Description

This course is an advanced introduction to formal semantics and pragmatics. It will focus on the main contribution of formal approaches to meaning, which originate with the works by logicians like Frege, Russell, Reichenbach, and philosophers like Strawson, Vendler, Davidson and Montague. During the last decades, formal semantics has made huge progresses in computing meaning with the use of logical languages, resulting in a formal theory of quantification and events representation.

Following a parallel way, mainly by the criticism of the formal tradition in logic and philosophy of language, new approaches to meaning have emerged, mainly with the development of speech acts theory (Austin, Searle) and the theory of implicature (Grice). Concepts like presupposition and implicature have been at the centre of the pragmatics of meaning, mainly focused on deriving speaker meaning from logical forms and context.

This course will be focused on two branches of the study of meaning: deriving logical forms from syntactic materials on the one hand, and computing speaker meaning from logical forms and contexts on the other. What makes the semantics-pragmatics interface possible is a theory of context and implicature on the one hand, and a theory of encoded and inferred meaning on the other. The course introduces central concepts of Gricean (implicature), neo-Gricean (generalized conversational implicature) and post-Gricean pragmatics (relevance).