Semantics & Cognition

Please check this website regularly. It will be updated throughout the course - the information may be tentative and is subject to change.

Lecturer: Jakub Szymanik

Classes: on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays

Content: While natural languages show significant variability, there are features that they all appear to share. Linguists call these features linguistic universals. Universals have been found at all levels of linguistic structure, e.g., phonological, syntactic, and semantic. Some universals might follow from constraints on what humans are physically capable of doing. For instance, there is no language whose prosody requires the production of sound waves above 30kHz, since humans cannot hear such sounds. The reasons for other universals are harder to understand. This course will focus on a class of universals that has recently increased interest, namely universals in lexical semantics.

A universal in lexical semantics is a property that restricts the set of all logically possible meanings, such that all words attested in known languages satisfy the property. Semantic universals have been identified in the meaning of simple determiners (e.g., conservativity), Boolean connectives (e.g., absence of a connective meaning “not and”), gradable adjectives (e.g., monotonicity), and the concepts expressed by nouns (e.g., convexity).

The program of analyzing universals due to competing pressures can be approached with different computational methodologies. Despite the wealth of recent work on the topic and the slow emergence of a unified picture of the evolution of semantic universals, little systematic treatment has become available to students interested in the subject. Therefore, this introductory course aims to give an overview of this approach to the study of semantic universals and the various methods that have been applied to it.

Prerequisites: There are no formal prerequisites, although some basic background in formal semantics, cognitive science, linguistics, or computer science would be useful.

Evaluation: The course typically consists of lectures and discussions of research papers; everybody is expected to play an active role in class. You will be asked to write a short paper by the end of the course (the last couple of weeks will be dedicated to this). This paper will account for most of the final grade (around 50%). The rest will correspond to exercises, presentations, and discussions.

Organization: The first part of the course will consist of lectures and discussions of research papers. Everybody is expected to play an active role during these sessions. You are asked to present a paper, write a summary for another paper and think of three questions for yet another paper. You can sign up for papers here. In the second part of the course (roughly the last three weeks), you are expected to work on a research project with a small group of fellow students. In the final week, you will need to give a presentation on your project and submit a short scientific paper.