36.2622, Confs: 5th Tsinghua Interdisciplinary Workshop on Logic, Language and Meaning (China)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2622. Wed Sep 03 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.2622, Confs: 5th Tsinghua Interdisciplinary Workshop on Logic, Language and Meaning (China)

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Date: 02-Sep-2025
From: Mingming Liu [markliu at mail.tsinghua.edu.cn]
Subject: 5th Tsinghua Interdisciplinary Workshop on Logic, Language and Meaning


5th Tsinghua Interdisciplinary Workshop on Logic, Language and Meaning
Short Title: TLLM 2026
Theme: Modality in Logic and Language

Date: 03-Apr-2026 - 05-Apr-2026
Location: Beijing, China
Contact: Jialiang Yan
Contact Email: jialiang.yann at gmail.com
Meeting URL: https://tsinghualogic.net/JRC/tllm-2026/

Linguistic Field(s): Pragmatics; Semantics

Submission Deadline: 15-Nov-2025

The study of modality in logic is as old as logic itself. Modern
propositional and predicate logic replaced notions like ‘necessary’
and ‘possible’, traditionally used to define what it means for a
proposition to follow from other propositions, by quantification over
ways to interpret the non-logical symbols of the language. But the
study of reasoning with the modalities themselves has continued in
logic, with the modern tools now available. Early syntactic studies of
systems for ‘strict implication’ gave way to possible worlds style
semantics in the hands of pioneers like Carnap, Kanger, Hintikka,
Kripke, and others, which now provides a standard framework for the
logical study of modality. This framework has been applied to systems
of logic where oA is meant to capture readings, besides ‘A is
necessary’, like ‘A will always be the case, A holds after a certain
program execution step, A is provable, obligatory, justified,
probable, believed/known by an agent’, etc. Today, the vast area of
philosophical logic studies all kinds of ‘intensional’ notions, using
formal languages and well-established mathematical tools. In
philosophy too, the discussion about the nature of possible worlds and
their use for various modalities, initiated by Lewis, Stalnaker,
Kripke, Fine, Williamson, and others, is still a very active area of
research.
In parallel, and sometimes in cooperation, linguists have studied the
syntactic and semantic behavior of modals in natural languages.
Modals, together with tense, enable us to displace from the actual
here and now, embodying one of Hockett’s design features of natural
language: displacement. Natural language also abounds in modal
expressions and constructions. In English for instance, we encounter
at least auxiliaries, verbs, adverbs, nouns, adjectives, and
conditionals that convey modal meanings. On the other hand, languages
vary significantly in how they express and categorize modal meanings
(as explored in the works of Rullmann, Matthewson, Deal and many
others). The rich empirical landscape provides linguists – building on
Kratzer’s pioneer work – with opportunities to study the range of
modal concepts expressible in natural language, how they are
expressed, the theoretical frameworks and logical tools required to
analyze them, the processes by which they are acquired, and so on.
The TLLM workshops aim to bring together logicians, philosophers, and
linguists around a specific theme of common interest. For the 2026
event, the theme is unusually wide, and we welcome contributions on
any general or particular aspect of the modalities in logic or
language. Below are just a few examples of possible topics for this
workshop.
- Foundations and semantics of modality: E.g.
Kripke/neighborhood/possibility/topological/
game-theoretic/inquisitive/team semantics.
- Proof theory for modal logic: E.g. sequent/natural
deduction/labelled/circular/display/ deep inference systems.
- Epistemic and doxastic logics.
- Deontic logic, norms and preference.
- Modality in natural language: E.g. epistemic/deontic/dynamic modals;
weak necessity and gradability; syntax of modals; semantic-pragmatic
interface; cross-linguistic typology; experimental and corpus studies.
- Non-classical perspectives on modality: E.g.
intuitionistic/linear/relevant/paraconsistent/ modal bilattice
frameworks; bilateralist accounts.
- Modality in computation, verification, and AI: E.g. KR with
modalities; causal and probabilistic modal models; LLMs and modal
reasoning (benchmarks, neurosymbolic methods, toolkits).
- Modality and other intensional categories: e.g. modality and tense;
modality and evidentiality; modality and mood.
- The processing and acquisition of modal expressions in natural
languages.
We invite submissions of 2-page abstracts (including references) on
any of the broad themes related to the modality in logic and language
as suggested above. After a review procedure, authors of accepted
abstracts will have the opportunity to present their papers at the
workshop, either as a contributed talk or in the poster session. The
poster session is intended to provide an informal setting for
discussion and to encourage participation from early-career
researchers and students. After the workshop, a volume of full papers
(properly refereed) will be published in the Springer LNCS – FoLLI
series. Details on submission of full papers will follow.
Abstracts should be submitted via Easychair:
https://easychair.org/conferences?conf=tllm2026
The workshop will take place on site at Tsinghua University, Beijing.



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