntax. However, it is difficult to devise a systematic communication mechanism for interactive syntax and semantics. In this article, I propose a variant of left-corner parsing to define the points at which syntax and semantics should interact, an account of grammatical relations and thematic roles to define the content of the communication, and a conflict resolution strategy based on independent preferences from syntax and semantics. The resulting interactive model has been implemented in a program called COMPERE and shown to account for a wide variety of psycholinguistic data on structural and lexical ambiguities.

Semantic feedback is an important source of information that a parser could use to deal with local ambiguities in syntax. However, it is difficult to devise a systematic communication mechanism for interactive syntax and semantics. In this article, I propose a variant of left-corner parsing to define the points at which syntax and semantics should interact, an account of grammatical relations and thematic roles to define the content of the communication, and a conflict resolution strategy based on independent preferences from syntax and semantics. The resulting interactive model has been implemented in a program called COMPERE and shown to account for a wide variety of psycholinguistic data on structural and lexical ambiguities.

Instruments constitute a classic member of the thematic role inventory, yet they are usually analyzed only peripherally, taking a back seat to the more studied members such as Agent and Patient. This dissertation investigates the semantic reality behind the label instrument from the functionalist perspective of Role & Reference Grammar. Starting from a theoretical investigation of what instrumentality truly means when contrasted with related concepts like comitatives, this book explores the morphosyntactic realization of instruments across a wide range of typologically diverse languages. Apart from the standard occurrences of instruments that come to mind from languages such as Latin, German or English, this book delves into several less common constructions that feature the instrument relation. Such constructions include, amongst others, passives with instruments and particularly the Instrument-Subject Alternation, a construction where the instrument seemingly appears as the subject of the sentence. This construction displays variation along three dimensions: 1) The instrument can vary from a very simple tool to a complicated machine, 2) the predicate can vary substantially and 3) languages differ widely with respect to the construction’s acceptability. This makes for a complex playing field where the animacy of the instrument but also the aktionsart class of the predicate play a major role. The last section of this book deals with linking the semantics of instruments and related concepts to their morphosyntactic realizations, including the various encoding strategies that are available in any given language. This book also features a concise introduction to Role & Reference Grammar. Dissertations in Language and Cognition: This series explores issues of mental representation, linguistic structure and representation, and their interplay. The research presented in this series is grounded in the idea explored in the Collaborative Research Center ‘The structure of representations in language, cognition and science’ (SFB 991) that there is a universal format for the representation of linguistic and cognitive concepts.

The sixth volume of this series contains eight contrastive studies in the syntax and semantics of English and Romanian. They are: "Criteria for the Contrastive Analysis of English Nouns," by Andrei Bantas; "Adjectives as Noun Modifiers in Post-Verbal Position," by Ioana Poenaru; "Towards a Semantic Description of 'Tense' and 'Aspect' in English and Romanian," by Alexandra Petrovanu-Cornilescu; "Main Future Expressions in English and Romanian," by Elena Bira; "The Prepositional and Adverbial Particle in Post Verbal Position in English and Implications for the Study of English by the Romanian Student," by Nora Tomosoiu; "A Pedagogical Grammar of Modal Sentences with May/Might and Can/Could and Their Nearest Romanian Equivalents," by Elena Bira; "A Contrastive Analysis of Negation in Romanian and English," by Marie-Anne Lupas and Alexandra Roceric; and "Some Remarks on the Semantic Field of Terms for Physical Pain in English and Romanian," by Florica Bancila. (CLK)

A merged lexicon for all domains has been created. The merged lexicon contains about 2400 distinct root words. A tool for extracting lexical items from a dictionary, given a word list, was used to obtain items from the merged lexicon for the resource management domain. Approximately 47% of the vocabulary (or 448 words) in this domain is new. However a large number of these words are proper names of ships and locations, which are relatively trivial to enter. There are about 225 other words, including about 50 verbs. Because there are so few verbs, we expect adding the lexical entries to take only a few days. Keywords: Syntax, Semantics, Natural language, Information retrieval.

The lexical reader has been modified to allow the PUNDIT Natural Language Processing system to recognize abbreviations ending in periods. PUNDIT previously had not been able to distinguish between periods ending abbreviations and periods ending sentences; consequently, it was not able to parse sentences with internal punctuation. Several meetings have been held to identify a discrete yet useful arena for developing a more flexible control strategy in syntactic and semantic processing of text. Currently, Pundit's control mechanism flows from the syntactic module. (Semantic data is used as a filter on the syntax, via the recently implemented selectional component, but this filtering does not change the control structure). The meetings have focused on the distribution of lexical information, which is dispersed both in the lexicon used by the syntactic parser and in the semantic lexical entries with their associated syntactic mapping rules. One proposal that has emerged would exploit the semantic component's potential to predict verb transitivity on the basis of selectional information and thereby handle the phenomenon of transitivity alternation, i.e., verbs which have transitive and intransitive uses. This would be useful because many verbs in English exhibit transitivity alternations.

Message understanding systems are key to handling the steadily increasing volume of information required for intelligence, data fusion, logistics and maintenance operations. The capture and understanding of information in narrative text and messages is the focus of this contract. The goal is to convert this information into a representation of its meaning, which can be used to update a database with new information derived from the incoming messages, to summarize key information, or to issue appropriate commands to a back-end, e.g. to query a database or an expert system. The deliverable under this contract is the PUNDIT(Prolog Understanding of Integrated Text) natural language understanding system. The PUNDIT natural language system is the most ambitious natural language understanding system built to date. Its goal in the integration of multiple linguistically-based knowledge (a domain model), to understand messages in a restricted domain. PUNDIT has been designed with portability as a major goal. To facilitate porting the system to new domains, PUNDIT maintains a careful separation of domain-independent information from domain-specific information. The system consists of a core domain-independent portion (20K lines of Prolog code) which remains constant from application to application.

Contents: Analyzing Explicitly-Structured Discourse in a Limited Domain: Trouble and Failure Reports; Reference Resolution in Pundit; Reducing Search by Partitioning the Word Network; Adding Forward Chaining and Truth Maintenance to Prolog; A Meta-Rule Treatment of English WH-Constructions; Natural Language Interfaces for Large Scale Information Processing; Restriction Grammar: A Logic Grammar; Porting Pundit to the Resource Management Domain; Or Parallel Speed-Up in Natural Language Processing: A Case Study; The Pundit Natural-Language Processing System; Or-Parallelism in Natural Language Parsing; Improved Portability and Parsing Through Interactive Acquisition of Semantic Information; Sentence Fragments Regular Structures; Getting at Discourse Referents; A Computational Model of the Semantics of Tense and Aspect; Situations and Intervals.

Contents: Analyzing Explicitly-Structured Discourse in a Limited Domain: Trouble and Failure Reports; Reference Resolution in Pundit; Reducing Search by Partitioning the Word Network; Adding Forward Chaining and Truth Maintenance to Prolog; A Meta-Rule Treatment of English WH-Constructions; Natural Language Interfaces for Large Scale Information Processing; Restriction Grammar: A Logic Grammar; Porting Pundit to the Resource Management Domain; Or Parallel Speed-Up in Natural Language Processing: A Case Study; The Pundit Natural-Language Processing System; Or-Parallelism in Natural Language Parsing; Improved Portability and Parsing Through Interactive Acquisition of Semantic Information; Sentence Fragments Regular Structures; Getting at Discourse Referents; A Computational Model of the Semantics of Tense and Aspect; Situations and Intervals.

Proof nets are a syntax for linear logic proofs which gives a coarser notion of proof equivalence with respect to syntactic equality together with an intuitive geometrical representation of proofs. In this paper we give an alternative $2$-dimensional syntax for multiplicative linear logic derivations. The syntax of string diagrams authorizes the definition of a framework where the sequentializability of a term, i.e. deciding whether the term corresponds to a correct derivation, can be verified in linear time. Furthermore, we can use this syntax to define a denotational semantics for multiplicative linear logic with units by means of equivalence classes of proof diagrams modulo a terminating rewriting.