This year we will focus on the interaction between logic and cognitive science in the realm of formal semantics and pragmatics. In particular, we will be interested in the study of quantifier expressions in natural language. Recent progress in the study of computational constraints on quantifier processing in natural language has laid the groundwork for extending semantic theory with cognitive aspects. In parallel, cognitive science has furthered the study of non-linguistic quantity representations. This project will review current approaches to formal modeling of quantifier meaning. The seminar is closely related with the Cognitive Semantics and Quantity project.
I will jump start the course by giving a few lectures introducing various logical and computational approaches to the study of generalized quantifiers in natural language. Effectively, the first part of the course will give an introduction to the generalized quantifier theory, overviewing some crucial notions of formal semantics and logic. I will survey how mathematical methods may be rigorously applied in linguistics to study the possible meanings, the inferential power, and computational properties of quantifier expressions. I will mostly focus on approaches combining classical generalized quantifier themes with a computational perspective and explicitly connecting the formal theory with psycholinguistic research. Among others we will discuss quantifier universals, computational models of quantifier processing and quantifier learnability. In this “introductory” section of the course I will mostly follow Quantifiers and Cognition book.
Then, in the second part of the course, we will discuss in a more seminar manner recent research papers on formal models of quantification.