This book originates from the International Symposium on Compositionality, COMPOS'97, held in Bad Malente, Germany in September 1997. The 25 chapters presented in revised full version reflect the current state of the art in the area of compositional reasoning about concurrency. The book is a valuable reference for researchers and professionals interested in formal systems design and analysis; it also is well suited for self study and use in advanced courses.

By highlighting relations between experimental and theoretical work, this volume explores new ways of addressing one of the central challenges in the study of language and cognition. The articles bring together work by leading scholars and younger researchers in psychology, linguistics and philosophy. An introductory chapter lays out the background on concept composition, a problem that is stimulating much new research in cognitive science. Researchers in this interdisciplinary domain aim to explain how meanings of complex expressions are derived from simple lexical concepts and to show how these meanings connect to concept representations. Traditionally, much of the work on concept composition has been carried out within separate disciplines, where cognitive psychologists have concentrated on concept representations, and linguists and philosophers have focused on the meaning and use of logical operators. This volume demonstrates an important change in this situation, where convergence points between these three disciplines in cognitive science are emerging and are leading to new findings and theoretical insights. This book is open access under a CC BY license.

This Festschrift volume, published in honor of Willem-Paul de Roever, contains 19 detailed papers written by the friends and colleagues of the honoree, all eminent scientists in their own right. These are preceded by a detailed bibliography and rounded off, at the end of the book, with a gallery of photographs. The theme under which the papers have been collected is Concurrency, Compositionality, and Correctness, reflecting the focus of Willem-Paul de Roever's research career. Topics addressed include model checking, computer science and state machines, ontology and mereology of domains, game theory, compiler correctness, fair scheduling and encryption algorithms.

In this book leading scholars from every relevant field report on all aspects of compositionality, the notion that the meaning of an expression can be derived from its parts. Understanding how compositionality works is a central element of syntactic and semantic analysis and a challenge for models of cognition. It is a key concept in linguistics and philosophy and in the cognitive sciences more generally, and is without question one of the most exciting fields in the study of language and mind. The authors of this book report critically on lines of research in different disciplines, revealing the connections between them and highlighting current problems and opportunities. The force and justification of compositionality have long been contentious. First proposed by Frege as the notion that the meaning of an expression is generally determined by the meaning and syntax of its components, it has since been deployed as a constraint on the relation between theories of syntax and semantics, as a means of analysis, and more recently as underlying the structures of representational systems, such as computer programs and neural architectures. The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality explores these and many other dimensions of this challenging field. It will appeal to researchers and advanced students in linguistics and philosophy and to everyone concerned with the study of language and cognition including those working in neuroscience, computational science, and bio-informatics.

Synchronic corpus linguistics contains select papers from the sixteenth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 16). The papers reflect the state of the art in the design, analysis, and annotation of corpora. Corpora new and old facilitate the description of single registers of English (e.g., London teenage English, business English) and of specific grammatical topics across registers (e.g., the grammatical flexibility of idioms), including variation studies (e.g., popular vs. technical registers of English). Other corpora permit the comparison of English to other languages (Norwegian, German, Swedish); of L1 English to L2 English; and of English as an original language to English in translation. A number of these papers emphasize pragmatics: indeed, among the papers on spoken English is an assessment of corpora annotated for discourse analysis. Other papers describe different aspects of the automatic analysis of text. Two papers describe semantic analysis of large text corpora composed of news/business text. Automatic grammatical analysis is the subject of other papers: two evaluate existing automatic parsers and wordclass taggers, while two describe how annotated corpora are being used to develop two new and innovative automatic parsers.

Open Compositionality: Towards a New Methodology of Language argues that natural languages, like English and Spanish, are not only systems of representation useful for communication but also highly interactive cognitive capacities allowing humans to engage in complex forms of cognition. This view goes against the orthodox approach within philosophy of language, which considers natural languages to be specialized systems consisting of only linguistic elements and functioning in a closed compositional manner, allowing for fully formal, algebraic descriptions. Eduardo García-Ramírez rejects the longstanding principle of compositionality, according to which the meaning of any complex expression is fully determined by its parts and the way they are combined, and he substitutes it with an alternative, open, and interactive one. This novel view of the nature of language better accounts for the empirical evidence. García Ramírez develops an account of open compositionality, accompanied by the cognition-first methodology, in which natural languages are conceived as supermodular cognitive capacities that allow for interaction among multiple distinct areas of human cognition. The explanatory success of this original proposal and its accompanying methodology are tested by the author’s account of three enduring philosophical problems: substitution failure, empty names, and the nature of moral discourse.

This volume contains papers selected for presentation during the 24th Interna tional Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science held on September 6-10, 1999 in Szklarska Por^ba, Poland. The symposium, organized alternately in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland, focuses on theoretical aspects and mathematical foundations of computer science. The scientific program of the symposium consists of five invited talks given by Martin Dyer, Dexter Kozen, Giovanni Manzini, Sergio Rajsbaum, and Mads Tofte, and 37 accepted papers chosen out of 68 submissions. The volume contains all accepted contributed papers, and three invited papers. The contributed papers have been selected for presentation based on their scientific quality, novelty, and interest for the general audience of MFCS par ticipants. Each paper has been reviewed by at least three independent referees — PC members and/or sub-referees appointed by them. The papers were se lected for presentation during a fully electronic virtual meeting of the program committee on May 7, 1999. The virtual PC meeting was supported by software written by Artur Zgoda, Ph.D. student at the University of Wroclaw. The entire communication and access to quite a sensitive database at PC headquarters in Wroclaw was secured by cryptographic protocols based on technology of certificates.