deadline for
submissions: 17 Mars 2017
notification to authors: 15 April 2017
final version due: 19 May 2017
conference: 17-21 July 2017 see programme below
The compositional
interpretation of determiners relies on quantifiers — in a
general acceptation of this later term which includes
generalised quantifiers, generics, definite descriptions i.e.
any operation that applies to one or several formulas with a
free variable, binds it and yields a formula or possibly a
generic term (the operator is then called a subnector,
following Curry). There is a long history of quantification in
the Ancient and Medieval times at the border between logic and
philosophy of language, before the proper formalisation of
quantification by Frege.
A common solution for natural language semantics is the
so-called theory of generalised quantifiers. Quantifiers like «
some, exactly two, at most three, the majority of, most of, few,
many, … » are all described in terms of functions of two
predicates viewed as subsets.
Nevertheless, many mathematical and linguistic questions remain
open.
On the mathematical side, little is known about generalised ,
generalised and vague quantifiers, in particular about their
proof theory. On the other hand, even for standard quantifiers,
indefinites and definite descriptions, there exist alternative
formulations with choice functions and generics or subnectors
(Russell’s iota, Hilbert-Bernays, eta, epsilon, tau). The
computational aspects of these logical frameworks are also worth
studying, both for computational linguistic software and for the
modelling of the cognitive processes involved in understanding
or producing sentences involving quantifiers.
On the linguistic side, the relation between the syntactic
structure and its semantic interpretation, quantifier raising,
underspecification, scope issues,… are not fully
satisfactory. Furthermore extension of linguistic studies to
various languages have shown how complex quantification is in
natural language and its relation to phenomena like generics,
plurals, and mass nouns.
Finally, and this can be seen as a link between formal models of
quantification and natural language, there by now exist
psycholinguistic experiments that connect formal models and
their computational properties to the actual way human do
process sentences with quantifiers, and handle their inherent
ambiguity, complexity, and difficulty in understanding.
All those aspects are
connected in the didactics of mathematics and computer science:
there are specific difficulties to teach (and to learn) how
to understand, manipulate, produce and prove
quantified statements, and to determine the proper level
of formalisation between bare logical formulas and written or
spoken natural language.
This workshop aims at
gathering mathematicians, logicians,
linguists, computer scientists to present their latest
advances in the study of quantification.
Among the topics that wil be addressed are the following :
Abstract
should be less than four pages of contents with, in addition to
these four pages, a bibliography.
We prefer abstracts to be typeset with LaTeX, using the
following template:
For non
latex users, the style is 12pt, times, with margin 2,5 cm,
and you for the title affiliation, sections, bibliography etc. here is a PDF example.