Monotonicity in Logic and Language: Second Tsinghua Interdisciplinary Workshop on Logic, Language and Meaning, TLLM 2020, Beijing, China, December 17–20, 2020, Proceedings

Monotonicity is one of those ideas that quietly holds together arguments in logic, linguistics, and computer science. This volume, the proceedings of the Second Tsinghua Interdisciplinary Workshop on Logic, Language and Meaning (TLLM 2020), brings together twelve peer-reviewed papers that examine how monotonicity and related notions shape meaning, inference, and grammar. Edited by Dun Deng, Fenrong Liu, Mingming Liu, and Dag Westerståhl, the collection reflects a genuinely cross-disciplinary conversation.

What the Proceedings Cover

The contributions range from foundational questions in logic to detailed case studies in particular languages. Readers will encounter work on:

• New logical perspectives on monotonicity
• Universal free choice and concessive copular conditionals in Tibetan
• Monotonicity in syntax
• Attributive measure phrases in Mandarin
• Universal quantification in Mandarin
• Intuitionistic minimal change semantics
• Downward monotonicity in causal reasoning
• Morphosyntactic patterns and monotonic mappings
• Negative polarity additive particles
• Modal syllogisms
• Bipartite exhaustification in Vietnamese
• Degree-based NPI licensing in comparatives

Research Themes and Approaches

Several threads run through the volume: polarity and negative polarity items, quantification, causality, belief revision, and the syntax-semantics interface. The papers show monotonicity not as an isolated formalism but as a tool for explaining why certain inferences are valid, why certain expressions are licensed, and how languages encode logical structure.

Who Will Find It Useful

This is a research-level collection. It will be most valuable to graduate students, linguists, logicians, philosophers of language, and computer scientists working on formal semantics, natural logic, and related areas. The mix of theoretical and language-specific studies makes it a useful snapshot of current work at the logic-language interface.

About the Workshop and Series

The volume appears in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (LNCS 12564) and in the FoLLI Publications on Logic, Language and Information subline. The workshop was originally planned for April 2020 at Tsinghua University and moved online to December 17–20, 2020. The proceedings include twelve full papers selected after blind review, alongside invited contributions from the event.

Why This Collection Stands Out

Monotonicity can seem technical, but it sits close to everyday reasoning. The studies here demonstrate how a single logical property can illuminate everything from pronoun interpretation to scalar implicature, from causal claims to comparative constructions. For readers who want a focused, current view of that research landscape, this volume offers a well-edited starting point.

Digital Delights is pleased to offer this ebook edition for researchers and students who want searchable, portable access to the proceedings.