In the third chapter the results from the second chapter are lifted to an intensional setting. It is shown that notions of informational content, information update and speaker support can be defined interchangeably, and independently. The chapter ends with a discussion of the contextualist debate, and the books agrees with (almost of) the contextualist findings, but not the contextualists' conclusions.

This paper explores the role of memoir writing in reexamining and finding meaning and purpose in lives that might otherwise be deprived of a key source of personal fulfillment, the sense of achieving individual destiny. It argues that the writing of memoir requires narrative flow, craft, and creative awareness—all produced by a quality of attention that can be transformative in itself. This reflective and artistic distance is a key factor in the phenomenology of human self-perception. In the writing of memoir, life material is restructured, reframed, and perceived afresh. For some, memoir has a creative potential that can be seen as self-directed destiny. Several outstanding memoirs are considered here. Russell Baker’s Growing Up credits the ambitions of his mother, combined with his fascination with people’s Depression era stories, to his rise through the newspaper ranks to national status as a columnist. A contrast is shown in Frank McCourt’s memoir trilogy—Angela’s Ashes, ’Tis, and Teacher Man—in which a childhood of extreme poverty, working class obscurity, and an entire teaching career passes before the author is able to write lucidly about the struggles that made him into a late-life hero to those who devote their lives to a vital, mostly thankless profession. Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase climbs to a realization that, though failing to find the God of her original quest, she has by unexpected means fulfilled a spiritual destiny through a lifelong study of world religions. The paper concludes with a reflection on Amy Tan’s key assertion, in her memoir The Opposite of Fate, that by writing one can create a better destiny than what seems to be fated. Her approach is poignantly verified in the case of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a life-affirming memoir composed when all the author had left was his awareness, imagination, and the control of one blinking eye. It is a triumph of attention as the creative catalyst of human destiny.

Conclusion

The paper has sought to show two things. One is that the apparent variety of Stalnaker and Lewis's counterexamples is misleading. Several of their examples are quite unsatisfactory because they depend on unguarded language behavior. There is in fact only one type of counterexample that is worth serious discussion, and that has the form of Barense's.

For Barense's example, I try to show that it fails as a counterexample to transitivity because one of the premisses is false within the context of the example. However, Barense's example is problematic for the Stalnaker-Lewis analysis, since their device for avoiding transitivity (rejecting the rule of conditional proof) does not in fact eliminate anomalous conclusions that can be drawn when both the premisses are taken as true.

In sum, there appears to be no good reason to doubt thatif is transitive, that the antecedent of a conditional can be strengthened, and that the contrapositive can be inferred. And the rule of conditional proof does seem to capture a commonly accepted form of argument in support ofif-then statements.

Ernesto Cardenal writes poems of praise throughout his poetic career, from Salmos (1969) to Cántico cósmico (1989). This essay examines some of the constant features of invention and style in a brief sampling. Particular attention is given to "Como en la rueda de un alfarero," where the expansions, compressions, omissions and additons to the source psalm give a key to the revolutionary Marxism of the poet as well as some sense of his distinctive voice.

Sound symbolism is a linguistic concept that argues, despite Saussure’s (in)famous assertions to the contrary, that the link between signifier and signified is a necessary one. Roman Jakobson remains one of the few noteworthy exponents of the concept in the last century. One aspect of sound symbolism that particularly interested him was “coloured vowels,” that is, the “real” mental correlations of colours with vowels. Though this phenomenon remains inconclusive and under investigation, Jakobson maintained an unwavering belief in its veracity. However, in his discussions of the subject, Jakobson’s rhetoric conceals his assumption that this particular aspect of sound symbolism and its correlations are universal, that is, Jakobson believed, without saying so explicitly, that the perceived coloured values of vowels transcend borders and cultures. This paper demonstrates Jakobson’s rhetorical and allusive strategies to this end, including, for example, his recurring reference to Mallarmé.

This paper presents a generalization technique that induces translation templates from a given set of translation examples by replacing differing parts in the examples with typed variables. Since the type of each variable is inferred during the learning process, each induced template is also associated with a set of type constraints. The type constraints that are associated with a translation template restrict the usage of the translation template in certain contexts in order to avoid some of the wrong translations. The types of variables are induced using type lattices designed for both the source and target languages. The proposed generalization technique has been implemented as a part of an example-based machine translation system.