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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 papers in this volume address two main topics: Q1: What is the nature, and especially the scope, of ellipsis in natural l- guage?

During the 2001 Linguistic Summer Institute at University of California, Santa Barbara, a group of linguists gathered at a workshop to discuss the expression and role of topicalization and focus from a variety of perspectives: phonetic, phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic.

This book provides an in-depth view of the current issues, problems and approaches in the computation of meaning as expressed in language. The annotation in corpora has only marginally addressed semantic information, however, since semantic annotation methodologies are still in their infancy.

The papers in this volume address two main topics: Q1: What is the nature, and especially the scope, of ellipsis in natural l- guage?

Vendler not only began to straighten out the distinctions, but pursued more specific and more interesting questions such as that of what entities the causality relation relates (events? Peterson's ontology features just facts, proposition, and events, carefully distinguished from each other.

Audience: Researchers and students in theoretical computer science (formal language theory and automata theory), computational linguistics, mathematical methods in linguistics, and linguists interested in formal models of syntax.

Student version

Ileana Comorovski Klaus von Heusinger vii ILEANA COMOROVSKI AND KLAUS VON HEUSINGER INTRODUCTION The notion of 'existence', which we take to have solid intuitive grounding, plays a central role in the interpretation of at least three types of linguistic constructions: copular clauses, existential sentences, and (in)de?nite noun phrases.

Ileana Comorovski Klaus von Heusinger vii ILEANA COMOROVSKI AND KLAUS VON HEUSINGER INTRODUCTION The notion of 'existence', which we take to have solid intuitive grounding, plays a central role in the interpretation of at least three types of linguistic constructions: copular clauses, existential sentences, and (in)de?nite noun phrases.

This book provides an in-depth view of the current issues, problems and approaches in the computation of meaning as expressed in language. The annotation in corpora has only marginally addressed semantic information, however, since semantic annotation methodologies are still in their infancy.

Addresses three central issues in the study of plurality and quantification in natural languages. This collection sheds light on the question of how many readings have to be assigned to plural sentences and on the respective consequences for the architecture of the syntax-semantics interface.

Are natural languages genuinely compositional? In particular, does context interfere with the compositional determination of truth conditions? What meanings should theorists assign to sentences if compositionality is to be retained?

The essays in this book deal with a number of problems in the analysis of intensional language - more especially with the analysis of the personal modalities in natural language.

Locality in WH Quantification argues that Logical Form, the level that mediates between syntax and semantics, is derived from S-structure by local movement. Among other issues addressed is the switch from uniqueness/maximality effects in single wh constructions to list readings in multiple wh constructions.

Recent work in computational semantics suggests, alternatively, to represent linguistic semantic information in formal structures with underspecification, and to apply context information in inference processes that result in further specification of these representations.

During the 2001 Linguistic Summer Institute at University of California, Santa Barbara, a group of linguists gathered at a workshop to discuss the expression and role of topicalization and focus from a variety of perspectives: phonetic, phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic.

Carlota S. Smith was a key figure in linguistic research and in generative linguistics. This selection of papers focuses on the research into tense, aspect, and discourse that Smith completed while Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin.

This text explores the relationship between theories of topic-focus structure, principally as developed in the Prague School, and the tripartite structure approach to quantification and other focus-sensitive constructions which has emerged from work in formal semantics.

The organizers of the workshop gratefully acknowledge support from the Department of Linguistics, the Department of Philosophy and the Faculty of Humanities at Lund University, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (through the Wallenberg Foundation), the Swedish Institute, and the Letterstedt Foundation.

Such types of acts as those exemplified above are called, following Austin, illocutionary acts, and they are standardly contrasted in the literature with certain other types of acts such as perlocutionary acts and propositional acts.

The work collected in this book represents the results of some intensive recent work on the syntax of natural languages. The authors' differing viewpoints have in common the program of revising current conceptions of syntactic representation so that the role of transformational derivations is reduced or eliminated. The fact that the papers cross-refer to each other a good deal, and that authors assuming quite different fram{:works are aware of each other's results and address themselves to shared problems, is partly the result of a conference on the nature of syntactic representation that was held at Brown University in May 1979 with the express purpose of bringing together different lines of research in syntax. The papers in this volume mostly arise out of work that was presented in preliminary form at that conference, though much rewriting and further research has been done in the interim period. Two papers are included because although they were not given even in preliminary form at the conference, it has become clear since then that they interrelate with the work of the conference so much that they cannot reasonably be left out: Gerald Gazdar's statement of his program for phrase structure description of natural language forms the theoretical basis that is assumed by Maling and Zaenen and by Sag, and David Dowty's paper represents a bridge between the relational grammar exemplified here in the papers by Perlmutter and Postal on the one hand and the Montague­

Such types of acts as those exemplified above are called, following Austin, illocutionary acts, and they are standardly contrasted in the literature with certain other types of acts such as perlocutionary acts and propositional acts.

the fact that John performs the song These nominals are also perceived by English speakers to be related to the same sentential construction: (2) John performs the song A more accurate inspection reveals, however, that the nominals in (1) differ both in their distribution and in the range of interpretations they allow.

For the most part, the papers collected in this volume stern from presentations given at a conference held in Tucson over the weekend of May 31 through June 2, 1985. We wish to record our gratitude to the participants in that conference, as well as to the National Science Foundation (Grant No. BNS-8418916) and the University of Arizona SBS Research Institute for their financial support. The advice we received from Susan Steele on organizational matters proved invaluable and had many felicitous consequences for the success of the con­ ference. We also would like to thank the staff of the Departments of Linguistics of the University of Arizona and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for their help, as weIl as a number of individuals, including Lin Hall, Kathy Todd, and Jiazhen Hu, Sandra Fulmer, Maria Sandoval, Natsuko Tsujimura, Stuart Davis, Mark Lewis, Robin Schafer, Shi Zhang, Olivia Oehrle-Steele, and Paul Saka. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to Martin Scrivener, our editor, for his patience and his encouragement. Vll INTRODUCTION The term 'categorial grammar' was introduced by Bar-Rillel (1964, page 99) as a handy way of grouping together some of his own earlier work (1953) and the work of the Polish logicians and philosophers Lesniewski (1929) and Ajdukiewicz (1935), in contrast to approaches to linguistic analysis based on phrase structure grammars.

This book is a collection of studies applying game-theoretical concepts and ideas to analysing the semantics of natural language and some formal languages.

The essays in this collection are the outgrowth of a workshop, held in June 1976, on formal approaches to the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages.

The present volume is as much a book co-authored by all the contributors as it is an edited collection of their papers. Most of the contributors have been involved in regular discussions over the past years, often inspiring the questions, or some aspects of the proposals, in each other's papers or actually collaborating on co-authored papers.