For all you local folks, I'll be giving a talk about my dissertation on November 5th at 4:00–5:00 in Ballantine Hall 011. For those who've heard me give talks about it before, not much has changed since NLCS 2013. But the majority of current CL/NLP, PL, and logic folks haven't seen the talk, so do feel free to stop by.
Abstract: Many natural languages allow scrambling of constituents, or so-called "free word order". However, most syntactic formalisms are designed for English first and foremost. They assume that word order is rigidly fixed, and consequently these formalisms cannot handle languages like Latin, German, Russian, or Japanese. In this talk I introduce a new calculus —the chiastic lambda-calculus— which allows us to capture both the freedoms and the restrictions of constituent scrambling in Japanese. In addition to capturing these syntactic facts about free word order, the chiastic lambda-calculus also captures semantic issues that arise in Japanese verbal morphology. Moreover, chiastic lambda-calculus can be used to capture numerous non-linguistic phenomena, such as: justifying notational shorthands in category theory, providing a strong type theory for programming languages with keyword-arguments, and exploring metatheoretical issues around the duality between procedures and values.
Edit 2014.11.05: The slides from the talk are now up.