(Victoria University of Wellington)

Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990, xi + 274 pp.

How is one to represent the meaning of a sentence such as Everyone who is actually rich might have been poor? Cresswell's thesis is that natural language is ontologically committed to possible worlds, which play a similar kind of semantic role to that played by times. In particular, there are sentences that require evaluation at a sequence of possible worlds rather than just a single world.—G.H.

Logic, Language, and Meaning Volume I: Introduction to Logic Volume II: Intensional Logic and Logi­cal Grammar L.T.E Gamut (pseud.) (Johan van Benthem, Jeroen Groenendijk, Dick de Jongh, Martin Stokhof, and Henk Verkuyl)

(Universities of Groningen, Amsterdam, and Utrecht)

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,

Vol II: xvi + 349 pp.

Editor's note: The following is excerpted from Barbara Partee's enthusiastic foreword to this [This is] the first comprehensive introduction to logic, language, and meaning that includes on the one hand a very fine introduction to logic, starting from the beginning, and on the other hand brings up at every point connec­tions to the study of meaning in natural lan­guage, and thus serves as an excellent intro­duction and logical background to many of the central concerns of semantics and the phi­losophy of language as well.

This book is pedagogically beautifully de­signed, with the central developments very carefully introduced and richly augmented with examples and exercises, and with a wealth of related optional material that can be included or omitted for different kinds of courses (or self-teaching) for which the book could very well be used: I could imagine tai­loring very fine but slightly different courses from it for inclusion in a linguistics curricu-

1 Copyright © 1991 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Reprinted by kind per­mission of The University of Chicago Press.

(Hewlett Packard Laboratories and Stanford University)

Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 1990, xi + 187 pp.

(CSLI Lecture Notes 19) (Distributed by The University of Chicago "This book is an investigation into the se­mantics of quantification and anaphora with third-person singular pronouns. Our goal will be to determine what consequences an ade­quate semantic account of both phenomena has for our general theories of quantification and anaphoric relations. We will defend the claim that the distinctions that need to be made at the level of content are too rich for a theory that attempts to capture quantifica-tional and anaphoric ambiguities in syntac­tic representations through such devices as NP-indexing and tree geometry."—From the authors' introduction

(Centre for Speech Technology Research, Uni­versity of Edinburgh)

Edinburgh University Press, 1988, viii + 291 pp.

(Edinburgh Information Technology Series 4) (Distributed in the U.S. by Columbia University Press)

Mervyn Jack and John Laver have edited a compact reference work that covers recent core areas of speech technology. The intent is to provide a critical tutorial discussion along with a comprehensive bibliographical source. At the time of publication (1988) the editors and all the contributing authors were mem­bers of the Centre for Speech Technology Re­search at Edinburgh University.

The book has five chapters: two on speech recognition, one on speech synthesis, one on speaker verification, and one on helium speech. All the chapters share certain excel­lent qualities; they are well written, they give extensive bibliographic support, and the au­thors take the time to compare and evaluate competing approaches. Each chapter presents a balance of early and recent work and a bal­ance of basic knowledge and applied prac­tice. These are the strengths of the book, and I would recommend Aspects of Speech Tech­nology to an advanced student who was in­terested in starting a project in one of these areas.

I would recommend it, however, with a word of caution. The two chapters on speech recognition, which together make up half the book, reflect the particular viewpoint that (1) pattern matching using dynamic program­ming techniques seems to be a short-term solution that is inextricably linked to word-based templates and therefore is not easily applicable to very large or open vocabularies; and (2) that we can anticipate the imminent emergence of high-accuracy speech recogni­tion systems that identify sub-word phonetic units based on the kind of knowledge that has been accumulated over the last several decades' work in acoustic phonetics. Even by 1986 or 1987, it should have been clear that there was no necessary link between dy­namic programming pattern-matching algo­rithms and closed vocabulary applications, and that the prospect for high-performance speech recognition systems based on acoustic phonetic expertise was dim and getting dim­mer. This renders the speech recognition por­tion of the book somewhat less useful than it might be. Still, one of the speech recog­nition chapters offers an excellent review of dynamic time warp (DTW) recognition the­ory and practice, and the other is a wonder­fully comprehensive review of the acoustic characteristics of English consonants.—]ared Bernstein, SRI International

(Department of Computing, University of Lan­caster)

Library and corporate subscriptions: £60.00 in the U.K., $120.00 elsewhere; individual subscriptions at half price.

"This journal aims to promote and examine three things, namely machine translation, computer-aided language learning, and the relationship of those two areas to one an­other and other relevant disciplines. As part of this, articles will be presented that will ex­amine the past, present, and future of both disciplines. A main aim of the journal is to examine current work in a light of critical evaluation: the journal seeks applied work. However, in saying this it must be noted that there is also room for three other types of ar­ticles: an examination of theories, a discus­sion of current and future issues, and finally articles which set out to put a current issue in a very firm context, providing a good, solid review of an important field."—From the edi­torial, issue 1(1)

Autolexical Syntax: A Theory of Paral­lel Grammatical Representations

(University of Chicago)

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991, xii + 254 pp.

"This book explores the hypothesis that natu­ral-language expressions are organized along a number of simultaneous informational dimensions, in each of which the allowable structural patterns form a system that can be specified by a set of explicit rules. Each of these rule systems, which we may call a com­ponent, or module, is an autonomous gram­mar of a single informational dimension, and therefore, the organization of an expression in one module need not correspond to its or­ganization in another, though there will be definite limits on the degree to which the various autonomous descriptions of a sin­gle natural-language expression can diverge from one another."—From the author's intro­duction

(Cornell University)

Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990, xiii + 476 pp.

"We focus on what has come to be known as logical, truth-conditional, or model-theoretic semantics," say the authors. This new text­book covers: what semantics is about; de­notation, truth, and meaning; quantification and logical form; meaning in speech acts; in-tensionality; indexicality discourse, and pre­supposition; lambda abstraction; word mean­ing; and generalized quantifiers.

(UNESCO, Paris)

This is a dictionary for translation, not defi­nition. Words and phrases are translated be­tween English, French, and Russian, with phrases being entered under all their signifi­cant words. In all, there are 7697 entries, from Abelian and aphasia through to vowel and zone bit, covering terms from artificial intelligence, automata theory, computational linguistics, computer-assisted instruction, linguistics, logic, machine translation, mathematical lin­guistics, psycholinguistics, and many related areas.

To test the dictionary's coverage, I tried looking up all the technical terms from the ta­bles of contents of a couple of issues of Com­putational Linguistics. I was successful with most of the terms, but found some surprising omissions: pronoun, anaphora, phrase structure grammar (not even phrase is given), and parse tree (not even parse is given, though parsing and tree are). — G.H.