Truth, Deduction, and Computation: Logic and Semantics for Computer Science
Ruth Davis · W H Freeman & Co eBooks · 1989
Mathematical Methods in Linguistics is a book that no serious student of theoretical linguistics should be without. Even at a quarter of the hardback price, the paperback edition is expensive for a student text, although in my view it represents good value for money, not only in terms of size but more importantly in quality and long-term usefulness. The authors speculate that there is probably too much for even a two-semester course, without indicating at what stage in a degree program it would be used. In my view, some of the material can be usable at an early stage, but it is unlikely to be exhausted before completion of an undergraduate course, and is likely to serve equally well as a handbook for graduate students and beyond. The objectives of the authors as stated in the preface are firstly to provide a basic literacy course in set theory and formal logic, and then to show how more complex and interesting structures can be built out of the set-theoretic and logical bases. The 663 pages are divided into five parts, three of which are followed by appendices and all by review exercises (in addition to the exercises that follow each chapter). There are also solutions to selected (about half, at a guess) exercises, and a bibliography, divided by section, and then differentiating textbooks from more specialist works and collections. The partitioning of the bibliography in this way was a little over-engineered, since for example some of the citations in Part C