Verona lectures 2011

Master classes

This series of lectures is based on the hypothesis that logical words in natural languages have as semantics their logical meanings and that their linguistic meanings are the result of an enrichment pragmatic process, given rise to more specific meanings.

Lecture 1 is devoted to the logical meaning of logical constants, and will discussed two main classical analyses of logical words, the formalist approach and the informalist one. It presents the standard pragmatic solution, based on Grice theory of implicatures..

Lecture 2 discusses pragmatics of logical connectives and quantifiers, and discusses Horn'ds conjecture on the absence of negative particulars in natural languages.

Lecture 3 is devoted to negation. It is about two types of negation, descriptive and metalinguistic, and its relation to presuppositions and implicatures, and about negation and event. It explores how and why events can be negated without loosing their temporal and causal properties.

Programme

Lecture 1: The pragmatics of logical words

Lecture 2: Quantifiers and negation

Lecture 3: Semantics and pragmatics of negation

Lecture 4: Why is meaning structured? Entailment, Presupposition, Implicature and Explicature