33.3489, Books: Language, Form, and Logic: Ludlow, Živanović

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3489. Mon Nov 07 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.3489, Books: Language, Form, and Logic: Ludlow, Živanović

Moderators:

Editor for this issue: Maria Lucero Guillen Puon <luceroguillen at linguistlist.org>
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Date: Mon, 07 Nov 2022 22:25:11
From: Tyler Simnick [Tyler.Simnick at oup.com]
Subject: Language, Form, and Logic: Ludlow, Živanović

 


Title: Language, Form, and Logic 
Subtitle: In Pursuit of Natural Logic's Holy Grail 
Publication Year: 2022 
Publisher: Oxford University Press
	   http://www.oup.com/us
	

Book URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/language-form-and-logic-9780199591534?utm_source=linguistlist&utm_medium=listserv&utm_campaign=linguistics 


Author: Peter Ludlow
Author: Sašo Živanović

Hardback: ISBN:  9780199591534 Pages: 464 Price: U.S. $ 105


Abstract:

This book takes an idea first explored by medieval logicians 800 years ago and
revisits it armed with the tools of contemporary linguistics, logic, and
computer science. The idea - the Holy Grail of the medieval logicians - was
the thought that all of logic could be reduced to two very simple rules that
are sensitive to logical polarity (for example, the presence and absence of
negations).

Ludlow and Živanović pursue this idea and show how it has profound
consequences for our understanding of the nature of human inferential
capacities. They also show its consequences for some of the deepest issues in
contemporary linguistics, including the nature of quantification, puzzles
about discourse anaphora and pragmatics, and even insights into the source of
aboutness in natural language. The key to their enterprise is a formal
relation they call "p-scope" - a polarity-sensitive relation that controls the
operations that can be carried out in their Dynamic Deductive System. They
show that with p-scope in play, deductions can be carried out using sublogical
operations like those they call COPY and PRUNE - operations that are simple
syntactic operations on sentences. They prove that the resulting deductive
system is complete and sound.

The result is a beautiful formal tapestry in which p-scope unlocks important
properties of natural language, including the property of "restrictedness,"
which they prove to be equivalent to the semantic notion of conservativity.
More than that, they show that restrictedness is also a key to understanding
quantification and discourse anaphora, and many other linguistic phenomena.
 



Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                     Philosophy of Language


Written In: English  (eng)

See this book announcement on our website: 
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=164313




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