Semantics, pragmatics, and logic

DOČEKAL, Mojmír, Jiří RACLAVSKÝ and Matej DROBŇÁK. Semantics, pragmatics, and logic. 2024.

Basic information

• Original name: Semantics, pragmatics, and logic
• Authors: DOČEKAL, Mojmír (203 Czech Republic, guarantor, belonging to the institution), Jiří RACLAVSKÝ (203 Czech Republic) and Matej DROBŇÁK (703 Slovakia).
• Edition: 2024.

Other information

• Original language: English
• Type of outcome: Organization of a workshop
• Field of Study: 60200 6.2 Languages and Literature
• Country of publisher: Czech Republic
• Confidentiality degree: is not subject to a state or trade secret
• Organization unit: Faculty of Arts
• Keywords (in Czech): formal semantics; formal pragmatics; analytic philosophy
• Keywords in English: formal semantics; formal pragmatics; analytic philosophy
• Tags: International impact, Reviewed

Abstract

In the 20th century, linguistics was fundamentally influenced by logic, first with the emergence of formal semantics (Montague 1974), then in the 1970s–1990s, with the formal-semantic incorporation of modal logic (Kratzer 1977), followed by the dynamic turn in pragmatics (Kamp and Reyle 1993) and semantics. Then, after formal semantics and pragmatics were established, the early 1990s saw the experimental turn that brought new methods of collecting data and the associated statistical models necessary to evaluate them (Baayen 2008). These formal-experimental methods were also applied to Slavic (and also Czech) data; see many conferences (followed by proceedings) such as FASL and FDSL. These data have then sometimes become important in contemporary theoretical linguistic debates, touching the traditional big topics, such as the meaning of definite descriptions (Šimík and Demian 2020) or the so-called theories of plurality (TP). TP followed the development of logical tools for describing the grammatical number and numerals meaning (Link 1983) and is one of the most influential contemporary subdisciplines of formal semantics (see Dotlačil 2010; Dočekal and Wągiel 2021, a.o.). This panel follows both the trend mentioned above and the Czech linguistics tradition of research on informational structure (Sgall, Hajičová, and Panevová 1986) or the semantic investigations of sentences (Daneš 1968, Karlík 1995). This motivates the choice of topics (see the already mentioned traditional big questions). At the same time, we welcome modern pragmatic topics such as the social dimensions of meaning, Bayesian models of interpretation, presuppositions/implicatures, and formal models of language acquisition. This list of topics is necessarily incomplete and remains open to all contributions from (experimental) semantics, pragmatics, logic, and philosophy of language. The common denominator of the papers should focus on the relation of natural language to linguistic/logical or analytical/philosophical problems. The research question of a given abstract should then address the linguistic data as a tool for moving our linguistic/logical/linguistic-philosophical investigations forward.