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- To put the idea somewhat roughly, logic studies various languages, and the only special feature of the study of natural language is its focus on the languages humans happen to speak.
academic.oup.com/book/7932/chapter/1532182223 Logical Consequence and Natural Language - Oxford Academic
Mar 22, 2022 · If by "spoken language" you roughly mean "natural language" and by "logical language" you roughly mean formal language, the answer is easy. In this case, the distinctions are multitude, the primary one being that natural languages "evolve naturally" - consult a linguist to see what exactly that means.
Jun 12, 2022 · A plausible explanation is that a logical language is a subset of natural language, thus by definition an articulation of a logical language is also articulation via natural language. –
Aug 18, 2017 · This chapter reviews the development of one particularly interesting and lively area of interaction between formal logic and linguistics—the semantics of natural language.
- Alice G.B. ter Meulen
- 2001
- On Being Greater Than Nothing
- Solution
- On Walking to School For An Hour
- On Having to Play The Piano
- On Even Eating Potatoes on Sundays
- Conclusion
Consider the following argument: Premise 1: The Devil is greater than nothing. Premise 2: Nothing is greater than God. Conclusion: Therefore, the Devil is greater than God. Can you explain why the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises?
If we were to replace the word “nothing” with some other ordinary object such as a table or an apple, the argument would be a perfectly valid one, i.e., its conclusion would logically follow from its premises (however absurd the premises might be). The problem, therefore, is that “nothing” cannot simply be treated like any other object which exists...
(1) #John walked to school for an hour. What’s wrong with sentence (1)? It doesn’t seem like there’s anything grammatically wrong with the sentence. The sentence seems odd in virtue of its meaning. A sentence like this is said to be semantically ill-formed, and we indicate this using the hash or pound symbol (#) by convention. To understand the pro...
Modal verbs are verbs which are used to express ideas such as possibility, permission, ability and obligation. Some common examples of modal verbs are “can”, “must”, “should”, “might”, and “may”. Let’s consider the meaning of “can” and “must”. When I say that “I can play the piano”, I mean that it is possible for me to play the piano, whereas if I ...
Consider a sentence like this: (2) John even eats potatoes on Sundays. What does the word “even” mean here? “Even” is an example of what semanticists call focus operators. These are words such as “only”, “just”, and “merely”, all of which create additional implicaturesby focusing on particular parts of the sentence. An implicature is the additional...
I hope these puzzles have convinced you that a systematic approach to semantics can reveal something new about how language conveys meaning. More importantly, I hope they’ve demonstrated how the meaning of sentences doesn’t only depend on the meaning of its individual words, but also how they are combined together into sentences with the help of th...
Nov 29, 2023 · The chief relationship to be understood is that natural language carries a variety of semantics. Some of those semantics are mathematical, some of them are logical, and some of them are computational.
Oct 3, 2013 · First, I argue that natural language has an inherent natural logic, probably the same for all languages, in that linguistic words or morphemes stand proxy for logical operators whose meanings jointly define a logical system.
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Jun 13, 2021 · In this chapter, we will discuss the relation between logic and language. We will illustrate the concept of semantics, syntax, and grammar. Further, we will enunciate types of language found in a language system.