The Logic Colloquium on Friday, November 17, at 2pm in Laurel Hall 108, will feature Una Stojnić, semanticist from Columbia and ANU.

The Logic and Grammar of Prominence

The recent literature maintains that the behavior of modal expressions motivates a non-truth-conditional account of their meaning, and non-classical account of their underlying logic. The key aspect of interpretation of modal claims is the characteristic dynamic effect they have on the context, and the corresponding dynamic notion of validity captures their seemingly non-classical behavior.  While prima facie supported by the puzzling behavior of modals in discourse, I argue that this approach is empirically inadequate. Instead I develop and argue for a dynamic theory of context-change which assigns standard truth-conditional meaning to modal utterances, and a corresponding dynamic notion of validity which preserves classical logic.

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