The UConn Logic Colloquium will feature a talk on semantics by Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; currently Yale University) on Friday, February 24, 2pm. The talk will be in hybrid form.

Modeling Linguistic Causation

This talk introduces a systematic way of analyzing the semantics of causative linguistic expressions, and of how natural languages express causal relationships. For this purpose, I will employ the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) framework and demonstrate how this method offers a rigorous model-theoretic approach to examining the distinct semantics of causal expressions. This paper introduces formal logical definitions of different types of conditions using SEM networks, and illustrates how this proposal, along with its formal tools, can help to clarify the asymmetric entailment relationship among different causative constructions.

 

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