Semantics etc.

Aifric Campbell (who once lectured in semantics at the University of Gothenburg) has written a mystery novel inspired by the mysterious death of Richard Montague (warning: the website is a bit flashy, if you know what I mean). The book is currently only available as an import on Amazon: The Semantics of Murder by Aifric Campbell.

Here is a synopsis from the FantasticFiction website:

“Jay Hamilton lives a comfortable life in fashionable west London, listening to the minor and major dysfunctions of the over-privileged clients who frequent his psychoanalysis practice. But the darker recesses of his own psyche would not stand up to close examination: his brother Richard, a genius professor of mathematical linguistics, was apparently killed by rent boys in Los Angeles and Jay was the first on the scene.

Author Dana Flynn is determined to scratch beneath the surface while researching a biography she intends to write about Richard, and finds that Jay’s professional life is as precarious as his personal relationships - he uses his clients’ case studies as material for his fiction writing.

Such is Jay’s hunger for recognition as a creative force that he exploits the vulnerables he counsels, and a decision not to intervene when a troubled patient steals a baby, causes his past to unravel.”

[Thanks to Barbara Abbott via Larry Horn for the heads up!]

[I know that this blog is being frustratingly silent these days. I’ll have to figure out what to do about that, but I’m too busy even for that. In the mean time, I’ll try to post a few snippets.]

The 2007 “Lifetime Achievement Award” of the Association for Computational Linguistics went to Lauri Karttunen. There is a video of the award ceremony (the award was announced by ACL Chair Mark Steedman) and Lauri’s acceptance speech. The written version of the talk appeared in the December 2007 issue of Computational Linguistics:

Karttunen, Lauri. 2007. Word play. Computational Linguistics 33(4): 443–467. doi:10.1162/coli.2007.33.4.443.

Lauri has posted the pdf of the article on his website. It’s a delightful read, somewhat along the lines of Barbara Partee’s reminiscences. Highly recommended.

Today is a big day for semantics, for open access, open science publishing in our field: the first research article in our new journal Semantics and Pragmatics (S&P) has been published!

Barker, Chris & Chung-chieh Shan. 2008. Donkey anaphora is in-scope binding. Semantics and Pragmatics 1(1): 1–42. doi:10.3765/sp.1.1.

We will comment on this occasion further on the editors’ blog. But take a look at the pdf and enjoy the extensive hyper-features: active links from the text to the bibliography, clickable DOIs in the bibliography for most of the cited literature, links from example numbers in the text to the examples, etc. Also, note that the bibliography style follows the guidelines agreed to by a working group of linguistics journal editors. In particular, note that our bibliography style gives full first names (looking at you, Springer!).

Of course, we welcome any comments and feedback. Just send us email at editors@semprag.org or comment here or on the editors’ blog.

And, given that all of us are using the summer to write new papers, please submit your best work to S&P. We’re ready to give you the best publishing experience you have ever had.

Update: See now also David’s post on “Donkeys in Cyberspace” on Language Log, which has a growing comment thread where we learn that the problem of donkey anaphora is not an obvious problem.