GroLog Seminar
Logic seminar of the University of Groningen
Logic seminar of the University of Groningen
Upcoming GroLog events are listed below. Past events can be found in the Archive page.
SPEAKER: Konstantinos Kogkalidis (Aalto University)
DATE: Wednesday 28 May 2025
TIME: 16:00-17:00
PLACE: BernoulliBorg, room 5161.0253
TITLE: Grammaticality as Provability
ABSTRACT:Â
Type-logical grammars treat a natural language as a substructural logic. Words of the language manifest as typed constants, interacting with one another through a small set of type inference rules. By virtue of the Curry-Howard-de Bruijn correspondence, the end result is at the same time a parse, a proof and a program. Fine-tuning the alignment between logical provability and linguistic well-formedness is handled by a manually-designed, language-specific set of structural rules, in turn licensed by (pairs of) unary modalities that extend the underlying language-universal logical core. Canonically, these modal operators carry no meaning; their duty is simply to control or elicit phenomena like movement, word-order variations and the like. As such, the term-level footprints of their introduction and elimination rules are "translated away" during the montagovian passage to computational semantics. As an alternative, I will discuss a parallel use case for modalities: that of imposing dependency domains. Modal dependency demarcation permits a type-safe enrichment of parse-derivations that extends well beyond word-order and function-argument structures, allowing interfaces to dependency trees and dependency-informed semantics.