- Lecture 1. The interactive stance: basic desiderata for a semantic theory; A theory of events and situations
- The interactive stance to semantics moves to an analysis of semantics which can characterize the potential for misunderstanding, rejection, and correction. A theory of events and situations is developed.
- slides: part 1 nassli-lek1-part1.pdf , part 2 lect1-part2-slides.pdf
- Lecture 2. Grammar in TTR: frames and lexical semantics; Incremental context and content; Tense and aspect
- Grammars are introduced as assigning types to speech events. We relate this view to Fillmore's theory of frames, the basis for a rich theory of lexical semantics. We show how the combination of frames and typing of speech events can be applied to a theory of tense and aspect related to Reichenbach's work on the relation between speech, event and reference times and more recent work by Tim Fernando on the analysis of events as strings of component events.
- slides: lect2-slides.pdf
- Lecture 3. A theory of abstract entities and illocutionary interaction: analysis in terms of dialogue game boards; Negation
- The semantic ontology is expanded to include abstract entities such as propositions, questions, and outcomes which underpin illocutionary interaction. This provides the background for an analysis of negation that combines aspects of classical, intuitionistic and situation semantics views.
- slides: part 1 part 2
- Lecture 4. Unifying metacommunicative and illocutionary interaction; Generalized quantifiers and copredication
- We provide a unified theory of metacommunicative and illocutionary interaction on the basis of the notion of Austinian locutionary propositions. This provides a basis for describing various linguistic phenomena occuring during grounding and clarification interaction. Formal semantics has been traditionally concerned with questions concerning quantifiers such as 'every', 'most' and 'a few'.
- We will show how these are treated in TTR and how the treatment relates to cases of copredication (originally discussed by James Pustejovsky) where we seem to be able to refer to different aspects of the same object simultaneously, e.g., 'The lunch was delicious but took forever' where 'lunch' appears to be used to simultaneously refer to food and an event. A rich theory of context emerges from these analyses and this is important for showing how fragmentary utterances can be interpreted.
- Slides part1 part2
- Lecture 5. Non-sentential utterances; extensions: disfluencies, multilogue, conversational genres. Slides