home | about | graduate | undergraduate | events | people | labs | papers | jobs | contact

Graduate Program

M.A./Ph.D Program

Admissions and Financial Aid

Admissions FAQ

Courses

• Spring 2010
• Fall 2009
• Spring 2009
• Fall 2008
• Spring 2008
• Fall 2007
• Spring 2007
• Fall 2006
• Spring 2006
• Fall 2005
• Spring 2005
• Previous Schedules
• Course Descriptions

Regulations and Requirements

Graduate Students

LANYU

Affiliated Universities

G61.3340 Seminar in Semantics:
Proof theory at the syntax/semantics interface

Prof. Anna Szabolcsi

Spring 2005

Semantics plays a role in grammar in at least three ways.

(A) Linguists seek to account for speaker's knowledge of what linguistic expressions mean. This goal is typically achieved by assigning a model theoretic interpretation in a compositional fashion. For example, No whale flies is true if and only if the intersection of the sets of whales and fliers is empty in the model. (B) The wellformedness of a variety of syntactic constructions depends on morpho-syntactic features with a semantic flavor. For example, Under no circumstances would a whale fly is grammatical, whereas Under some circumstances would a whale fly is not, corresponding to the negative vs. positive feature of the preposed phrase. (C) Linguists seek to account for speakers' ability to make various inferences based on semantic knowledge. For example, No whale flies entails No blue whale flies and No whale flies high.

It is usually assumed that once a compositional model theoretic semantics is assigned to all expressions, its fruits can be freely enjoyed by syntax and inferencing. But especially computational linguists and logicians have argued that this is not feasible and have developed systematic accounts using proof theoretical methods. Recent work has furthermore indicated that proof theoretical semantics may not only be computationally advantageous but may also be enlightening from the perspective of "pure" theoretical linguistics. But, of course, many open questions remain of both an empirical and a theoretical nature.

The seminar will start with a gentle introduction to proof theoretic methods and go on to explore the insights that specific proposals may offer into the syntax/semantics interface. The discussion will benefit from the month-long visit, sponsored by NYU's International Visitors Program, of Raffaella Bernardi and Øystein Nilsen, both of whom have done pioneering logical and empirical work pertaining to the seminar's central concerns.

nyu | gsas