Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- Editorial Introduction -- Five Easy Pieces -- On some proposed universals of natural language -- Determiners: A Relational Perspective -- Plurality and Conjunction -- Discourse representation theory and plurality -- Direct and embedded multiple questions -- A note on the definiteness-effect -- On the form and interpretation of ellipsis -- Situation-descriptions: temporal and aspectual semantics -- The representation of time in natural language -- From tense to modality
Elementary set theory accustoms the students to mathematical abstraction, includes the standard constructions of relations, functions, and orderings, and leads to a discussion of the various orders of infinity. The material on logic covers not only the standard statement logic and first-order predicate logic but includes an introduction to formal systems, axiomatization, and model theory. The section on algebra is presented with an emphasis on lattices as well as Boolean and Heyting algebras. Background for recent research in natural language semantics includes sections on lambda-abstraction and generalized quantifiers. Chapters on automata theory and formal languages contain a discussion of languages between context-free and context-sensitive and form the background for much current work in syntactic theory and computational linguistics. The many exercises not only reinforce basic skills but offer an entry to linguistic applications of mathematical concepts. For upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students in theoretical linguistics, computer-science students with interests in computational linguistics, logic programming and artificial intelligence, mathematicians and logicians with interests in linguistics and the semantics of natural language.
