habitually probing generalist

Sunday, 9 Dec 2007 and Tuesday, 11 Dec 2007 +

Harris, Roy. 1990. The Foundations of Linguistic Theory: Selected Writings of Roy Harris. Ed. Nigel Love. London: Routledge.

• Editor’s Introduction.
• Ch. 2: Words and Word Criteria in French.
• Ch. 3: Semantics and Translation.
• Ch. 4: Performative Paradigms.
• Ch. 5: Semantics, Performatives and Truth.
• Ch. 6: Truth-Conditional Semantics and Natural Languages.
• Ch. 7: Making Sense of Communicative Competence. (Tue)
• Ch. 8: Communication and Language. (Tue)
• Ch. 9: The Speech-Communication Model in Twentieth-Century Linguistics and its Sources. (Wed)
• Ch. 10: Must Monkeys Mean? (Wed)
• Ch. 11: Scriptism. (Wed)
• Ch. 12: Language as Social Interaction: Integationalism versus Segregationalism. (Thu)
• Ch. 13: The Semiology of Textualization. (Thu)

I had read a few of these pieces before as a couple are excerpts from other things, but many of them were new. All in all, I found this to be an excellent volume and overview of Harris’ thought.

Harrison, Colin. “Semantic Specification/Semantic Emergence: Against the Container Metaphor of Meaning.” In 23rd LACUS Forum (1996), pp. 95-107.

Cited by Walrod (2006), “Language: Object or Event?”, p. 72.

Critiques Lakoff’s handling of polysemy in Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Proposes a connectionist explanation that is a far better neurocognitive model.

OK. I have no idea how this got published already. I’m giving up and going to bed.

Thursday, 13 Dec 2007

Morgan, Eric Lease. Today’s digital information landscape.

Pointed to by someone on AUTOCAT trying to stir up even more hornets. I take the gist to be reasonably accurate but it was a little overwrought at times. And I absolutely do not like his ideas of automatic search refinement/relevance ranking. In fact, I think “relevance ranking” as a term is one of the worst named concepts we have and we have some doozies.

Thursday – Friday, 13 – 14 Dec 2007

Halpern, Joseph Y. and Vicky Weissman. “Using First-Order Logic to Reason about Policies.” ACM Transactions on Computational Logic Vol. V, No. N, May 2006, 1-39.

Um, no. I did not choose this for myself. Read it for my Python class final.

This is most likely the last edit. I swear. I still have no idea how this ever got published a couple days ago. Clearly, I must have clicked Publish and not Save. But knowing that I must have is not the same as knowing that I did.