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 #69!

This week's tag language: Lakota!

Related episodes:
Meaning Predicated on Logic: What Makes a Sentence True or False? -    • What Makes a Sentence True or False? ...  
Let's Talk About Sets: How Do We Build Meaning with Math? -    • How Do We Build Meaning with Math? Se...  
Quantifying Sets and Toasters: What Does "Most" Even Mean? -
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Last episode:
Watch What You Say: What Makes Bad Words Bad? -    • What Makes Bad Words Bad? Taboo Langu...  

Other of our semantics and pragmatics videos:
Operation Relevance: How Do We Decide What's Relevant in Conversations? -    • How Do We Decide What's Relevant in O...  
Building Common Ground: How Do We Create a Shared World in Conversation? -    • How Do We Create a Shared World in Co...  
Logical Connections: How Logical is Language? -    • How Logical is Language? Sentential L...  

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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_...
We also recommend Anders Schoubye's lecture notes, Formal Semantics for Philosophers:
http://schoubye.org/teaching/Formal-S...

Looking forward to next week!