Associate Professor Ezra Keshet, who specializes in theoretical semantics, presented a paper titled “Dynamic Unioning Plural Logic” at the 2019 Amsterdam Colloquium, held at the University of Amsterdam, in December. 

Read the full paper. View the presentation slides. 

The Amsterdam Colloquium brings together linguists, philosophers, logicians, cognitive scientists and computer scientists who share an interest in the formal study of the semantics and pragmatics of natural and formal languages.

MIT Colloquium Talk

In November, Associate Professor Keshet gave a colloquium talk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His talk was titled “Pronouns in 3-D.” View the presentation slides. 

ABSTRACT

Pronouns in 3-D

This talk aims to demystify dynamic logic by tracing the development of a new plural logic step-by-step through three dimensions of meaning:

  1. Storing and retrieving single discourse referents (akin to names), each suitable for later reference via pronouns:
    Arthur saw Beth. She waved to him.

  2. Repeating this process along multiple parallel paths to explain pronoun reference to an antecedent indefinite (cf. Groenendijk & Stokhof 1991):
    A man saw a woman. (= Arthur saw Beth or Arthur saw Dara or Charlie saw Beth or Charlie saw Dara...) She waved to him.

  3. Accessing values along multiple paths at once to derive plural pronoun values and other more exotic effects (cf. van den Berg 1996):
    Every student donated a book. (= Arthur donated W&P and Beth donated C&P and Charlie donated P&P...) They are on that shelf.  [they = W&P, C&P, P&P, ...]

I will argue, perhaps unsurprisingly, that my new logic is simpler than existing analyses, while handling the same data plus new empirical cases. For instance, the logic can handle a class of sentences where a plural pronoun in the nuclear scope of a quantifier seems to refer to the very value being constructed by that nuclear scope, as in (4). I will propose that such cases relate to a straightforward account of reflexives such as each other.

(4) Almost every North Atlantic country agreed in a treaty that an attack on one of them constitutes an attack on all of them. [them = only the treaty signatories]