Logic, languages and linguistics

The talk includes: ¯ a brief survey of the literature on descriptive complexity results; this journey takes us from regular to context-sensitive languages, ¯ a brief survey of the complexity of (realistic) linguistic formalisms; this journey takes us from context-sensitive grammars to fragments of richer grammars, ¯ a discussion of generative and model-theoretic means to arrive at more adequate formalisms. My point of departure is the somewhat Chomskyan methodological point that an adequate theory of natural languages lies at the intersection of the descriptively adequate theories (in terms of extension), those theories that are adequate in terms of complexity and those theories that are adequate in terms of learnability. I talk mostly about complexity issues here.