Semantics 1 - Spring 2023
Practical Information
Classes are held on Fridays from 9.30 to 11.30, salle Ribot. They start on Feb. 10
TA sessions are currently scheduled on Tuesdays from 2 pm to 3.30pm, Room U209, but this might be subject to change.
Moodle Page: SC0BM060 LING 201 Semantics I
Student List (To facilitate communication, please add your name to this list, together with the requested information)
Course Description
This course is a fast-paced introduction to natural language semantics and pragmatics.
Human beings can produce and understand, without any apparent effort, sentences that have never been used or understood before. This capacity must rely on a mechanism whereby the meaning of a complex expression can be computed on the basis of that of its parts and the way they are combined (compositional semantics). Furthermore, the interpretation of sentences does not only rely on their linguistically encoded meaning, but also on all the inferences that we are able to draw, in a given context, regarding the communicative intentions of speakers (pragmatics). Formal semantics and pragmatics aim to explore these two dimensions of meaning.
The course is roughly organized around three main themes:
Compositional semantics: extensional semantics; compositionality; predication and modification; pronouns and quantification, polarity phenomena (60%)
Semantics and Pragmatics: presuppositions and scalar implicature, questions and answers (25%)
Intensional semantics (15%): limitations of extensional approaches; modality; propositional attitudes.
The class is taught in English, but questions can be asked in either French or English, remarks can be made in either language. Homework assignments can be done either in English or French.