Week of Dec 1

LangCog

The next LangCog meeting of the semester will be on Tuesday, December 2nd from 5:30-7:00pm. It will take place in William James Hall, Room #1550. The speaker is Viola Schmitt (MIT), and the title and abstract of her talk can be found below. Food will be available at the meeting, and you can find the schedule for the remainder of the semester on the LangCog website.

Speaker: Viola Schmitt (MIT)

Title: How are classical meanings expressed?

Abstract: When trying to establish the core semantic building blocks of natural languages (i.e., the meanings that the morpho-syntactically smallest elements can make use of),  the (often implicit) assumption seems to be that  `classical’ meanings — meanings correlated with those of connectives and quantifiers in classical propositional or 1st order predicate logic — are among them. Drawing on both older and more recent work by my collaborators and me, I argue that this assumption cannot be maintained for the universal part of the language (elements like English `and’ or English `every’) and then sketch the consequences for the existential part of the language.

Ankana Saha Thesis Defense

Final-year student Ankana Saha is defending her thesis on Monday December 8th from 2 to 4pm in Boylston 105. Refreshments will be provided after the defense in the department lounge. Details can be found below:

Title: Demonstratives and the semantics-pragmatics interface: from natural languages to language models

Time: Monday December 8th, 2-4pm

Location: Boylston 105

This is the last issue of this semester's Spell-Out Blog!

See you after the holidays!