Initial Composition

Welcome to Semantic Compositions, one of the first blogs on the Web to cover the discipline of linguistics. For those of you who have interesting lives, friends, family and work -- and therefore no acquaintance with type theory or lambda calculus -- the name of the blog is a play on the notion of semantic composition, a claim that the truth value of a logical sentence can be computed by operations on its component parts. It's a bit more complicated than that, but the main point of this blog will be to expose and hopefully popularize some of the ideas to come out of theoretical and applied linguistics, as well as related disciplines like computer science and psychology.

Your host is a commercially employed computational linguist with an undergraduate degree in linguistics, a graduate degree in computational linguistics, and additional training in electrical engineering and music. He also holds a patent in search engine design, and as of this writing, has a further patent pending for a related natural-language parser design.