The Ling Space's video: How Can One Greek Letter Help Us Understand Language Lambda Calculus

How can we capture the meanings of transitive sentences? How do we match our syntax trees to our semantics? In this week's episode, we talk about lambda calculus: why we need it to explain what our other semantic machinery can't, how to work out its math, and what it can show us about how words move around in sentences. This is Topic ! This week's tag language: Lakota! Related episodes: Meaning Predicated on Logic: What Makes a Sentence True or False? - https://youtu.be/al5SJSbIyvM Let's Talk About Sets: How Do We Build Meaning with Math? - https://youtu.be/M96aiDk2ePw Quantifying Sets and Toasters: What Does "Most" Even Mean? - https://youtu.be/U1l3C_hmjqM Last episode: Watch What You Say: What Makes Bad Words Bad? - https://youtu.be/Y4HW0tOCoQM Other of our semantics and pragmatics videos: Operation Relevance: How Do We Decide What's Relevant in Conversations? - https://youtu.be/yRv1agt776c Building Common Ground: How Do We Create a Shared World in Conversation? - https://youtu.be/gQqXmhqM13U Logical Connections: How Logical is Language? - https://youtu.be/lw4ykgRtv3Q Find us on all the social media worlds: Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace/ And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com/ ! You can also find our store at the website, https://thelingspace.storenvy.com/ Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-69/ We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally. Sources: Most of the information for this episode came from Irene Heim and Angelika Kratzer's 1998 book, Semantics in Generative Grammar. Also, the Wikipedia page on Lambda Calculus is pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus We also recommend Anders Schoubye's lecture notes, Formal Semantics for Philosophers: http://schoubye.org/teaching/Formal-Semantics/FormalSemanticsNotes2014.pdf Looking forward to next week!