| Course Details | Course Description | Lectures | Assessment |
| Course tutor | Albert Gatt () | |
| Venue | CCT 404A | |
| Lectures | Mondays, 09:00 - 11:00 |
Lectures will often be accompanied by specific readings. These will be made available in good time.
This course will build on the basic concepts that students will have acquired in the introductory course in Semantics (LIN1180), and make use of the formal methods acquired in the Formal Foundations for Linguistics course(LIN1032). The airm of the course is to give students a grounding in one of the dominant methods used for semantic analysis, namely, the application of mathematical methods (set theory, propositional and predicate logic) to the study of meaning.
Participants will be introduced to the main theories that have influenced work in Formal Semantics, particularly Montague Grammar and the logical work of Frege, as well as the basics of Model Theory. The course will then move on to a consideration of the principle of Compositionality, concretised through the study of how meaning is composed in various constructions, such as those involving verbal predicates, modifier constructions and generalised quatifiers. The final part of the course will deal with the concepts of modality and tense, after a discussion of the distinction between intensional and extensional contexts.
This page contains details of lectures and readings for each lecture. Following each lecture, I will put up the lecture notes for download.
Note: The topics of lectures may alter at short notice, so please check back regularly.
Assessment for this course is via an assignment (ca. 2000 words). Choose one of the following topics. Keep in mind that your assessment will depend on (a) the coherence of your argument; (b) the evidence you give that you have read beyond the basic course requirements; (c) your use of examples (in any language you are familiar with).
The deadline for submission of your assignments is June 30th, 2011. Please submit your assignment by email, as well as in hard copy.
One of the main advantages of viewing NPs as generalised quantifiers is that it affords us with a unified view of NP semantics. Furthermore, the study of generalised quantifiers has shed light on some possible semantic universals (i.e. universal restrictions on the kinds of quantifiers we can have in Natural Language, and their semantic properties). Outline the main features of the view of NPs as generalised quantifiers, and explain the rationale behind the theory. Using examples, show how this can yield a unified treatment of a diverse class of NPs, and what the implications for this treatment are.
According to a dominant view in formal semantics, nouns and verbs can be analysed along similar lines, that is, as predicates. This also means that nominal and verbal modification can receive similar analyses. Discuss the main arguments in favour of this view, showing what the main differences between nouns and verbs are, and how the attempt to view them as similar can shed light on the nature of events, compared to the meanings of nominals.
Time is a crucial component of the meaning of verb phrases and natural language allows both the expression of an event's "location" in time (via tense) and a specification of the temporal contours of an event (via aspect). Give an overview of the way semantics can handle tense, and discuss the way that tense interacts with grammatical and lexical aspect, with particular reference to the progressive and perfect tenses.
A lot of research in formal semantics is based on the possible worlds framework. This has proven particularly useful in the analysis of intensional contexts and modality. How do possible worlds help in the analysis of such expressions, and to what extent do you think such contexts justify the use of possible worlds in our theoretical models?