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This interdisciplinary work addresses the question What role should psychological conceptualization play for thinkers who believe that the brain is the organ of the mind? It offers readers something unique both by systematically comparing the writings of eliminativist philosophers of mind with the writings of the most committed proponents of biological psychiatry and by critically scrutinizing their shared “anti-anthropomorphism” from the standpoint of a diagnostician and therapist. Contradicting the contemporary assumption that common sense psychology has already been proven futile and we are just waiting for an adequate scientifically-based replacement this book provides explicit philosophical and psychological arguments showing why if they did not already have both cognitive and psychodynamic psychologies philosophers and scientists would have to invent them to better understand brains. (Series A)

Complementation i.e. predication encoded in argument slots is well-renowned for its syntactic and semantic variability across languages. As such it poses a tantalizing descriptive/explanatory challenge to linguists of any theoretical persuasion.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Recent developments in Cognitive and Functional-typological linguistics have enabled researchers to address various unexplored research questions on complementation phenomena. The seven papers included in this volume represent the most recent endeavors to explore cognitive-functional foundations of complementation phenomena from various theoretical perspectives (Cognitive Grammar Mental Space Theory Typology Discourse-functional linguistics Cognitive Science). The seven papers are prefaced by an introductory chapter (Kaoru Horie and Bernard Comrie) which situates the current volume within the major complementation studies of the past forty years. This work presents a new theoretical venue of complementation studies and enhances our understanding of this complex yet intriguing syntactic and semantic phenomenon.<br/>

These new studies by prominent neuroscientists psychologists and philosophers work toward a coherent framework for understanding emotion and its contribution to the functioning of consciousness in general as an aspect of self-organizing embodied subjects. Distinguishing consciousness from unconscious information processing hinges on the role of motivating emotions in all conscious modalities and how emotional brain processes interact with those traditionally associated with cognitive function. Computationally registering/processing sensory signals (e.g. in the occipital lobe or area V4) by itself does not result in perceptual consciousness which requires subcortical structures such as amygdala hypothalamus and brain stem. This interdisciplinary anthology attempts to understand the complexity of emotional intentionality; why the role of motivation in self-organizing processes is crucial in distinguishing conscious from unconscious processes; how emotions account for ‘agency’; and how an adequate approach to emotion-motivation can address the traditional mind-body problem through a holistic understanding of the conscious behaving organism.

(Series B)

Language is always generated and interpreted in a certain context and the semantic syntactic and lexical properties of linguistic expressions reflect this. Interactive language understanding systems such as language-based dialogue systems therefore have to apply contextual information to interpret their inputs and to generate appropriate outputs but are in practice very poor at this. This book contains a number of studies in Computational Pragmatics the newly emerging field of study of how contextual information can be effectively brought to bear in language understanding and generation. The various chapters center around the conceptual formal and computational modeling of context in general of the relevant beliefs of dialogue participants in particular and of the reasoning that may be applied to relate linguistic phenomena to aspects of the dialogue context. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>These issues are discussed both from a theoretical point of view and in relation to their roles in prototypical language understanding systems.<br/>

There is a continual growth of interest among linguists of all-theoretical denominations in grammaticalization a concept central to many linguistic (change) theories. However the discussion of grammaticalization processes has often suffered from a shortage of concrete empirical studies from one of the best-documented languages in the world English. Pathways of Change contains discussion of new data and provides theoretical lead articles based on these data that will help sharpen the theoretical aspects involved such as the definition and the logical connection of the component processes of grammaticalization. The volume is concentrated around a number of themes that are important or controversial in grammaticalization studies such as the principle of unidirectionality the relation between lexicalization and grammaticalization — and connected with these two factors the possibility of degrammaticalization — the way iconicity interweaves with grammaticalization processes and with the phenomenon of grammaticalization on a synchronic or discourse level also often termed subjectifization.

This volume contains revised versions of thirteen of the papers presented at the parasession “New Solutions to Old Problems: Issues in Romance Historical Linguistics” held as part of the 29th Linguistic Symposium on the Romance Languages (1999). These studies examine specific problems in Romance historical linguistics within the framework of new analytical approaches many of which represent extensions into the diachronic realm of methodologies and theories originally formulated to explain aspects of synchronic phonology and syntax. Insights afforded by Principles and Parameters the Minimalist Program Optimality Theory grammaticalization theory and sociohistorical linguistics are used to elucidate such long-standing issues in traditional historical grammar as diphthongization in Hispano-Romance syncope of intertonic vowels in Hispano- and Gallo-Romane Romance lenition the role of analogy in morphological change word order infinitival constructions and the collocation of clitic object pronouns in Old French and Old Spanish.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>

Language Acquisition and the Form of the Grammar attempts to re-think the ideal organization of the grammar given its need to be learned. The book proposes a fundamental connection between the form of the adult grammar and the sequence of grammars which the child adopts in first language acquisition. Challenging the conventional division between language acquisition and syntax this influential work constructs a new understanding of phrase structure bringing syntactic data to bear on phrase structure composition. Two new phrase structure composition operations are proposed Adjoin-α which adjoins adjuncts into the structure and Project-α which fuses open class and closed class structures. The author also introduces the novel concept of subgrammars successively larger grammars that take the child from the initial state to the adult grammar. This work will be of interest to those in the areas of syntax language acquisition learnability and cognitive science in general.

The book focuses on the syntactic behavior of argument noun phrases depending on their discourse status. The main language of consideration is German but it is shown that the observations can be carried over to other languages. The claim is that discourse-new arguments remain inside the VP where they are base generated. The hierarchy of argument projection is claimed to be fix within and across languages. With the major attention to direct objects it is then argued that discourse-old here called topical noun phrases undergo raising to agreement projections. This movement can be realized differently: scrambling object agreement clitic-doubling differences in morphological case and stress pattern turn out to be analyzable as one underlying phenomenon. It is furthermore shown that many so-called subject:object asymmetries boil down to topic:non-topic differences for example with respect to extraction. Thus irrespectively of the argumental status discourse-new constituents do not act as barriers whereas topical arguments create (weak) islands.

This book brings together a number of seemingly distinct phenomena in the history of English: the introduction of special reflexive pronouns (e.g. myself) the loss of verbal agreement and pro-drop and the disappearance of morphological Case. It provides vast numbers of examples from Old and Middle English texts showing a person split between first second and third person pronouns. Extending an analysis by Reinhart &#38; Reuland the author argues that the ‘strength’ of certain pronominal features (Case person number) differs cross-linguistically and that parametric variation accounts for the changes in English. The framework used is Minimalist and Interpretable and Uninterpretable features are seen as the key to explaining the change from a synthetic to an analytic language.

Employment is clearly one of those fields of political activity that reveal the manifold problems and difficulties accompanying the process of European integration and supranational institutionalization. In particular the conflict between supranationalists and intergovernmentalists and the degree to which member states show willingness to cooperate with each other become manifest. The Union is struggling for new employment policies that should on the one hand be compatible with the European model of the welfare state and on the other adopt to new economic constraints. These debates are accompanied by many conflicts between different interest groups and lobbies. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>This study succeeded in looking behind closed doors within the EU organizational system. Committee meetings were tape-recorded and analysed drafts of policy papers were examined for recontextualizations and the impact of interest groups and different economic and ideological concepts on policy-making made explicit. A comparison of decision-making processes in the European Parliament and in small networks of the Commission illustrates the different argumentation patterns and discursive practices that are involved in the formation of new employment policies. The ethnographic research is accompanied by a systemic linguistic and sociological analysis of various institutional genres and political spaces.