PhD position in linguistics and/or philosophy, KU Leuven

Bitstring semantics, which was recently developed in logic, is a formalism for exploring the meaning relations between different expressions. Because it operates in a thoroughly local fashion, this formalism is able to achieve a good balance between high expressivity and low mathematical/computational complexity. The overarching goal of the BITSHARE project is to explore new applications of bitstring semantics in other disciplines that are concerned with meaning and reasoning, viz., philosophy, linguistics, psychology and computer science. Our target applications include some of the most important research topics in these disciplines today, such as scalar implicatures, the semantics/pragmatics interface, collaborative knowledge extraction, and probabilistic causal models. Through these well-chosen target applications, the project will demonstrate that bitstring semantics offers a shared representation formalism for a broad, interdisciplinary community of reasoning researchers, in which the insights from different disciplines can be expressed and combined with each other.

In order to carry out this research, we are looking to hire a total number of four PhD students. The current PhD position is situated at the interface between philosophy and linguistics. Our starting point is the observation that many phenomena and lexical fields display a scalar structure, which can consist of endpoints, intervals and/or midpoints (examples: all – some – no; less than – equal – greater than). Our central theoretical aim is to generalize the formalism of bitstring semantics so that it allows us to capture these types of scalar properties. Next, our central descriptive aim is to analyze the scalar structure underlying natural language quantifiers expressing proportionality (at least 20%/the majority/most of the A are B), evaluation (many/few of the A are B) and normativity (too few/enough/too many of the A are B).