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EVENING LECTURES

The plenary lectures start at 20.00, and are held in the Educatorium.

Abstracts

Eva Hajicova: Mysteries of Order

Every speaker of natural language is able to use re-ordering of items in many different functions. The order of phonemes determines lexical units ([tel] and [let], [spi:k] and [pi:ks], etc.), and so does the order of morphemes (e.g. 'crossover' vs. 'overcross'). The re-ordering of words and word forms in a sentence has multifarious effects:

  • (a) in cases such as E. 'Mary saw Jim' vs. 'Jim saw Mary' the grammatical sentence structure clearly is changed,
  • (b) in 'Jim studies linguistics on weekends' vs. 'On weekends Jim studies linguistics' the syntactic relations are identical, but the meaning is changed, and
  • (c) in 'Yesterday I came to Utrecht' vs. 'I came to UTRECHT yesterday' even the meaning remains unchanged (at least on one reading).

The capitals in (c) denote a marked position of the intonation centre, which is relevant in a similar sense as the order. Languages differ in the extent to which they employ these two types of means.

Examples as 'John introduced Mary only to Jane' vs. 'John introduced only Mary to Jane', 'Mary always takes JOHN to the movies' vs. 'Mary always takes John to the MOVIES', or 'Farmers who grow rice often only EAT rice' will be analyzed in the light of the relation of the (underlying and surface) order to meaning, and a descriptive framework will be characterized with the help of which it is possible to capture this relation.

The outcoming idea is that the opposition between "free" and "fixed" word order in different languages is just a matter of degree, not that of principle.

Johan van Benthem: Homo Sapiens as Homo Ludens

Games are a very typical feature of our human behaviour, mixing physical and cognitive action. Their paradigmatic influence in this century reaches from literature and philosophy to mathematics and economics. One intriguing use of games is deliberate 'cognitive experimentation', of a sort that should appeal to linguists and logicians. In this lecture, we will discuss some recent confluences between logic and game theory, focussing on the logical structure of games and the information flow inside them.

Reference: "Logic and Games". lecture notes, Stanford University, spring 1999, available via the home-page http://www.wins.uva.nl/~johan/teaching/

Sergei Artemov: Understanding Constructive Semantics

Is there an alternative mathematics? In particular, does intuitionism yield an essentially new approach that cannot be specified within classical mathematics? The intended informal meaning of intuitionistic logic was given in the 1930s by the Brouwer-Heyting-Kolmogorov semantics which understands intuitionistic truth as provability. Natural attempts to formalize this semantics met principal difficulties coming from Goedel's incompleteness phenomenon. In the 1940s Kleene introduced the notion of realizability which interpreted constructive truth via computability. This approach was free of the above complications and led to a rich theory which however did not address the issue of the original semantics for intuitionistic logic.

In this lecture we will talk about recent advances in this area that have bridged the incompleteness gap and provided the adequate formalization of the Brouwer-Heyting-Kolmogorov semantics.

Reference: S. Artemov, "Understanding Constructive Semantics'', Spinoza Lecture for European Association for Logic, Language and Information, Utrecht, August 1999

Patrick Suppes: Language and the Brain

This lecture is concerned with what has been done recently to infer how words and sentences are represented in the brain. The first task is like that of speech recognition but now that of brain-wave recognition of words being processed in the cortex. Here I will report on work accomplished in this respect over the past three years using EEG recordings and extensive computational analysis. The second task is to find invariances in brain-wave representations of words and sentences. I will focus on recent results on the surpising invariance of brain waves for sentences from one person to the next. In highly structured linguistic tasks different individuals have remarkably similar brain waves for the same spoken or visually presented sentence. A different, but equally interesting invariant is the same brain-wave represenation of a simple visual image and of the word naming the image, circles and squares for example. Relevance of this result to the famous controversy in the 18th century about how general ideas can be represented in the mind will be considered. Finally, the possibility of having words represented in the brain by the superposition of a few fundamental frequencies will be explored.