We are happy to announce a talk by Thomas Ede Zimmermann (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium.
The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.
Date: November 27, 2025
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title: Intensional type logic: standard translation and non-standard interpretation
Abstract:
The compositional interpretation of natural language is often carried out indirectly, by translation into a suitable type logic. This talk concerns the formal properties of such languages. More specifically, it is about Montague’s intensional type logic (IL), which has long been known to be almost expressively equivalent with its two-sorted substratum (Ty2): Gallin’s standard translation from IL to Ty2 can be reversed so as to cover nearly all of the latter, excepting only terms that are themselves of non-intensional types or contain such parameters. However, the proof depended on the so-called standard interpretation of both languages, according to which abstraction and quantification range over full set-theoretic domains. The question of whether the result also holds for Gallin’s restricted, axiomatisable non-standard interpretation had been open until recently. It now appears that there is more than one correct answer.