book announcement

[Jud Wolfskill]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I thought readers of the Historical Linguistics List might be interested in
these two books.  For more information, please send me an email or visit the
URLs listed below.  Thanks!

Jud

Language, Brain, and Cognitive Development
Essays in Honor of Jacques Mehler
edited by Emmanuel Dupoux
http://mitpress.mit.edu/0262041979

In the early 1960s, the bold project of the emerging field of cognition was
to put the human mind under the scrutiny of rational inquiry, through the
conjoined efforts of philosophy, linguistics, computer science, psychology,
and neuroscience. Forty years later, cognitive science is a flourishing
academic field. The contributions to this collection, written in honor of
Jacques Mehler, a founder of the field of psycholinguistics, assess the
progress of cognitive science. The questions addressed include: What have we
learned or not learned about language, brain, and cognition? Where are we
now? Where have we failed? Where have we succeeded? The book is organized
into four sections in addition to the introduction: thought, language,
neuroscience, and brain and biology. Some chapters cut across several
sections, attesting to the cross-disciplinary nature of the field.
6 x 9, 562 pp., 21 illus., cloth ISBN 0-262-04197-9
A Bradford Book


Flexibility Principles in Boolean Semantics
The Interpretation of Coordination, Plurality, and Scope in Natural Language
Yoad Winter
http://mitpress.mit.edu/0262232189

Since the early work of Montague, Boolean semantics and its subfield of
generalized quantifier theory have become the model-theoretic foundation for
the study of meaning in natural languages. This book uses this framework to
develop a new semantic theory of central linguistic phenomena involving
coordination, plurality, and scope. The proposed theory makes use of the
standard Boolean interpretation of conjunction, a choice-function account of
indefinites, and a novel semantics of plurals that is not based on the
distributive/collective distinction. The key to unifying these mechanisms is
a version of Montagovian semantics that is augmented by flexibility
principles: semantic operations that have no counterpart in phonology.
7 x 9, 328 pp., 15 illus., cloth ISBN 0-262-23218-9
Current Studies in Linguistics, Volume 37

______________________
Jud Wolfskill
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The MIT Press
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http://mitpress.mit.edu