17 - 21 July 2017, ESSLLI-2017 workshop on Quantifiers and Determiners (QUAD), Toulouse, France

This workshop aims at gathering mathematicians, logicians, linguists, computer scientists to present their latest advances in the study of quantification.

There is a long history of quantification in the Ancient and Medieval times at the border between logic and philosophy of language, before the proper formalisation of quantification by Frege. But many mathematical and linguistic questions remain open, both on the mathematical side (such as the proof theory of generalised quantifiers or the computational aspects of alternate formulations such as Russel's ioata), and the linguistic side (such as the relation between the syntactic structure and its semantic interpretation, or the relationship between quantification and phenomena like generics, plurals, and mass nouns), as well as the intersection of the two sides (for instance, psycholinguistic experiments that connect formal models and their computational properties to the actual way human do process sentences with quantifiers).

All those aspects are connected in the didactics of mathematics and computer science: there are specific difficulties to teach (and to learn) how to understand, manipulate, produce and prove quantified statements, and to determine the proper level of formalisation between bare logical formulas and written or spoken natural language.