Language, Form, and Logic: In Pursuit of Natural Logic's Holy Grail

Description

I will present, in broad strokes, my upcoming book Language, Form, and Logic: In Pursuit of Natural Logic's Holy Grail, co-authored with Peter Ludlow.  Starting from the idea — the Holy Grail of the Medieval logicians — that all of logic could be reduced to two very simple rules that are sensitive to logical polarity, we end up with a sound and complete, and arguably cognitively plausible, Dynamic Deductive System.  We call the central formal relation of this system "p-scope", and this relation turns out to be also the key to the formal characterization of conservativity by restrictedness.  Assuming that restrictedness is a fundamental property of natural language then dissolves the basic puzzle of donkey anaphora, and allows us to pursue the integration of our plural first-order formal language into linguistic theory, in particular to view Logical Form of the Minimalist Program as a particular encoding of that formal language.

[ZOOM ACCESS] https://us02web.zoom.us/j/7538649992?pwd=T1ZPODdXSDhJbzNGTEtOVlpXWG5GZz09

Meeting ID: 753 864 9992
Passcode: 9ZmiqR