ABSTRACT. This paper attempts to explore what kind of general theory of action a notion of linguistic acts could be embedded in and tries to develop the beginnings of such a theory using type theory as the starting point. We will here only develop a non-linguistic example, although we will point out relationships to linguistic acts during the course of the paper.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents a new logical analysis of nominal comparatives (i.e. sentences as in (1)) within the Delineation Semantics (DelS) approach to gradability and comparison (Klein, 1980, among many others).

(1) More linguists came to the party than stayed home to study.

Along with the Degree Semantics (DegS) framework (see Kennedy, 1997, for a summary), DelS is one of the dominant logical frameworks for analyzing the meaning of gradable constituents of the adjectival syntactic category; however, there has been very little work done investigating the application of this framework to the analysis of gradability outside the adjectival domain. This state of affairs distinguishes the DelS framework from its DegS counterpart, where such questions have been investigated in great deal since the beginning of the 21st century. Nevertheless, it has been observed (for example, by Doetjes et al. (2011)) that there is nothing inherently adjectival about the way that the interpretations of scalar predicates are calculated in DelS, and therefore that there is enormous potential for this approach to shed light on the nature of gradability and comparison in the nominal and verbal domains. This paper gives the first attempt at realizing this potential within a Mereological extension of a (simplified) version of Klein (1980)’s system.

ABSTRACT. the paper presents a proof-theoretic semantics (PTS) for intensional transitive verbs, claimed to be advantageous compared to the model-theoretic semantics (MTS) for them. The PTS evades the controversies over the truth-conditions for sentences headed by ITVs, and is relieved from the complicated ontological commitments originated from various inhabitants populating models (over which there is no consensus). The following three characteristics of ITVs are handled: 1. Admittance of non-specific objects 2. Resistance to substitutability of coextensives 3. Suspension of existential commitment The paper also considers in detail the monotonicity involved with ITVs. Finally, there is a discussion of a proof-theoretic handling of passivisation of ITVs. The paper extends work on PTS for an extensional fragment, reviewed in an appendix.

ABSTRACT. Much of the current work in pragmatics goes back to Paul Grice who introduced the notion of implicature, a part of the meaning of an utterance which goes beyond the semantic value of the actual sentence uttered.  An implicature may depend on the particular circumstances prevailing when a statement is made, or it may be more general and community wide.

We consider the special case of a particularized conversational implicature which arises when one agent, A, has a goal G (typically assumed to be common knowledge), and makes a statement relevant to her situation. The other agent B then says something, and an implicature arises from B's utterance which can only be understood in terms of B helping A to achieve the goal. It turns out that Hoare semantics, developed originally for proving program correctness, is relevant here to examine the appropriateness of the action which A might take to achieve her goal. 

A second point is Grice's principle of cooperation.  Grice assumed that A and B above are cooperating and his treatment of implicature needs an assumption of cooperation to work out.   But as we are all aware, not all conversations are fully cooperative. For instance, an American tourist and a street hawker in India may negotiate the price of a carved elephant which the latter is offering to the former. The cooperation arises from the fact that both want the sale to take place, but there is also an opposition as the tourist wants to pay less and the hawker wants to charge more. What will each say?

The well known come on uttered by a young man to his date, "Would you like to come to my apartment and see my etchings?" provides another such case where the man and his date may have different priorities which they need to negotiate.

We suggest that a principle formulated by John Nash in his "The Bargaining Problem" provides the proper generalization for the mix of cooperation and competition which prevails in such dialogues.

ABSTRACT. Pregroup grammars are introduced by Lambek in 1999 as an algebraic tool for the formal analysis of natural languages. The main focus of the present paper is placed on a special extension of this calculus known as tupled pregroup grammars. Their applications to Italian concerning different sentential structures involving clitic pronouns, relative pronouns and related phenomena are taken into consideration and the advantages of the tupled pregroup approach are shown from the point of view of both linguistic analysis and syntactic computation.

ABSTRACT. The third round of the Kurt Gödel Research Prize Fellowships Program, under the title: Connecting Foundations and Technology, aims at supporting young scholars in early stages of their academic careers by offering highest fellowships in history of logic, kindly supported by the John Templeton Foundation. Young scholars being less or exactly 40 years old at the time of the commencement of the Vienna Summer of Logic (July 9, 2014) will be awarded one fellowship award in the amount of EUR 100,000, in each of the following categories:

• Logical Foundations of Mathematics,
• Logical Foundations of Computer Science, and
• Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence

The following three Boards of Jurors were in charge of choosing the winners:

• Logical Foundations of Mathematics: Jan Krajíček, Angus Macintyre, and Dana Scott (Chair).
• Logical Foundations of Computer Science: Franz Baader, Johann Makowsky, and Wolfgang Thomas (Chair).
• Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence: Luigia Carlucci Aiello, Georg Gottlob (Chair), and Bernhard Nebel.

http://fellowship.logic.at/

ABSTRACT. The aim of the FLoC Olympic Games is to start a tradition in the spirit of the ancient Olympic Games, a Panhellenic sport festival held every four years in the sanctuary of Olympia in Greece, this time in the scientific community of computational logic. Every four years, as part of the Federated Logic Conference, the Games will gather together all the challenging disciplines from a variety of computational logic in the form of the solver competitions.

At the Award Ceremonies, the competition organizers will have the opportunity to present their competitions to the public and give away special prizes, the prestigious Kurt Gödel medals, to their successful competitors. This reinforces the main goal of the FLoC Olympic Games, that is, to facilitate the visibility of the competitions associated with the conferences and workshops of the Federated Logic Conference during the Vienna Summer of Logic.

This award ceremony will host the

• 3rd Confluence Competition (CoCo 2014);
• Configurable SAT Solver Challenge (CSSC 2014);
• Ninth Max-SAT Evaluation (Max-SAT 2014);
• QBF Gallery 2014; and
• SAT Competition 2014 (SAT-COMP 2014).

ABSTRACT. Phenomena on the syntax-semantics interface of natural languages have been observed to have links with programming language semantics, namely computational effects and evaluation order. We explore this connection to be able to profit from recent development in the study of effects. We propose adopting algebraic effects and handlers as tools for facilitating a uniform and integrated treatment of different non-compositional phenomena on the syntax-semantics interface.

In our paper, we give an exposition of the framework of algebraic effects and handlers with an eye towards its applicability in computational semantics. We then present some exemplary analyses in the framework: we study the interplay of anaphora and quantification by translating the continuation-based dynamic logic of de Groote into a more DRT-like theory and we propose a treatment of overt wh-movement which avoids higher-order types in the syntax.

ABSTRACT. According to the received view of type-logical semantics (suggested by Montague and adopted by many of his successors), the number of a semantics' basic types depends proportionally on the syntactic and lexical diversity of the modeled natural language fragment. This paper provides a counterexample to this principle. In particular, it shows that Partee's temperature puzzle from [PTQ] – whose solution is commonly taken to require a basic type for indices (for the formation of individual concepts) or for individual concepts – can be interpreted in the poorer type system from [EFL], which only assumes basic individuals and propositions. This result contributes to the general project of identifying the minimal semantic requirements on models for certain linguistic fragments.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies entailments between sentences like "three boys kissed five girls" involving two or more numerically quantified noun phrases that are interpreted as expressing cumulative quantification in the sense of Scha (1984). A precise characterization of when one such sentence entails another such sentence that differs from it only in the numerals is crucially important to evaluate claims about scalar implicatures arising from the use of those sentences, as pointed out by Shimada (to appear). This problem turns out to be non-trivial and surprisingly difficult. We give a characterization of these entailments for the case of sentences with two noun phrases, together with a complete axiomatization consisting of two pairs of simple inference rules. We also give some valid inference rules for sentences with three noun phrases.