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Barbara Partee: Reflections of a Formal Semanticist as of Feb 2005

What follows will be a very subjective and personal view, as much my own history and development in the field and how things looked through my eyes as about the development of the field itself.

This essay is a longer version of the introductory essay in (Partee 2004). The introductory essay was first written in this long form in February 2003, but had to be cut down to about half the size to fit in the book...

This essay is about natural language semantics, but you'll find old friends here: lambdas, bindings, types, quantifiers etc. If you are lazy, go directly to footnote 25...

No surprise, really, if you follow the links we give here from time to time about TLGs and such.

By Ehud Lamm at 2005-02-15 10:37 | History | Lambda Calculus | Semantics | Type Theory | other blogs | 10928 reads

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About Partee

She's well worth reading, a senior linguist, broad minded, and one refreshingly free of the Chomsky worship that infests too many linguistics departments in the USA. I've not read this text, but I've read some of its ancestors.

By Charles A Stewart at Tue, 2005-02-15 11:06 | login or register to post comments

The Atoms of Programming Language

The question of how natural languages correlate with artificial ones (programming languges) brought to my mind
The Atoms Of Language, The Mind's Hidden Rules Of Grammar by Mark C. Baker.

In similar vein it would be interesting to define "atoms" that constitute *any* existing and yet still to be invented programming language.
Any works in this area ?

By Dmitri Kondratiev at Wed, 2005-02-16 10:01 | login or register to post comments

CTM

it would be interesting to define "atoms" that constitute *any* existing and yet still to be invented programming language.

IMO, this is the great strength of CTM. They have done an excellent job of laying out, piece by piece, the features that can be added to a language, and the effects each has.

By Marc Hamann at Wed, 2005-02-16 16:32 | login or register to post comments

Preach It!

Marc Hamann: IMO, this is the great strength of CTM. They have done an excellent job of laying out, piece by piece, the features that can be added to a language, and the effects each has.

Let me just say "Amen" and add my appreciation that this isn't merely a nice theory since it has Oz as an existence proof.

By Paul Snively at Wed, 2005-02-16 16:41 | login or register to post comments

I agree with the strength of

I agree with the strength of CTM ideas as well as the proof of these ideas in Mozart Oz.
Yet, talking about programming language atoms I was thinking not about language features but about basic elements that language is built from.
To explain my idea I started a new thread:
What are The Atoms of Programming Languages?

By Dmitri Kondratiev at Fri, 2005-02-18 00:29 | login or register to post comments