30.3215, Calls: Philosophy of Language, Pragmatics, Semantics/China

Sat Aug 24 12:20:45 UTC 2019

LINGUIST List: Vol-30-3215. Sat Aug 24 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.3215, Calls: Philosophy of Language, Pragmatics, Semantics/China

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Date: Sat, 24 Aug 2019 08:19:31
From: Mingming Liu [markliu at mail.tsinghua.edu.cn]
Subject: 2nd Tsinghua Interdisciplinary Workshop on Logic, Language, and Meaning: Monotonicity in Logic and Language

Full Title: 2nd Tsinghua Interdisciplinary Workshop on Logic, Language, and Meaning: Monotonicity in Logic and Language 
Short Title: TLLM2020 

Date: 10-Apr-2020 - 12-Apr-2020
Location: Beijing, China 
Contact Person: Mingming Liu
Meeting Email: markliu at mail.tsinghua.edu.cn
Web Site: http://tsinghualogic.net/JRC/?p=1489 

Linguistic Field(s): Philosophy of Language; Pragmatics; Semantics 

Call Deadline: 30-Nov-2019 

Meeting Description:

Monotonicity, in various forms, is a pervasive phenomenon in logic,
linguistics, and related areas. In theoretical linguistics, monotonicity
properties (and lattice-theoretic notions such as additivity), as semantic
properties of intra-sentential environments, determine the syntactic
distribution of a class of terms robustly attested across languages called
Negative Polarity Items (NPIs, Ladusaw 1979), such as English any in (1), and
is relevant to a large array of semantic phenomena such as the interpretation
of donkey pronouns (Kanzanawa 1994, (2)), plural definites (Krifka 1996, (3)),
plural morphemes and so on, and to the presence of pragmatic inferences such
as scalar implicatures (Grice 1989), as illustrated by the interpretative
difference of disjunction in (4) (Chierchia 2004) . 

(1) a. Somebody bought any cookies.

b. Nobody bought any cookies.

(2)  a. Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it. (Universal interpretation of
it)

b. No farmer who owns a donkey beats it. (Existential interpretation of it)

(3) a. Mary has read the files on her desk. (Universal interpretation of the
files)

b. Mary has not read the files on her desk. (Existential interpretation of the
files)

(4) a. If everything will go well, we’ll hire either Mary or Sue. (Exclusive
interpretation of or)

b. If we hire either Mary or Sue, everything will go well.  (Inclusive
interpretation of or)

In logic and mathematics, a function f between pre-ordered sets is monotone or
increasing (antitone or decreasing) if x ≤ y implies f(x) ≤ f(y) (f(y) ≤
f(x)). Monotonicity guarantees the existence of fixed points (points x such
that f(x)=x) and the well-formedness of inductive definitions, and logical
languages with expressive means for talking about fixed points, such as
first-order fixed point logic or the modal µ-calculus, is a growing area of
study in logic and computer science. Also, monotonicity is closely tied to
reasoning, in formal as well as natural languages. Corresponding to the
semantic properties of monotonicity and antitonicity there is the syntactic
property of (positive or negative) polarity. Monotonicity Reasoning, which
involves replacement of predicates in syntactic contexts of given polarity, is
a simple yet surprisingly powerful mode of inference. Starting with work of
van Benthem and Sánchez-Valencia in the 1980s, the idea of Natural Logic,
comprising algorithms for polarity marking and formal calculi for monotonicity
reasoning, is an active research project (Icard and Moss 2014). Likewise, much
of the current study of syllogistic reasoning (Moss 2015) formally exploits
patterns of monotonicity.

Recent logical and linguistic work on monotonicity has also found its way into
computation systems for natural language processing (e.g. systems for
Recognizing Textual Entailment, MacCartney and Manning 2009), and cognitive
models of human reasoning (Geurts 2003). 

The goal of our workshop is to bring together researchers working on
monotonicity or related properties, from different fields and perspectives.
Topics of the workshop may include (but are not limited to) the following:

linguistic phenomena sensitive to monotonicity and their analyses
different types of monotonicity (logical monotonicity, Strawson monotonicity
and perceived monotonicity; Chemla, Homer and Rothschild 2012)
monotonicity beyond quantificational determiners and negation (monotonicity of
embedding verbs and modals, monotonicity in questions)
cognitive and computational aspects of monotonicity
representation of monotonicity in formal and natural languages 
logics based on fixed points
formal calculi of monotonicity and related properties
Natural Logic: theory and applications
logics for syllogistic fragments

Call for Papers:

Abstracts are not to exceed two pages of A4 or letter-sized  paper, including
data and references, preferably with 1″ (2.54cm) margins on all sides, set in
a font no smaller than 11 points. The abstract should have a clear title and
should not identify the author(s).

The abstract must be submitted electronically in PDF format, via EasyChair
(https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tllm2020).

Papers from the workshop will be published (after peer review) in the FoLLI
LNCS series.

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