Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics 6 (LENLS VI)

LENLS is an annual international workshop focusing on formal semantics and pragmatics. In the past it has been a satellite of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence conference; this year it will be part of JSAI International Symposia on AI (JSAI-isAI 2009), distinct from the conference though still sponsored by JSAI.

We invite submissions to this year's workshop on topics in formal semantics and pragmatics, and related fields, including but in no way limited to the following:

• Dynamic syntax/semantics/pragmatics of natural language
• Categorical/topological/coalgebraic approaches for natural language syntax/semantics/pragmatics
• Logic and its relation to natural language and linguistic reasoning (especially dynamic logics)
• Type-theoretic approaches to natural language
• Philosophy of language
• Formal pragmatics (especially game- and utility-theoretic approaches)
• Substructural expansion of Lambek Lambda Calculi
• Many-valued/Fuzzy and other non-classical logics and natural language

This year we especially welcome submissions related to the interplay between logic, philosophy of language, and formal semantics and pragmatics.

The proceedings of the workshop will be available at the conference site for registered persons. We also plan to publish a selection of the accepted papers as a portion of a volume in the `Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence' series (Springer Verlag).

• Satoru Suzuki
"Measurement-Theoretic Foundation of Logic for Goodness and Badness"
• Angel Alonso-Cortes
"The Stability of Language"
• Mihaela Popa
"Pure Semantics Facing the Psychological Reality Charge"

• Takashi Iida
"Semantics of Possibility Suffix '(Rar)e'"

• Hiroaki Nakamura, Masahiro Kobayashi
"Japanese Indefinites as Epsilon Terms"
• Daisuke Bekki, Kenichi Asai
"Representing Covert Movements by Delimited Continuations"
• Alastair Butler, Kei Yoshimoto
"Who’s on First"

• Igor Yanovich
"On the nature and formal analysis of indexical presuppositions"
• Sarah Zobel
"Non-indexical uses of 1st person singular pronouns"
• Magdalena Schwager
"Modality and speech acts: troubled by German modal particle ruhig"
• Li Kesheng
"Telicity and Serial VP Constructions in Mandarin Chinese"

November 20th (Fri), 2009

• Yurie Hara, Sanae Tamura
"Two ways to nominalize actions: concrete or abstract"
• Chungmin Lee
"Scalar reasoning and semi-duality between Concessive even/to/- mo and CT B accent/nun/-wa"

• Yasuo Nakayama, Yuji Fukuta
"Dynamic Contextualism in Semantics and in Epistemology"
• Elizabeth Coppock, David Baxter
"A translation from logic to English with dynamic semantics"

• Stefan Kaufmann (TBA)

• Nobu-Yuki Suzuki
"Kripke-Type Semantics for Intuitionistic Epistemic Logics of Shallow Depths for Game Theory"
• Hans Lycke
"An Adaptive Logic for the Formal Explication of Scalar Implicatures"
• Giuseppe Primiero, Bjorn Jespersen
"A type-theoretical approach to privative modification"

• Reinhard Muskens
"Tableaus for Natural Logic"

Location

Schedule

Course Description

Most of our logics identify semantic values that should be kept apart. As a result they come with problems such as the prediction of logical omniscience. These problems can be evaded by distinguishing between an expression's sense and its reference, in Frege's way .

In this tutorial we study logics in which such a distinction is made and in which even logically equivalent sentences can be assigned different meanings. We will also consider applications of such logics. After an overview of some of the proposals that have been made, the course will focus upon the classical theory of types and it will be explained how a natural generalization of Henkin's general models for this logic leads to structures with the desired characteristic: senses as well as referents being available as semantic values. It will turn out that the system thus obtained has many nice logical properties, completeness with respect to a very straightforward Gentzen calculus being one of them. It will also be shown how in a set-up where expressions come with senses the usual ingredients of possible worlds semantics can be constructed.

The course will emphasize ideas rather than logical technique and should be accessible to natural language semanticists who are inte rested in getting rid of a foundational difficulty of their discipline.

Contact: