esslli2008

Composing meanings as programs

This wiki page is for Chung-chieh Shan’s course at the 2008 European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information, in Hamburg, Germany. It is an advanced course on language and logic in week 1 (August 4–8) at 9:15–10:45am.

Abstract

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.

Course reader

PDF (1MB), posted on 2008-06-12.

Revised and tentative schedule