Abbreviations

For more information about the lecture halls and seminar rooms, see our lecture room page. The names listed under "Technical Assistance" are student volunteers who will act as a contact person for technical questions of the lecturers and workshop speakers during the course or workshop.

Alternative logical semantics

There is a growing number of publications in which the notion of 'alternatives' is used to explain semantic and pragmatic phenomena. Alternative Logical Semantics offers a common logical foundation for these approaches. The course introduces ALS for predicate logic. ALS is an update semantics. An in formation state is a reflexive and symmetric relation (of indifference) on a set of possibilities. States embody data and issues. Alternatives arise as maximal sets of related possibilities. Updates may add data and raise issues. Disjunction (and, hence, existential quantification) does both, unless when (doubly) negated. Questions, which include conditional, alternative, mention-n, and choice questions, arise from disjunction. Relatedness is the logical notion accompanying ALS. It characterizes a wide variety of dialogue coherence relations. ALS gives a new twist to Gricean pragmatics. Cooperativity meets Trust and Politeness. Inquisitive Quality and Quantity enter the scene. Implicatures appearin a new light, and old problems are solved.