Unlike the notion of AargumentA that is central to modern linguistic theorizing, the phenomena that are commonly subsumed under the complementary notion AadjunctA so far have not attracted the attention they deserve. In this volume, leading experts in the field present current approaches to the grammar and pragmatics of adjuncts. Among other things, the contributions scrutinize the argument-adjunct distinction, specify conditions of adjunct placement, discuss compositionality issues, and propose new analyses of event-related modification. They are meant to shed new light on an area of linguistic structure that is deemed to be notoriously overlooked.

The present volume is the result of a project which concentrated on a selected subset of linguistic knowledge with the aim of giving a systematic account of the various aspects of structure and process in this subset and the interpretation of these. The subset that for a number of reasons appeared appropriate to this undertaking centres around the dimensional adjectives of German. That the en terprise ultimately produced a less integrated and complete result than expected is due to several reasons. Some of these are of an intrinsic nature, ever present, and not particularly surprising. Some, however, are related to the character of the project itself and are worth commenting upon, as they reflect specific expe riences and difficulties which we encountered during several years of working on the project. We started from the assumption that the dimensional adjectives constitute a sufficiently rich, but nevertheless limited domain of grammatical and concep tual structure which is fairly well understood and explored in relevant aspects. Consequently we expected that summarizing, integrating, and extending the nu merous results that were available should quickly lead to a more complete picture of the interaction of the components involved. However, even had the premise of this assumption been correct, the conclusion turned out to be wrong fairly early in the project. On closer inspection, the investigations of the phenomena were much less complete, the facts agreed upon less systematic, and the proposed anal yses far less convincing than supposed initially."

On the basis of a semantic analysis of dimension terms, this book develops a theory about knowledge of spatial objects, which is significant for cognitive linguistics and artificial intelligence. This new approach to knowledge structure evolves in a three-step process: - adoption of the linguistic theory with its elements, principles and representational levels, - implementation of the latter in a Prolog prototype, and - integration of the prototype into a large natural language understanding system. The study documents interdisciplinary research at work: the model of spatial knowledge is the fruit of the cooperative efforts of linguists, computational linguists, and knowledge engineers, undertaken in that logical and chronological order. The book offers a two-level approach to semantic interpretation and proves that it works by means of a precise computer implementation, which in turn is applied to support a task-independent knowledge representation system. Each of these stages is described in detail, and the links are made explicit, thus retracing the evolution from theory to practice.

Grundlage dieses Buches bildet die Wissensbasis des LILOG-Systems als integraler Bestandteil der zweiten prototypischen Implementierung eines textverstehenden Systems, die im Wissenschaftlichen Zentrum der IBM Deutschland GmbH in Kooperation mit mehreren Universit{ten realisiert wurde. Die bei der Entwicklung der Wissensbasis getroffenen Modellierungsentscheidungen werden dokumentiert und in ihrem Zusammenhang mit anderen Komponenten des Systems, insbesondere den Modulen f}r die sprachliche Analyse und Generierung, betrachtet. Besonderes Augenmerk gilt jeweils der Verkn}pfung von Alltagswissen mit sprachlichem Wissen und der Benutzersicht auf logikbasierte Formalismen. Ziel ist es, einen Beitrag zu leisten zu erfahrungsgest}tzten und theoriegeleiteten Entwurfsprinzipien f}r Wissensbasen. Die verschiedenen Aufs{tze lassen sich vier Bereichen zuordnenund besch{ftigen sich mit }bergreifenden Aspekten der Wissensmodellierung, mit Bez}gen zur sprachlichen Oberfl{che und zu Inferenzen im System, sowie mit Aspekten der Entwicklung und Verwaltung von Wissensbasen. Die erreichte hohe Vernetzung der interdisziplin{ren Diskussion spiegelt sich in wechselseitigen Bezugnahmen und Kommentaren der Autoren wider.