On Tuesday, April 25, Craige Roberts will be visiting and co-present ongoing work in Stewart Shapiro’s seminar in Philosophical Logic, which starts at 9:30am in 334 Manchester Hall. We will skip our usual meeting in order to allow people to attend the seminar.

Logic Group Colloquium on Friday, April 21: Thomas Graf (Stony Brook)

  Fragments of First-Order Logic for Linguistic Structures

Logic has always played a central role in the study of natural language
meaning. But logic can also be used to describe the structure of words
and sentences. Recent research has revealed that these structures are so
simple that they can be modeled with very weak fragments of first-order
logic. Unfortunately, many of these fragments are still not particularly
well-understood on a formal level, which has become a serious impediment
to ongoing research. This talk is thus equally about the known and the
unknown: I will survey the empirically relevant fragments of first-order
logic and explain how they allow for completely new generalizations
about linguistic structures at the word and sentence level. But I will
also highlight the limits of our current understanding and which
mathematical challenges need to be overcome if the logical approach to
natural language is to realize its full potential. Hopefully, an
alliance of linguists, logicians, and computer scientists will be able
to solve these problems in the near future.

This is a joint meeting with the Diachronic Syntax reading group. We’ll be discussing Kai von Fintel (1995) “The Formal Semantics of Grammaticalization,” NELS 25 Proceedings (GLSA, UMass Amherst),Volume 2: Papers from the Workshops on Language Acquisition & Language Change, pp. 175-189. Contact us for more details and/or a copy of the paper.

Komoto, Naoko (2011). Internal past, external past, and counterfactuality: evidence from Japanese. In Proceedings of SALT 20, pages 618-635.