Special Issue Including Selected Papers from the “Logic and Linguistics” Workshop of the 4th World Congress on Universal Logic

Abstract

Logic and linguistics have engaged in a many-faceted dialogue since the very beginnings of both disciplines in Antiquity. While participants may have had diverse views over the ages, arguably, the dialogue has always revolved around the relationship between human thought and natural language. While there are those who see these two domains as one and the same, or as a case of one-directional influence (language as an expression of thought, or thought as an expression of language), we beg to differ. To us, the long historical tradition of authors such as Arnauld, Boole, Turing, or Jespersen demonstrates the much richer perspectives on language and reasoning that are needed, including connections with intelligence and computability. Another major historical theme in the above dialogue are similarities or convergences between natural and artificial languages. It is clear that natural languages are not only semantically broader, but also much closer to human communication than artificial languages, and so linguistic grammars have long dealt with a larger set of problems than logical formalisms. Tomention just one key instance, the notion of time has always been present in grammars (whatever their normative or descriptive stance or theoretical affiliation), whereas logical frameworks either lack explicit reference to time, or treat only some selected features, falling far short of all the features of time and aspect that natural languages are capable of expressing. Even so, the goal of translating utterances to logical forms has been a never-ending source of attraction for linguists aiming for methodological rigor and metalinguistic precision. Naturally, simple conversion of utterances to some logical form does not exhaust all their