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.

Composing meanings as programs

The meaning of expressions can be characterized either denotationally, by mapping them to a separate domain of values, or operationally, by mapping them to themselves. Drawing on a tight link between denotation and operation in programming languages, a growing literature in natural language semantics proposes dynamic accounts for various linguistic phenomena. This course surveys these accounts, with emphasis on two themes: first, the correspondence between notions of context and cases of apparent noncompositionality; second, building computational intuition through suggested lab exercises. Day 1: From denotations and calculi to rewriting systems (Moschovakis; Muskens; Parikh; Felleisen) Day 2: From anaphora to presupposition (Groenendijk & Stokhof; Heim; Kamp; Fernando; Stone) Day 3: From exceptions to quantification (Montague; Felleisen; Danvy & Filinski; Barker & Shan) Day 4: Web interactions; type soundness (Queinnec; Wright & Felleisen) Day 5: From quotation to hyperintensionality (Cappelen & Lepore; Geurts & Maier; Smith; Taha)