9780199591534-0199591539-Language, Form, and Logic: In Pursuit of Natural Logic's Holy Grail

Language, Form, and Logic: In Pursuit of Natural Logic's Holy Grail

ISBN-13: 9780199591534
ISBN-10: 0199591539
Author: Peter Ludlow
Publication date: 2022
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Format: Hardcover 444 pages
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ISBN-13: 9780199591534
ISBN-10: 0199591539
Author: Peter Ludlow
Publication date: 2022
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Format: Hardcover 444 pages

Summary

Language, Form, and Logic: In Pursuit of Natural Logic's Holy Grail (ISBN-13: 9780199591534 and ISBN-10: 0199591539), written by authors Peter Ludlow, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. With an overall rating of 3.7 stars, it's a notable title among other Linguistics (Words, Language & Grammar , Logic & Language, Philosophy) books. You can easily purchase or rent Language, Form, and Logic: In Pursuit of Natural Logic's Holy Grail (Hardcover) from BooksRun, along with many other new and used Linguistics books and textbooks. And, if you're looking to sell your copy, our current buyback offer is $1.56.

Description

This book takes an idea first explored by medieval logicians 800 years ago and revisits it armed with the tools of contemporary linguistics, logic, and computer science. The idea - the Holy Grail of the medieval logicians - was the thought that all of logic could be reduced to two very simple
rules that are sensitive to logical polarity (for example, the presence and absence of negations).

Ludlow and Zivanović pursue this idea and show how it has profound consequences for our understanding of the nature of human inferential capacities. They also show its consequences for some of the deepest issues in contemporary linguistics, including the nature of quantification, puzzles
about discourse anaphora and pragmatics, and even insights into the source of aboutness in natural language. The key to their enterprise is a formal relation they call "p-scope" - a polarity-sensitive relation that controls the operations that can be carried out in their Dynamic Deductive System.
They show that with p-scope in play, deductions can be carried out using sublogical operations like those they call COPY and PRUNE - operations that are simple syntactic operations on sentences. They prove that the resulting deductive system is complete and sound.

The result is a beautiful formal tapestry in which p-scope unlocks important properties of natural language, including the property of "restrictedness," which they prove to be equivalent to the semantic notion of conservativity. More than that, they show that restrictedness is also a key to
understanding quantification and discourse anaphora, and many other linguistic phenomena.

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