Tsinghua University – University of Amsterdam Joint Research Centre for Logic

TLLM-Call for Papers

The Connectives in Logic and Language

4th Tsinghua Interdisciplinary Workshop on Logic, Language and Meaning

March 30–31, 2024, Tsinghua University, Beijing

Workshop web site: http://tsinghualogic.net/JRC/tllm/2024connectives/

The propositional connectives – and, or, not, if-then, etc. – are fundamental building blocks in formal as well as natural languages. In the Western tradition, they were first studied as such by the Stoics, and Propositional Logic is the fundament of practically all current systems of logic; every beginning logic course starts with it. Still, the proof theory and semantics of systems of propositional logic are far from trivial, and have been studied intensely by logicians in the last one and a half century, not least in recent decades. It is actually a vast area of research, as witnessed by Lloyd Humberstone’s 1500 page tome The Connectives (2011), which overviews much of that research. Perhaps the most familiar recent work in this area concerns conditionals in formal and natural languages. In this workshop we also focus on the apparently simpler connectives expressing (various versions of) conjunction, disjunction, and negation.

Researchers working from a cross-linguistic perspective also focus on how the connectives are encoded in different languages, and ask whether classical logic is capable of capturing the variations and universals exhibited. Even in well-studied languages like English, there are intricate phenomena that remain challenging for classical logic, including free choice disjunction, non-boolean conjunction, metalinguistic negation, to name just a few. There is also growing interest in the acquisition and processing of natural language connectives. In the context of the hotly discussed Large Language Models (LLMs), understanding connectives presents novel challenges that deserve in-depth exploration.

The idea behind the TLLM workshops is to bring together logicians and linguists around a specific theme of common interest. Thus, we welcome contributions on any general or particular aspect of the propositional connectives in logic or language. Below are just a few examples of possible topics for this workshop.

  • semantics of negation: classical, non-classical, contra-classical
  • inclusive versus exclusive disjunction in natural languages
  • the meaning of connectives: model-theoretic, proof-theoretic, game-theoretic,…
  • non-classical connectives: in intuitionistic logic, linear logic, relevance logic, orthologic, etc.
  • free choice disjunction
  • boolean and non-boolean conjunction
  • acquisition of natural language connectives
  • cross-linguistic variations of natural language connectives
  • role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in understanding connectives: challenges, capabilities, and implications

Invited Speakers

Wesley Holliday (UC Berkeley)

Christoph Harbsmeier (University of Oslo)

Jacopo Romoli (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)

Fan Yang (University of Utrecht)

Tutorials

Logic: Wesley Holliday

Linguistics: Christoph Harbsmeier

Contributed Papers

We invite submissions of 2-page abstracts (including references) on any of the broad themes related to the connectives in logic and language as suggested above. After a review procedure, authors of accepted abstracts will have the opportunity to present their papers at the workshop. After the workshop, a volume of full papers (properly refereed) will be published. Details on submission of full papers will follow.

Abstracts should be submitted via Easychair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tllm2024

The workshop will take place on site at Tsinghua University, Beijing.

Important dates

Deadline for submitting abstracts:                   November 25, 2023.

Notification of acceptance:                               December 15, 2023.

Tutorials:                                                            March 29, 2024.

Workshop:                                                          March 30–31, 2024.

Registration fee

Earlier workshops had no registration fee, since they were mostly online, but for this onsite workshop there is a small registration fee, to cover some of the costs.

Student:            100 US dollars

Non-student:   150 US dollars

Program Committee (it may be enlarged)

Maria Aloni (University of Amsterdam)

Gennaro Chierchia (Harvard)

Xuping Li (Zhejiang University)

Jo-wang Lin (Academia Sinica)

Fenrong Liu (Tsinghua University)

Mingming Liu (co-chair, Tsinghua University)

Larry Moss (Bloomington, Indiana)

Stanley Peters (Stanford)

Martin Stokhof  (ILLC, Tsinghua University)

Jakub Szymanik (University of Trento)

Johan van Benthem (Stanford University, ILLC, Tsinghua University)

Frank Veltman (ILLC)

Yingying Wang (Hunan University)

Dag Westerståhl (co-chair, Stockholm University, Tsinghua University)

Yicheng Wu (Zhejiang University)

Xiaolu Yang (co-chair, Tsinghua University)

Linmin Zhang (NYU Shanghai)

Local Organizing Committee 

Jialiang Yan (Tsinghua University)

Sponsors

The Joint Research Center for Logic, Tsinghua University

Department of Philosophy, Tsinghua University

Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Tsinghua University