History

History

On the Amsterdam Colloquia and their Proceedings

by Paul Dekker1

The Amsterdam Colloquia aim at bringing together linguists, philosophers, logicians and computer scientists with an interest in the formal study of the semantics and pragmatics of natural and formal languages. The spectrum of topics covered ranges from descriptive (syntactic and semantic analyses of all kinds of expressions, and their evolution) to theoretical (logical and computational properties of semantic theories, philosophical foundations, learning).

The series of Amsterdam Colloquia started in 1976, informed by the conviction that ''There is (...) no important theoretical difference between natural languages and the artificial languages of logicians; (...)''2 Inspiration came from the insight that all languages, natural and otherwise, share important formal characteristics, such as being truth-conditional and compositional, and,  hence, license the mathematical study of meaning and validity. It was also generally understood, in the footprints of Gottlob Frege, that the latter two notions ought not to be confused with a mentalist, or cognitive psychological, rendering of them. Whence the, rather revolutionary, and polemical, stances against rival traditions in linguistics, behaviorist as well as Chomskian.

The first two Amsterdam Colloquia, on ''Montague grammar and Related Topics'', organized by Renate Bartsch, Jeroen Groenendijk and Martin Stokhof, were held in January 1976 (15 papers) and 1978 (18 papers). They resulted in proceedings published by the Centrale Interfaculteit, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam Papers in Formal Grammar, Volumes I &  II.

The next four installments (from 1980 to 1987) were held later in the academic years, and the Colloquia employed various titles: ''Formal Methods in the Study of Language'', ''Frontiers of Intensional Semantics'', and ''Varieties of Formal Semantics''. Selections of papers presented at those colloquia were published in dedicated volumes in the GRASS series, by Foris, Dordrecht.3 Quite a few papers from these years may count as classical by now.4

From 1989, the Amsterdam Colloquia have always been held by the end of December and they came without further subtitles. The Colloquium became known, simply, as ''The Amsterdam Colloquium'', which turned out to be sufficient to indicate to the insiders that it continued insightful local traditions in Montague Grammar emerging from, for instance, intuitionist (Brouwer, Beth) and semiotic (Significa) studies of the foundations of language and mathematics.

The Tenth Colloquium, held in 1995, was a special occasion, of course. For the first time the Amsterdam Colloquium featured its own website, https://archive.illc.uva.nl/AC/AC1995/, and it paid a tribute to Theo M.V. Janssen, the only one who had succeeded in giving a presentation at all ten Amsterdam Colloquia till then.5 The 10-th meeting also featured a vesperal RetroProspective ''Semantics in the Progressive'', with eagle's eye contributions from Johan van Benthem, Hans Kamp and Barbara Partee.

The contributions from the 7-th till the 16-th Amsterdam Colloquiua were published in (pre-)proceedings.6 From 2005 onwards the proceedings were (also) posted online, https://events.illc.uva.nl/AC/. On a few occasions, the 17-th, 18-th and 20-th, collections of contributions were published in post-proceedings.7

In the meantime, the interest in the area had grown so much that sister conferences were installed, SALT, in the United States, and SuB, originally in Germany. The first meeting of SALT, Semantics and Linguistic Theory,  was organized in 1991 at Cornell University by Gennaro Chierchia, Fred Landman, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. It was held April, 1991, and every year after ever since.8 In 1996 the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Semantik (Sebastian Löbner,
Arnim von Stechow and Ede Zimmermann) initiated a series of conferences under the title ''Sinn und Bedeutung''. The first five of these meetings were held in Germany9, and every year after ever since at various places in Europe.10

Over the years, the programming of the colloquia has gradually professionalized.
 While the program of the first five colloquia, until 1984, was established by the local organizers, in consultation with ILLC colleagues, from the Sixth Colloquium in 1987 onwards, the chairs in the departments of Philosophy, Mathematics, and Computer Science, Renate Bartsch, Johan van Benthem and Peter van Emde Boas, made up a core committee selecting abstracts submitted for presentation. In the Nineties the three B's were assisted by an international team of reviewers, including the invited speakers, which themselves were invited by the organization committees. In the first decade of the current millennium, the Colloquia featured especially appointed, but varying, program committees, consisting of a core group of internal members and a selected team of external reviewers who then jointly decided on the program. With the growth of the field, it turned out have become more and awkward to let one small group decide on all submissions, and since the 2011 installment, the Colloquia therefore featured a local programme committee deciding on the program entirely informed by an enormous pool of some 75 external reviewers, expecting three reviews on each submitted abstract.

From the Eleventh installment (1997) the Amsterdam Colloquia featured various workshops, for a closer focus on current issue and developments.11 From 1999 onwards the Colloquia also hosted the bi-annual Beth lecture. The lectures are funded by the E.W.~Beth Foundation and serves to provide broader perspectives on the academic field.12 Since 2011 the Colloquia moreover included poster sessions to broaden the platform and become easier accessible for junior researchers. Over the years the Colloquia has finally featured various co-located events and satellite workshops.13

While the first Amsterdam Colloquia had been mainly concerned with the mathematics of language and the computation of meaning, in the second decade of the current century the focus had somewhat shifted to that of philosophical logic, and the nature of meaning. While the Colloquia, as said, had originally been fairly anti-mentalist, and anti-social, it later had a more extensive scope on the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages more widely, cross-linguistic typology, and the social and cognitive nature of meaning.

 

 

Notes

  1. Thanking Maria Aloni, Peter van Ormondt, Floris Roelofsen and  Giorgio Sbardolini for valuable input, which has been appreciated most.
  2. Richard Montague, 1970, ''Universal Grammar'', Theoria, 36 p. 373. ''(...) indeed I consider it possible to comprehend the syntax and semantics of both kinds of languages with a single natural and mathematically precise theory.''
  3. ''Truth, Interpretation and Information, 1984, Vol. 2; ''Varieties of Formal Semantics'' 1984, Vol. 3; ''Foundations of Pragmatics and Lexical Semantics'', 1987, Vol. 7; ''Studies in Discourse Representation Theory and the Theory of Generalized Quantifiers'', 1987, Vol. 8; ''Semantics and Contextual Expression'', Vol. 11.
  4. Here is non-exhaustive selection. * Renate Bartsch, (''The Structure of Word Meaning''), * Robin Cooper (''Situation Semantics''), * Annabel Cormack, (''Variables and VP anaphora''), * Peter van Emde Boas, Jeroen Groenendijk and Martin Stokhof (''The Conway Paradox''), * Kit Fine (''Arbitrary Objects''), * Jaakko Hintikka (''Towards a General Theory of Anaphora''), * Nirit Kadmon (''Asymmetric Quantification''), * Hans Kamp (''A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation''), * Ed Keenan (''Constraints on the Semantics Interpretation of Natural Language''), * Angelika Kratzer (''An Investigation of the Lumps of Thought''), * Manfred Krifka (''Mass Terms''), * David Lewis (''Individuation by Acquaintance and by Stipulation''), * Godehard Link (''Algebraic Semantics of Event Structures''), * Alice ter Meulen (''The Internal Structure of Events''), * Barbara Partee (''Quantifying over Contexts''), * John Perry (''Fleeting Situations''), * Craige Roberts (''Distributivity''), * Rob van der Sandt (''Presupposition and Discourse Structure''), * Remko Scha (''Distributive, Collective and Cumulative Quantification''), * Robert Stalnaker (''Belief Ascription and Context''), * Arnim von Stechow (''Three Theories of Focusing Operators''), * Anna Szabolcsi (''Bound Variables in Syntax''), * Ray Turner (''Nominalisations and Inductive Definability''), * Frank Veltman (''Data Semantics''), * Henk Zeevat (''Discourse Representation Structures as Objects of Belief''), * Ede Zimmermann (''Intensional Logic and 2-Sorted Type-Theory'').
  5. An overview of the titles of his talks is, by the same token, an indicative, but partial, overview of the interests of the first 20 years of the AC: ''A Computer Program for Montague Grammar'', * ''Compositionality and the Form of Rules in Montague Grammar'', * ''Compositional Semantics and Relative Clause Formation in Montague Grammar'', * ''Individual Concepts'', * ''Individuals and Individual Concepts'', * ''Compositionality and Machine Translation'', * ''Models for Discourse Markers'', * ''Invariants of the Zielonka-Lambek Calculus'', * ''Synchronous TAG-grammars and Montague grammar'', ''Compositionality''.
  6. Martin Stokhof (7-th, 8-th, 9-th, 10-th, 11-th, 13-th), Leen Torenvliet (7-th), Paul Dekker (8-th, 9-th, 10-th, 11-th, 12-th, 14-th, 15-th, 16-th), Yde Venema (11-th), Robert van Rooij (13-th, 14-th), Michael Franke (15-th), Maria Aloni (16-th), Floris Roelofsen (16-th) (eds.), 1990/2/4/6/7/9/2001/3/5/7, Proceedings of the  (X)7 ≤ X ≤ 16-th Amsterdam Colloquium, ILLC, Universiteit van Amsterdam.
  7. Maria Aloni et al. (ed.), 2010 and 2012, Logic, Language and Meaning, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-14287-1 and https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-31482-7. In 2015 the journal Topoi devoted a special issue with a selection of contributions, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11245-017-9505-5.
  8. For a history of SALT, see https://saltconf.github.io/history.html.
  9. Tübingen, December 1996; Berlin, December 1997; Leipzig, December 1998; Düsseldorf, October 1999; and Amsterdam, December 2000.
  10. Proceedings of the meetings can be found at the Sinn und Bedeutung page https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/sub/index.php/sub/issue/archive.
  11. * The Semantics of Topic and Focus in Discourse * Games in Logic (11-th, 1997) * Non-Monotonicity and Natural Language * Discourse and Communication. Structured Information Exchange (12-th, 1999) * Semantics and Cognition * Games in Language and Logic (13-th, 2001) * Mood and Modality * The Evolution and Change of Semantic Conventions (14-th, 2003) * Language and Learning * Semantic Universals (15-th, 2005) * Uninterpretability (16-th, 2007) * Implicatures and Grammar * Natural Logic * Vagueness (17-th, 2009) * Formal Semantics and Pragmatics of Sign Languages * Formal Semantic Evidence * Inquisitiveness (18-th, 2011) * Quantitative Methods in Formal Semantics and Pragmatics * More on Modals (19-th, 2013) * Negation: Logical, Linguistic and Philosophical Perspectives * Reasoning in Natural Language: Symbolic and Sub-symbolic Approaches (20-th, 2015) * Causality and Semantics * Formal and Distributional Perspectives on Meaning (21-st, 2017) * Semantic Universals * Super Linguistics (22-nd, 2019) * Biases in Language and Cognition * Compositional Approaches to Projection (23-rd, 2022) * Dynamic and Inquisitive * Identifying and Explaining Universals of Semantics (24-th, 2024) *
  12. * Lotfi A. Zadeh, 1999, ''Toward a Logic of Perceptions''  * Hans Kamp, 2001, ''Logic and Language'' * Elliot Sober, 2003, ''Likelihood, Model Selection, and the Duhem-Quine Problem'' * Hannes Leitgeb, 2005, ''The Logical Structure of Cognition'' * Graham Priest, 2007, ''The Closing of the Mind'' * Peter Hagoort, 2009, ''The Neurobiology of Language: beyond the Sentence Given'' * Kevin Kelly, 2011, ''An Erotetic Theory of Empirical Simplicity and its Connection with Truth'' * John Horty, 2013, ''Common Law Reasoning'' * Timothy Williamson, 2015, ''Counterpossibles'' * Stewart Shapiro, 2017, ''Open Texture, and its Ramifications for Logic and Semantics'' * Ian Rumfitt, 2019, ''Meaning and Speech Acts'' * Craige Roberts, 2022, ''The Architecture of Interpretation'' * Angelika Kratzer, 2024, ''Possible worlds in a polyphony of meanings'' *
  13. The 1987 edition featured an evening session on Discourse Representation Theory with invited lectures by Franz Guenthner, Pieter Seuren and Hans Kamp. * In 2001, colocated was the closing event of the Logic in Action project, funded by a Spinoza grant of Johan van Benthem, https://archive.illc.uva.nl/AC/AC2001/spinoza_day.html. * In 2003, a CoLogNet-ElsNet symposium on Questions and Answers: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives was colocated, 
    https://www.illc.uva.nl/NewsandEvents/Events/Upcoming-Events/newsitem/436/, as well as an ILLC workshop on Reasoning about Space, https://archive.illc.uva.nl/RaS/. * In 2007 the VI-th meeting of PALLMYR was colocated, the Paris, Amsterdam, London Logic Meetings of Young Researchers, https://events.illc.uva.nl/PALLMYR/PALMYR-6/. * In 2013 a Special Session on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue was organised as a joint session with the colocated SemDial workshop, https://archive.illc.uva.nl/semdial/dialdam/. * In 2013,  also features a special event devoted to the work of Jeroen Groenendijk, Martin Stokhof and Frank Veltman, and the presentation of a Festschrift, https://archive.illc.uva.nl/AC/AC2013/Special-Event/index.html. * In 2015 two satellite workshops, on Questions in Pragmatics, and one on Questions in Logic and Semantics, formed the Closing Event of the The Inquisitive Turn project, https://projects.illc.uva.nl/inquisitivesemantics/workshops/2015-inquisitive-turn-closing.html. * In 2017 the Colloquium featured a satellite workshop on Inquisitiveness Below and Beyond the Sentence Boundary, https://projects.illc.uva.nl/inquisitivesemantics/workshops/2017-inqbnb2.html. * In 2024 the XIV-th meeting of PALLMYR is colocated, the Paris, Amsterdam, London Logic Meetings of Young Researchers, https://events.illc.uva.nl/PALLMYR/PALLMYR-XIV/.