Mathematical Methods in Linguistics

This course gives a general introduction to various tools from discrete mathematics that are used in linguistics. It is based largely (or entirely) on Barbara Partee, Alice ter Meulen, Robert Wall (1990) Mathematical Methods in Linguistics, Kluwer Academic Publishers. Which parts of the book we choose depend on the background and interests of the people taking the course. Take a look at the list of contents.

The plan is to develop a web version of the course which can be taken to some extent asynchronously. Class meetings will be held normally at the request of course participants in order to go through particular material with which help is needed. Chat sessions might be a bit too much of a challenge given the need for symbols, but I am open to suggestions. We will pick out 5 modules which have to be completed in order to obtain the 5 points for the course. You complete a module by creating new instances of certain designated exercises from Partee, ter Meulen and Wall (different exercises for different participants) and correctly solving your own exercises and those produced by your classmates. I will also provide some exercises. (This will also involve learning how to produce electronically readable output. LaTeX is the standard method for this and we can provide lots of help in terms of examples, templates etc. to ease the pain.) If you solution to an exercise is incorrect you will have to solve a new exercise of the same type...until you get it right. (List of exercises)

My hope is that we will not only learn the material but that the we will have as a result a web version of the course which it will be easy for people to take in the future using a combination of self-study and supervision and which can be further developed in the future.

Additional literature

The Haskell Road to Logic, Math and Programming Kees Doets and Jan van Eijck. Book manuscript and related software, 2003.
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Last modified: Fri Dec 12 16:42:23 CET 2003