“The curious case of and/or“, based on a forthcoming article in Natural Language Semantics (lead author Raj Singh, Carleton University), was featured in the Brainiac section of the Boston Globe earlier this month. The journal Natural Language Semantics was founded, and has been edited for the last 25 years, by Irene Heim (MIT, 1982 UMass PhD) and myself. We are happy that an article in our journal, which is usually mostly read by specialists, found an audience outside of academia. The topic of the article (children’s confusion of and and or) is in line “with the trend in linguistics to think of the real power in language as arising from short “function” words that stitch sentences together — words like “if,” “and,” “or,” and “why.” These words turn language from something that simply gives names to things (“table,” “rock,” “cup,”) into a logical system that, almost like computer code, makes sophisticated thinking possible.” Source: Boston Globe.