THE POSSIBILITY OF LANGUAGE -- Editorial page -- Title page -- Copyright page -- Dedication -- Table of contents -- Abbreviations -- Acknowledgments -- Foreword -- Rapprochement and reconciliation -- Languages and machines -- Preface -- 1. Limits in Search of a Cause -- 1.1 An answer -- 1.2 A mascot for translation -- 1.3 Some difficulties in translation -- 1.4 Some issues in translation theories -- 2. Machine Translation -- 2.1 The fascination of machine translation -- 2.2 A brief history of machine translation -- 2.3 Problems with tuning in early systems -- 2.4 The Systran machine translation system -- 2.5 Bar-Hillel -- 2.6 A government report and its aftermath -- 2.7 Personal encounters with machine translation -- 2.8 Giving up fully automatic translation -- 2.9 Giving up high-quality translation -- 2.10 Living with restricted text -- 2.11 Some recent events in machine translation -- 2.12 Some issues in machine translation -- 3. The Wall -- 3.1 The fascination of universal sememes -- 3.2 Hitting the wall surrounding domain-specific machine translation -- 3.3 The nature of the wall: two kinds of language -- 3.4 The search for a term to cover both sides -- 3.5 The clay/stone analogy -- 3.6 Fundamental ambiguity versus superficial ambiguity -- 3.7 Evidence for the general/domain distinction -- 3.7.1 Examples of dynamic versus static LTUs in LSP text -- 3.7.2 Asymmetry as evidence -- 3.7.3 Asymmetry of homographs -- 3.7.4 Asymmetry of evolving word senses -- 3.7.5 Asymmetry of holes -- 3.7.6 Asymmetry of subdivisions -- 3.7.7 Dynamic asymmetry -- 3.7.8 Summary of observations concerning asymmetry -- 3.7.9 Evidence from NLP -- 3.7.10 Speech processing -- 3.7.11 Microworlds -- 3.7.12 User interfaces -- 3.8 Summary of chapter to this point -- 3.9 Mainstream linguistics and the general/domain distinction.

3.9.1 Isolated sentences and autonomous syntax -- 3.9.2 Generative Grammar's domain -- 3.9.3 Superficial or fundamental ambiguity ? -- 3.9.4 Closed or open infinity -- 3.10 Linguistics and machine translation -- 3.11 George Lakoff -- 3.12 The wall between Lakoff and objectivist approaches -- 4. Possibilities -- 4.1 The tradition of bottom-up processing from primitives -- 4.1.1 Concepts and rules as given -- 4.1.2 Our intellectual heritage -- 4.1.3 Chomsky's solution to the problem of the given -- 4.2 Concepts as arbitrary -- 4.3 The search for an alternative -- 4.4 An introduction to Levinas -- 4.5 An approach to how language is possible -- 4.6 Grounding and acquisition -- 4.7 Release from prison -- 5. Implications -- 5.1 A review of our basis -- 5.1.1 An image with multiple interpretations -- 5.1.2 Techniques that do not extend to general language -- 5.1.3 Avoiding objectivism -- 5.1.4 What is needed -- 5.1.5 Requirements for the possibility of language -- 5.2 Overview of implications -- 5.3 Some implications for translation theory -- 5.3.1 A multidimensional approach with specifications -- 5.3.2 More discussion of issues from chapter 1 -- 5.3.3 A brief look at some approaches to translation -- 5.4 Some implications for translation technology -- 5.4.1 Bitext and translation -- 5.4.2 On the horizon -- 5.5 Alternatives and risks -- Appendix -- A.1 Samples of machine translation -- A.2 A sample indicative translation scenario -- A.3 Types of text and pre-editing -- Endnotes -- Bibliography -- Glossary -- Subject Index -- Author Index.