This project began to take shape effectively with the Jadertina Summer School in Zadar 2006, organised by Damir Ćavar. I presented a similar course in Budapest in January 2007. The basic idea is that when we think of language as being interpreted, that is, as being a set of pairs of exponents and meanings, a lot of formal language theory needs to be revised. The traditional top down approach in context free grammars, for example, is less suitable because of its inherent nondeterminism. Some intuitions that people have developed by looking at syntax turn out to be less fruitful when we move to interpreted languages. One example is adjunction.

1. Source

2. Slide Shows

Compositionality and Syntactic Structure. (MIT, October 2007)

The Combinatorics of Interpreted Languages (UCLA, November 2007)

3. Essential Reading

• 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 (basics of the notion of a grammar)
• 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5 (interpreted languages; highlight: weak and strong generative capacity are different)
• 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 (developing the theory of concepts)
• 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6 (applications to natural language)