On 11/10 at 1pm in Bousfield A101-A, Xuetong Yuan will lead us in a discussion of Mandelkern and Dorst 2022 “Assertion is Weak.”
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Meeting on 11/3: Kuhn 2021
On Thursday 11/3 at 1:00pm in Bousfield A101-A, Yusuke Yagi will present Kuhn 2021 ‘The dynamics of negative concord.’
Talk of interest on 09/16: Florio, Shapiro and Snyder
The UConn Logic Colloquium will feature a talk on language semantics by Salvatore Florio, Stewart Shapiro, and Eric Snyder on Friday, September 16, 11:45am. The talk will be in hybrid form.
Semantics and logic; logic and semantics
It is widely (but not universally) held that logical consequence is determined (at least in part) by the meanings of the logical terminology. One might think that this is an empirical claim that can be tested by the usual methods of linguistic semantics. Yet most philosophers who hold views about logic like this do not engage in empirical research to test the main thesis. Sometimes the thesis is just stated, without argument, and sometimes it is argued for on a priori grounds. Moreover, many linguistic studies of words like “or”, the conditional, and the quantifiers run directly contrary to the thesis in question.
From the other direction, much of the work in linguistic semantics uses logical symbols. For example, it is typical for a semanticist to write a biconditional, in a formal language, whose left hand side has a symbol for the meaning of an expression in natural language and whose right hand side is a formula consisting of lambda-terms and other symbols from standard logic works: quantifiers ∀, ∃ and connectives ¬, →, ∧, ∨, ↔. This enterprise thus seems to presuppose that readers already understand the formal logical symbols, and the semanticist uses this understanding to shed light on the meanings of expressions in natural language. This occurs even if the natural language expressions are natural language terms corresponding to the logical ones: “or”, “not”, “forall”, and the like.
The purpose of this talk is to explore the relation between logic and the practice of empirical semantics, hoping to shed light, in some way, on both enterprises.
Meeting on 4/28: Yang practice talk for SALT
Muyi Yang will present a practice of her SALT talk “Singularity and plurality of discourse reference to worlds.”
Meeting on 4/14: Bledin & Rawlins 2020
We will have a meeting this Thursday, April 14 from 12:45 to 1:45 in Oak 338.
Xuetong Yuan will lead a discussion of the paper “Resistance and Resolution: Attentional Dynamics in Discourse” by Bledin and Rawlins, 2020.
Find the paper at the link below.
https://academic.oup.com/jos/article/37/1/43/5734752
Meeting on 4/7: Tellings 2021
This week Muyi Yang will lead us in a discussion of “When if or when specify modals” by Jos Tellings.
The meeting is at the usual time: Thursday, April 7 at 12:45-1:45 in Oak 338.
Find the link to the paper below.
http://www.lingref.com/cpp/wccfl/38/paper3589.pdf
Talk of interest on 04/01: Skovgaard-Olsen (Göttingen)
The Logic Colloquium on Friday, April 1, at 2:30pm will feature Niels Skovgaard-Olsen (University of Göttingen) with a talk on Norm Conflicts and Epistemic Modals. The talk will be held online. See the email announcement or contact Stefan Kaufmann for details.
Meeting on 3/31: Prince 2019
We will meet this Thursday 3/31 from 12:45 to 1:45 in Oak 338 to discuss “Counterfactuality and Past” by Kilu von Prince.
Stefan will lead the discussion. You can find open access to the paper at the link below.
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10988-019-09259-6.pdf
Updated schedule
Here is an updated schedule of upcoming presentations:
3/31: Stefan Kaufmann leads the discussion of von Prince 2019
4/7: Muyi Yang leads discussion of Tellings 2021 “When if or when Specify Modals”
4/14: OPEN
4/21: OPEN
4/28: Muyi Yang SALT practice talk