Strictly Speaking

Badenov wikipedia

I’m giving a talk tomorrow (info/abstract below the fold) which required me to find an image of Boris Badenov (don’t ask — it’s to illustrate an example slide). I went to his wikipedia entry, and found, to my delight, that someone has taken the time to create a long list of disguises that Boris has used, along with the episode in which that disguise appeared. Some of my favorites:

• Mayor Avaricious J. Wardheeler (Bumbling Brothers Circus)
• Salesman of Dancer, Prancer, Blitzen, & Fink advertising agency (Moosylvania Saved)
• Hailfellow J. Backslap, Official Washington Greeter (Missouri Mish Mash)

My talk:

CUNY Ph.D. Program in Computer Science
Graduate Center CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue,
New York, New York 10016

Fall Semester 2007, Computational Logic Seminar
Room 3305, December 11, 2:00-4:00 PM.

Speaker: Susan Schweitzer (CUNY Graduate Center)
Title: Every Linguist Loves Some Donkey Sentence
Abstract:This talk will serve both as an overview of compositionality in natural language semantics and an introduction to the Dynamic Predicate Logic of Groenendijk and Stockhof [1990]. I will begin by summarizing the theoretical motivation for assuming a principle of compositionality in a theory of meaning for natural language. Such a principle is arguably not satisfied by theories which seek to extend formal semantics from individual sentences to fragments of discourse such as those of Heim[1983] and Kamp [1981]. In fact, these theories arguably fail to give an adequately compositional analysis of so-called “donkey sentences” as typified by

1. Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it.

Not only are such sentences conventionally interpreted as having universal force, but they also contain pronouns in their (logical) consequents which are apparently outside the scope of quantifiers in their (logical) antecedents. As such, donkey sentences are commonly held to resist formalization in first-order logic in a manner whichrespects their compositional structure. The semantics of Groenendijk and Stockhof seek to address this and related problems about variable binding by representing the meaning of a sentence as an update operator on contexts. I will outline this approach and apply it to several examples.