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Over the last few years, we have led a series of tutorials and classes introducing the programminglanguage Prolog by way of example programs that apply it to the problem of natural-language analysis and processing. This volume began as the notes for a tutorial taught by one of the authors, Pereira, at the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Chicago during July of 1985. During the fall of 1986, we organized a course at Stanford University on the same subject for which the original notes were extended. The impetus for organizing and expanding these various lecture notes into a more coherent text came from our colleagues at the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), and the projectwas made possible by a gift from the System Development Foundation. Along the way, we were aided by a number of our colleagues. Ray Perrault was kindenoughto allowus to pursue work onthis projectevenwhenour other responsibilities at SRI International were now and then overlooked. David Israel was instrumentalin procuringthe occasionalgrantunder which the book was written and without which it would not have been; we must also thank other members of the CSLI administration—in particular, Jon Barwise, John Perry, and Brian Smith—for their support and facilitation of this project. The text was improved considerably by the efforts of several colleagues who volunteered to read drafts of the book. John Bear, Mary Dalrymple, Robert Keller, Peter Ludlow, Richard O’Keefe, Ray Perrault, and Ivan Sag all provided invaluable comments, corrections and improvements. We attempted to use as much …