Exploring Language With Logo

Exploring Language with Logo invites the reader to participate actively in the play and work of the linguist. It is the first comprehensive presentation of Logo's highly developed, well publicized, but vastly underused language-manipulation capability. Throughout the book, experimental projects and compelling examples of language in use are chosen to stimulate interest in and promote exploration of the structure, function, and history of language. The treatment is both serious and playful. Using this book, readers can teach a machine how to produce words, phrases, and sentences and at the same time gain insight into both the elegance and the complexity of language. The book teaches Logo technique as it is needed for specific explorations, with the goal of providing readers with enough programming independence to design their own sophisticated language-manipulation programs. The first part takes up the grammar of sentences, poems, and stories -syntax, semantics, and style, the orderliness of language in units larger than a word. The second explores the structure in the microscopic worlds within words - morphology, orthography, and phonology. The reader is invited to model the structure of words, create procedures that know how to spell, discover the ways words are affected when affixes are added, and to work with projects on word roots, historical changes in words, and conjugations and declensions in English and other languages. This inventive and innovative text is readable both with and without the computer. It will challenge and excite anyone interested in learning or teaching language and linguistics. E. Paul Goldenberg is Researcher and Developer at Education Development Center, Inc., Newton, adjunct faculty in education at Lesley College, and former Director of the Computer Center at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School. Wallace Feurzeig is Division Scientist of the Information Sciences Division at BBN Laboratories, Cambridge. Exploring Language with Logo is included in the series Explorations in Logo, edited by E. Paul Goldenberg.