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Analogy is a central component of language structure, language processing, and language change. This book addresses central questions about the form and acquisition of analogy in grammar. What patterns of structural similarity do speakers select as the basis for analogical extension? What types of items are particularly susceptible or resistant to analogical pressures? At what levels do analogical processes operate and how do processes interact? What formal mechanisms are appropriate for modeling analogy? What analogical processes are evident in language acquisition? Answers to these questions emerge from this book which is a synthesis of typological, experimental, computational, and developmental paradigms.

Cultural Economies of Locative Media examines the manifold ways that location, location-awareness, and location data have all become familiar yet increasingly significant parts of our mobile-mediated experiences of everyday life. The book explores the complex of interrelationships that mutually define the new business models and economic factors that emerge around and structure locative media services, their diverse social uses and cultures of consumption, and their policy implications and impacts. It offers a detailed, in-depth account of how location-based services, such as GPS-enabled mobile smartphones and associated applications, are socially, culturally, economically, and politically produced and shaped, as much as technically designed and manufactured. The result is a rich, composite portrait of locative media in all its cultural economic complexity.

This book explores graded expressions of modality, a rich and underexplored source of insight into modal semantics. Studies on modal language to date have largely focussed on a small and non-representative subset of expressions, namely modal auxiliaries such as must, might, and ought. Here, Daniel Lassiter argues that we should expand the conversation to include gradable modals such as more likely than, quite possible, and very good. He provides an introduction to qualitative and degree semantics for graded meaning, using the Representational Theory of Measurement to expose the complementarity between these apparently opposed perspectives on gradation. The volume explores and expands the typology of scales among English adjectives and uses the result to shed light on the meanings of a variety of epistemic and deontic modals. It also demonstrates that modality is deeply intertwined with probability and expected value, connecting modal semantics with the cognitive science of uncertainty and choice.

This book is the first dedicated to linguistic parsing—the processing of natural language according to the rules of a formal grammar—in the minimalist framework. While the Minimalist Program has been at the forefront of generative grammar for several decades, it often remains inaccessible to computer scientists and others in adjacent fields. In particular, minimalism reveals a surprising paradox: human language is simpler than we thought, and yet it cannot be processed by the machinery used by computer scientists. In this volume, experts in the field show how to resolve this apparent paradox, and how to turn Chomsky’s abstract theories into working computer programs that can process sentences or make predictions about the time course of brain activity when dealing with language. The book will appeal to graduate students and researchers in formal syntax, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computer science.

This volume in the Explorations in Language and Space series contains a unique collection of chapters on the way in which motion is encoded in language. Although the way in which people encode motion in language has been an object of study for some time, the chapters in this volume show that many aspects of linguistic motion encoding are still unexplored, that current theories in this area do not capture all main aspects of linguistic motion encoding, and that the research area of linguistic motion encoding is very much alive and evolving. The chapters in this volume take different theoretical and methodological approaches in exploring possible new parameters in linguistic motion encoding, in describing new empirical research on how direction of motion is represented in language, and in presenting original insights into how motion is encoded at different levels of spatial resolution or granularity in language. This collection of chapters presents both advanced students and researchers in linguistics, computer science, psychology, and cognitive science with a set of new explorations and challenges in the area of spatial language.