Event, Assertion and Verification Time

At IMLA 2013 (Intuitionistic Modal Logic and Applications) last week I talked about a constructive modal logic conceived to interpret "conditionals" in English. This system comes from its possible worlds semantics, something that I use to hate...yeah, Kripke semantics was never a source of intuition for me. 

Still isn't, but the idea that the slogan "you know the meaning of a sentence if you know the conditions under which it is true” should be replaced by  “You know the meaning of a sentence if you know the change it brings about in the information state of anyone who wants to incorporate the piece of news conveyed by it" rings true. Call me a coward if you will, but talking about information states of agents and changes that they undergo when new information comes in, feels less threatening than talking about "truth".

The slides are here, but my level of understanding of this stuff is still very far from ideal. 

(hope the two saudi arabian farmers in the picture are making progress faster...)

Unilog and IMLA: Research Horizons

Last week I was in Rio talking at Unilog and IMLA. I had three talks accepted and prepared slides (not very well, but somewhat..) for the three talks.

One talk was not given. This was on 'Contextual Constructive Description Logic', joint work with Natasha Alechina, from Nottingham University. Our main idea was to say that one can construct modal intuitionistic description logics, as well as usual modal description logics. Slides are here.

Tomorrow: CSLI Workshop Perspectives on Modality

CSLI Workshop Perspectives on Modality

Program:

Leon van der Torre (Luxembourg & CSLI): Deontic logic without possible worlds
Thomas Icard III (Stanford) and Wesley Holliday (Berkeley): Measure Semantics and Qualitative Semantics for Epistemic Modals

Stefan Kaufmann (Northwestern & UConn): Independencies in Counterfactuals
Dan Lassiter (Stanford): The weakness of must: In defense of a mantra

Igor Yanovich (MIT): Distinction between 'advice' and 'factual' deontics, or "Mary should buy that laptop" vs "Mary should go to jail"
Anette Frank (Heidelberg): Challenges in the annotation of modal meanings and how to circumvent them 

Linear Logic for Linguists

Cayman Islands from Space

This post is mostly an excuse to add a link to some old ESSLLI 2000 lectures notes on Linear Logic for Linguists. I hope to make them into a book, adding some new material, but in the meanwhile it would be good to have them in a place that I can find. Some of the time...
The notes were also used in a course in Stanford in 2002 by Ash Asudeh and Dick Crouch, Resource Accounting at the Syntax-Semantics Interface. 
and they were the basis of another ESSLLI course in 2004.
Ash and Dick wrote several papers together, of which I need to read "Coordination and Parallelism in Glue Semantics: Integrating Discourse Cohesion and the Element Constraint".

The Canon of Tech

It took me forever to find this Canon again. The Atlantic is a great magazine and Alexis Madrigal is really good, but I thought the piece was in Wired. and I couldn't remember Madrigal's name. and Google wasn't very helpful as tech canon sends you to the cameras, all the time. With some reason, of course.
And yes, I do know some tricks with queries, but it usually irks me to use them, so I kept thinking of other ways of getting to the article...Glad I finally found it again. I'm keeping a copy for myself somewhere safe.
BTW the photo is from Col. Chris Hadfield, who's the commandant of the International Space Station right now. His photos are absolutely fantastic.

Temporality in Portuguese

I know nothing about it and should really try to learn a bit, but the tenses work very differently in Portuguese and English.

Apparently, if you say I have lost my watch in English you cannot continue to say but I found it again. This is to be contrasted with saying I lost my watch, but I have found it again which is just fine. Now in Portuguese, with literal translations Eu tinha perdido meu relogio  and Eu perdi meu relogio, both can be followed by mas o achei de novo.  And actually the first one seems better. In English the theory is that The perfect  seems to involve some notion of persisting causal consequence, absent from the past tense.

Need to ask my friend Patricia what does she make of this, what is the story that we have in Portuguese...

Time takes forever

Continuing from Temporality in Natural Language....
 6. Logical representations: should sentence meanings explicitly quantify over times and/or events, or should they have tense operators akin to the propositional operators familiar from modal logic? (vcvp: which operators? past, present, future? much as I like operators, are they enough?)
7. Aspect: what is the significance of constructions like the perfect I have lost
my watch and the progressive John was crossing the road? (vcvp: significant as they may be, not now...)
8. Aspectual class and coercion: processes vs. states and events..(vcvp:definitely punting)
9. Temporal and nominal constitution: collective/distributive distinctions (vcvp:the same..)
10. Nominal tense: nominal predicates do not normally carry an explicit temporal marking, like verbal ones do, but an individual can be a child at one time and an adult at another. How is their temporal interpretation determined?
11. Temporal adverbials and connectives: how do adverbials interact with tense, aspect and aspectual class? (vcvp: is there a list? how do know if we have most of them?)
12. Sequence of tense: in John said Mary went to London, why is Mary’s going to London prior to John’s reported utterance? (vcvp: how much of this can the language tell us about?)
13. Modals, conditionals and the future: there is a close connection between time and modality. Conditionals too interact with time and tense in complex ways. (vcvp: how to make the minimum number of mistakes on that?)
14. Generics: does a syntactically present tense, but generic, sentence like Lions are mammals make any temporal reference, or does it express an atemporal truth? (vcvp: Similarly the command Play Avatar! is this atemporal or a present or future tense form?)

Anna and Paola in Dagstuhl.