30 - 31 March 2024, 4th Tsinghua Interdisciplinary Workshop on Logic, Language and Meaning (TLLM IV): "The Connectives in Logic and Language", Beijing, China

The propositional connectives – and, or, not, if-then, etc. – are fundamental building blocks in formal as well as natural languages. 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. 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. 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 languag.