The European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) is organized every year by the Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI) in different sites around Europe. The main focus of ESSLLI is on the interface between linguistics, logic and computation. ESSLLI offers foundational, introductory and advanced courses, as well as workshops, covering a wide variety of topics within the three areas of interest: Language and Computation, Language and Logic, and Logic and Computation. The 16 papers presented in this volume have been selected among 44 papers presented by talks or posters at the Student Sessions of the 24th and 25th editions of ESSLLI, held in 2012 in Opole, Poland, and 2013 in Düsseldorf, Germany. The papers are extended versions of the versions presented, and have all been subjected to a second round of blind peer review.
This book investigates the syntax and semantics of proportional most and other majority quantifiers across languages. Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin and Ion Giurgea draw on data from around 40 languages to demonstrate the existence of two distinct semantic types of most: a distributive type, which compares cardinalities of sets of atoms, and a cumulative type, which involves measuring plural and mass entities with respect to a whole. On the syntactic side, the most significant difference is between partitive and non-partitive configurations: certain majority quantifiers are specific to partitive constructions, while others are also allowed in non-partitives. The volume also explores complex expressions of the type the largest part and nominal quantifiers of the type the majority. The authors argue in favour of a quantificational analysis of most, in contrast to many recent studies, but adopt a bipartition-cum-superlative analysis for the largest part. The volume is a large-scale crosslinguistic investigation, offering typological insights as well as case studies from a range of languages, including German, Romanian, Hungarian, Hindi, and Syrian Arabic. The findings have implications for the study of number marking, partitivity, kind reference, (in)definiteness marking, and other crucial issues in linguistic theory.
This book addresses the complexity of Russian verbal prefixation system that has been extensively studied but yet not explained. Traditionally, different meanings have been investigated and listed in the dictionaries and grammars and more recently linguists attempted to unify various prefix usages under more general descriptions. The existent semantic approaches, however, do not aim to use semantic representations in order to account for the problems of prefix stacking and aspect determination. This task has been so far undertaken by syntactic approaches to prefixation, that divide verbal prefixes in classes and limit complex verb formation by restricting structural positions available for the members of each class. I show that these approaches have two major drawbacks: the implicit prediction of the non-existence of complex biaspectual verbs and the absence of uniformly accepted formal criteria for the underlying prefix classification. In this book the reader can find an implementable formal semantic approach to prefixation that covers five prefixes: za-, na-, po-, pere-, and do-. It is shown how to predict the existence, semantics, and aspect of a given complex verb with the help of the combination of an LTAG and frame semantics. The task of identifying the possible affix combinations is distributed between three modules: syntax, which is kept simple (only basic structural assumptions), frame semantics, which ensures that the constraints are respected, and pragmatics, which rules out some prefixed verbs and restricts the range of available interpretations. For the purpose of the evaluation of the theory, an implementation of the proposed analysis for a grammar fragment using a metagrammar description is provided. It is shown that the proposed analysis delivers more accurate and complete predictions with respect to the existence of complex verbs than the most precise syntactic account.
This book focuses on the game-theoretical semantics and epistemic logic of Jaakko Hintikka. Hintikka was a prodigious and esteemed philosopher and logician, and his death in August 2015 was a huge loss to the philosophical community. This book, whose chapters have been in preparation for several years, is dedicated to the work of Jaako Hintikka, and to his memory. This edited volume consists of 23 contributions from leading logicians and philosophers, who discuss themes that span across the entire range of Hintikka’s career. Semantic Representationalism, Logical Dialogues, Knowledge and Epistemic logic are among some of the topics covered in this book's chapters. The book should appeal to students, scholars and teachers who wish to explore the philosophy of Jaako Hintikka.
Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st Workshop on Logic, Language, Information and Communication, WoLLIC 2014, held in Valparaiso, Chile, in September 2014. The 15 contributed papers presented together with 6 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 29 submissions. The focus of the workshop was on the following subjects Inter-Disciplinary Research involving Formal Logic, Computing and Programming Theory, and Natural Language and Reasoning.
Logical pluralism is the view that different logics are equally appropriate, or equally correct. Logical relativism is a pluralism according to which validity and logical consequence are relative to something. In Varieties of Logic, Stewart Shapiro develops several ways in which one can be a pluralist or relativist about logic. One of these is an extended argument that words and phrases like 'valid' and 'logical consequence' are polysemous or, perhaps better, are cluster concepts. The notions can be sharpened in various ways. This explains away the 'debates' in the literature between inferentialists and advocates of a truth-conditional, model-theoretic approach, and between those who advocate higher-order logic and those who insist that logic is first-order. A significant kind of pluralism flows from an orientation toward mathematics that emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century, and continues to dominate the field today. The theme is that consistency is the only legitimate criterion for a theory. Logical pluralism arises when one considers a number of interesting and important mathematical theories that invoke a non-classical logic, and are rendered inconsistent, and trivial, if classical logic is imposed. So validity is relative to a theory or structure. The perspective raises a host of important questions about meaning. The most significant of these concern the semantic content of logical terminology, words like 'or', 'not', and 'for all', as they occur in rigorous mathematical deduction. Does the intuitionistic 'not', for example, have the same meaning as its classical counterpart? Shapiro examines the major arguments on the issue, on both sides, and finds them all wanting. He then articulates and defends a thesis that the question of meaning-shift is itself context-sensitive and, indeed, interest-relative. He relates the issue to some prominent considerations concerning open texture, vagueness, and verbal disputes. Logic is ubiquitous. Whenever there is deductive reasoning, there is logic. So there are questions about logical pluralism that are analogous to standard questions about global relativism. The most pressing of these concerns foundational studies, wherein one compares theories, sometimes with different logics, and where one figures out what follows from what in a given logic. Shapiro shows that the issues are not problematic, and that is usually easy to keep track of the logic being used and the one mentioned.
Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this book constitutes the 5th volume of the FoLLI LNAI subline. It contains the refereed proceedings of the Third Indian Conference on Logic and Its Applications, ICLA 2009, held in Chennai, India, in January 2009. The 12 revised full papers presented together with 7 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers present current research in all aspects of formal logic. They address in detail: algebraic logic and set theory, combinatorics and philosophical logic, modal logics with applications to computer science and game theory, and connections between ancient logic systems and modern systems.
Herbert Simon's classic work on artificial intelligence in the expanded and updated third edition from 1996, with a new introduction by John E. Laird. Herbert Simon's classic and influential The Sciences of the Artificial declares definitively that there can be a science not only of natural phenomena but also of what is artificial. Exploring the commonalities of artificial systems, including economic systems, the business firm, artificial intelligence, complex engineering projects, and social plans, Simon argues that designed systems are a valid field of study, and he proposes a science of design. For this third edition, originally published in 1996, Simon added new material that takes into account advances in cognitive psychology and the science of design while confirming and extending the book's basic thesis: that a physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for intelligent action. Simon won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1978 for his research into the decision-making process within economic organizations and the Turing Award (considered by some the computer science equivalent to the Nobel) with Allen Newell in 1975 for contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing. The Sciences of the Artificial distills the essence of Simon's thought accessibly and coherently. This reissue of the third edition makes a pioneering work available to a new audience.
The aim of the present volume is two-fold: to give a coherent account of the locative alternation in English, and to develop a constructional theory that overcomes a number of problems in earlier constructional accounts. The lexical-constructional account proposed here is characterized by two main features. On the one hand, it emphasizes the need for a detailed examination of verb meanings. On the other, it introduces lower-level constructions such as verb-class-specific constructions and verb-specific constructions, and makes full use of these lower-level constructions in accounting for alternation phenomena. Rather than being a completely new version of construction grammar, the proposed lexical-constructional account is an automatic consequence of the basic tenet of constructional approaches as being usage-based.
