New Book: COHERENCE, REFERENCE, AND THE THEORY OF GRAMMAR

[Christine Sosa]

CSLI Publications is pleased to announce the availability of:

COHERENCE, REFERENCE, AND THE THEORY OF GRAMMAR: Andrew Kehler (UC
San Diego) ;paper ISBN: 1-57586-216-6, $22.95, cloth ISBN:
1-57586-215-8, $64.95, 231 pages. CSLI Publications 2002.
http://cslipublications.stanford.edu , email: pubs at csli.stanford.edu.

To order this book, contact The University of Chicago Press. Call
their toll free order number 1-800-621-2736  (U.S. & Canada only)  or
order online at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ (use the search
feature to locate the book, then order).

Book description:

A natural language discourse is not just an arbitrary sequence of
utterances; a discourse must also exhibit coherence. Despite its
centrality to discourse interpretation, coherence rarely plays a role
in theories of linguistic phenomena that operate across clause
boundaries.
In this book, Kehler provides an analysis of coherence relationships
rooted in three types of 'connection among ideas' first articulated
by the philosopher David Hume: Resemblance, Cause-Effect, and
Contiguity. Kehler then shows how these relationships affect the
distribution of a diverse set of linguistic phenomena, including verb
phrase ellipsis, gapping, extraction from coordinate structures,
pronominal reference, and tense. In each of these areas, Kehler
demonstrates how the constraints imposed by linguistic form interact
with those imposed by the process of establishing coherence to
explain data that have eluded previous analyses.
This book will be of interest to researchers working in syntax,
semantics, pragmatics, discourse, computational linguistics,
psycholinguistics, cognitive science, and philosophy of language.



Praise for "Coherence, Reference, and the Theory of Grammar":

"Coherence, Reference, and the Theory of Grammar is one of the most
original books on discourse phenomena to be published in the last
twenty-five years. In this work, Andrew Kehler argues persuasively
that an adequate account of what look to be intrasentential, even
purely syntactic, phenomena cannot be obtained except from a
trans-sentential and inferential perspective. A truly surprising and
important work!"
-David Israel, AI Center, SRI International

"This book is an extremely valuable contribution to our understanding
of the interactions between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. It
will be a revelation for formal linguists who have overlooked the
relevance of coherence relations among sentences in a discourse for a
variety of syntactic and semantic patterns, for cognitive and
functional linguists in search of a lucidly presented formal model
for complex discourse patterns, and for computational linguists in
search of a sensible and intuitive way of understanding discourse and
coherence."
-Mary Dalrymple, Xerox PARC