Keith Douglas' Web Page

About me Find out who I am and what I do.
My resumé A copy of my resumé and other documentation about my education and work experience for employers and the curious.
Reviews, theses, articles, presentations A collection of papers from my work, categorized and annotated.
Current research projects What I am currently working on, including some non-research material.
Interesting people People professionally "connected" to me in some way.
Interesting organizations Organizations I am "connected" to. (Some rather loosely.)
Intellectual/professional influences Influences on my work, including an organization chart. Here you can also buy many good books on philosophy and other subjects via amazon.com. I have included brief reviews of hundreds of books.
Professional resources Research sources, amazon.com associates programs, etc.
What is the philosophy of computing? A brief introduction to my primary professional interest.
My intellectual heroes A partial list of important people. Limited to the dead.
My educational philosophy As a sometime teacher I've developed one. Includes book resources.

Book Influences - Linguistics

Title
Author
Purchase / Enjoy Cover
Comment
An Invitation To Cognitive Science, Volume 1: Language (2e) Gleitman and Liberman (eds.) 14 papers of generally uniformly good quality on topics related to language. Syntax, semantics, languages acquisition, neurolinguistics, etc. are all represented. As this is intended as a textbook, there are study questions and ample references for follow-up reading. My only complaint about the selections concerns "Computational Aspects of the Theory of Grammar" by Steedman. Not enough introduction to many of the techniques used in this work is made. Moreover, this work seems to point to some omissions to the volume as a whole: nowhere is there a discussion devoted to automata theory (or the Chomsky hierarchy) and their relevance to theories of language. While I am familiar (loosely) with these topics and hence can fill in a few gaps, other readers might not have this luxury in an introductory context (like a graduate course on interdisciplinary cognitive science). I would also like to learn more about what linguists say about the hiearachies in question and do not find much of that here. These limitations, however, do not detract very much from an otherwise decent book.
Contemporary Linguistic Analysis O'Grady Massive textbook of introductory linguistics.
The Language Instinct Pinker The reasonably technical popularization that catapulted Pinker into academic stardom.
Language, Thought and Reality Whorf The famous, but now discredited, classic.
Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental Structure Jackendoff Noted heterodox linguist Jackendoff defends a novel semantics-centered view of language, and shows how it has fruitful consequences for exploring mental "content" and "structure" generally. In particular, he is able to produce a very detailed descriptive deontic logic. One noted feature which makes the semantic approach even more heterodox is the insistence on parallelism. This is a monumental work which should be heeded by any who are concerned with logic, semantics, philosophy of mind, psychology, etc. My only source of disagreement arises when it comes time to actually getting the data from language-oriented sources. Almost all the examples are from English; at least the author does not make the mistake of thinking that the (excellent) analysis of language reflects the world. However, he does suggest that it reflects the structure of our thought (a sort of Dummettian move). This strikes me as premature. While I am certain that the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is false, I wonder if any light (or confounding matters) on the issues Jackendoff discusses could be found by attending to other languages. I am wondering about constructions like "... for ..." in English - there is no reason to suspect that all the constructions in English are paralleled in other languages.
Language: Its Structure and Use Finegan Another large textbook of introductory linguistics.
The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics Mitkov Hardly a "handbook" due to its rather large size. Varying tremendously in detail and computational discussion, this is basically an annotated bibliography on many traditional topics within linguistics, language studies, etc. with the computational "theme" providing a somewhat tenuous thread. Clear and includes a glossary; however also could use a unified references section.
What is Meaning?: Fundamentals of Formal Semantics Portner Focusing on "possible worlds semantics" (with a brief mention and discussion of alternatives), this is a textbook of semantics. Reasonably clear and (introductorally) comprehensive, except when it came to some stipulative definitions of terms like "properties" which seemed to be very confused as to whether or not they were referring to mental entities or to extra-mental objects. The book also does not address non-referring items either, and hence falls prey to some of what has motivated the distinction in some circles between reference (which is the same, regardless of existence) and extension, which can be nil.
Words and Rules Pinker This popularization of studies on irregular verb formation and other other syntactic features of language is not nearly as popular as Pinker's The Language Instinct.

 

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