Description

One: Nuts and Bolts.- 1. Mental Representation.- Symbolism: The Classical Paradigm.- Cracks in the Symbolic Paradigm.- Connectionism: The Other Paradigm.- Methods of Models.- Assessing Theories of Mental Representation.- 2. Partitioned Representations.- General Overview.- The Contents of Spaces.- Parochial Reasoning.- Primary Contexts.- Partitioned Semantics.- Coherence.- Consolidation.- Secondary Contexts.- A Typology of Spaces.- Where Partitioned Representations Get Their Power.- Summary and Conclusions.- 3. Language: Process and Structure.- A Simple Philosophy of Language.- Linguistic Explanation.- The Process of Language Understanding.- Linguistic Evidence for Mental Representations.- 4. Three Levels of Language Processing.- Parochial Processing.- Distribution.- Contextualization.- An Example Discourse.- Conclusions.- Two: Studies in Language.- 5. Pedro's Donkey and Oedipus's Mother.- Some Common Parochial Linguistic Processes.- Some Common Cases of Distribution.- Interaction of Distribution and Parochial Processes.- Summary and Conclusions.- 6. Satisfying Presuppositions in Discourse.- The Problem of Presupposition.- Presupposition and Parochial Processing.- What Happens in Complex Sentences?.- Conclusions.- 7. Space Frogs and Henry Ford.- Linguistic Evidence for Contextualization.- The Semantic Contributions of Space Cues.- Summary.- 8. Temporal Aspect.- Reference Time: Temporal Perspective.- Semantics and Construction.- Reference Time: Contextualization.- The Case of the Present Perfect.- Conclusion.- 9. General Conclusions.- An Assessment of Partitioned Representations.- Prospectus.- The Importance of Partitioned Representations.- Appendices: Formal Models.- 10. A Logic of Partitioned Representations.- The Syntax of PR.- Rules of Inference for PR.- The Semantics of PR.- Soundness.- Conclusions.- 11. Generalized Natural Deduction.- Generalized Natural Deduction.- Time and Action.- Frames.- Summary and Conclusions.- 12. A Computational Model.- The Design of Spaceprobe.- Customizing Digestion.- Restructuring Rules for Distribution.- Handling Queries.- Language Understanding in Spaceprobe.- Summary.- References.- Author Index.