LIN1180 / LIN5082 Semantics

Course Details Course Description Lectures Tasks Assessment
Course tutor Albert Gatt ()
Venue LC118
Time Tuesdays, 11:00 -- 12:00

There will be no lecture on Tuesday 18th. A lecture will be held on Wednesday 19th at 0900 in Architecture Building Hall D

bibliography

  1. Saeed, J. 2003. Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. (This is the book on which the course will be based.)
    Note: Some students have observed that Saeed's book (3rd ed) is missing the page with symbols and abbreviations. This can now be downloaded in pdf format from here.
  2. Loebner, S. 2002 Understanding Semantics. London: Edward Arnold
  3. Cruse, A. 2000. Meaning in Language: an introduction to semantics and pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Another introductory textbook in semantics).

further reading

This is a list of books by authors whose work we will be introducing during the course. Saeed (2003) contains an introduction to the material that these authors discuss. The books themselves are not meant as introductory material, but taking a look at them certainly won't hurt.

  1. Wierzbicka, A. 1992 Semantics, culture and cognition: Universal human concepts in culture-specific configuations. Oxford: Oxford University Press
  2. Jackendoff, R. 2002 Foundations of language: Brain, meaning, grammar and evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press
  3. Pustejovsky, J. 1995 The generative lexicon. Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press

course description

This introductory course is concerned with two basic questions:

  1. What is meaning?
  2. How can linguistic theory account for a speaker's knowledge of the meaning of natural language utterances?

These questions have been tackled within a variety of disciplines in addition to linguistics, especially philosphy and psychology. Therefore, the course will involve forays into both these disciplines, while maintaining a clear focus on semantic theorising within the discipline of linguistics itself. The course will proceed in the following stages:

  1. An overview of different approaches to the analysis of meaning. This will include brief incursions into philosophical approaches, with a view to tracing their impact on contemporary theories of linguistic semantics. This initial overview will help to contextualise the subsequent focus on major trends in linguistic semantic theory in the 20th and 21st Centuries, including Structuralist and Generative approaches.
  2. An introduction to the basic concepts of semantic theory, including sense, denotation and reference.
  3. An introduction to lexical semantics, with a focus on:
    1. Lexical fields and meaning relations such as synonymy and hyponymy;
    2. Classical approaches to word meaning such as decompositional and definitional theories. This will also include an overview of contemporary descendants of these theories, such as Anna Wierzbicka's Natural Semantic Metalanguage, Ray Jackendoff's Conceptual Semantics, and James Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon Theory
    3. The relationship between words, meanings and the world. Of particular interest is the definition of a concept as the underlying meaning of a lexical item, and the contribution of realist and cognitivist approaches to the relationship between language and the world.
    4. An introduction to propositional and sentence meaning, including:
      1. The notion of compositionality;
      2. Some of the fundamentals of propositional meaning such as truth conditions.
      3. Some aspects of the relationship between syntax and semantics, particularly the issues of predication and argument structure (thematic roles) and selectional restrictions.

Data for analysis and exemplification will largely be drawn from Maltese and English.

lectures

This page contains details of forthcoming lectures and readings for each lecture. Following each lecture, I will put up the lecture notes for download.

To download a file, right-button click on the link, select save as and choose where to save the file.

Note: This programme is subject to last-minute changes, so check this page regularly!

Part 1: Basic Concepts

Part 2: Lexical semantics

Part 3: Sentence semantics

Assessment

Assessment will take the form of an assignment. Please read the assessment criteria carefully. The questions are listed below.

Assessment criteria

The mark you receive on your assignment will be primarily based on three criteria:

A note on plagiarism

Plagiarised work will not be tolerated. You are strongly advised to read the plagiarism policy on the website of the Institute of Linguistics. Make sure that any article or book that you use is acknowledged, using both inline citations (such as Borg (1999)) and a full reference in your bibliography. If in doubt, feel free to email your course tutor.

Submission procedures

You should submit your assignment in hard copy as well as by email to Albert Gatt using . Your assignment should be in the form of a Microsoft Word (.doc) document.

Deadline for submission

February 28th, 2011

Assignment titles

Choose any three of the following questions and answer each one in no more than 500 words.

  1. Distinguish between sense, reference and denotation.
  2. Consider the following case study: An architect designs and builds an electronic lift in the ditch of the city of Valletta. It is made of glass, and therefore people begin to refer to it as "the glass lift". Over the years, this acquires the status of a proper name, that is, people now refer to it as "The Glass Lift" (with capital letters). Now, imagine that fifty years after its construction, due to damage in a storm, the lift structure is changed and most of the glass is replaced with reinforced steel. However, people still refer to it as "The Glass Lift". Would you say this is incorrect?
  3. The following examples differ in what they presuppose: the first seems to presuppose that he finished the book, while the second doesn't.
    1. He wept before finishing the book.
    2. He stopped before finishing the book.
    What do these examples show about presupposition and its dependence on linguistic context? Would you view presupposition in these cases as a semantic or as a pragmatic phenomenon?
  4. Outline the main features of Prototype Theory and show how it differs from the classical view of concepts as necessary and sufficient conditions. Give examples to support your answer.
  5. In each of the following sentence pairs, the underlined word seems to differ in meaning. However, this happens for different reasons in each case. Discuss these examples, using them to distinguish between homophony, vagueness and polysemy/sense ambiguity.
    1. This is a good book. / This is a good cake.
    2. This branch of the bank is now closed. / This branch of the tree fell off.
    3. The hole in the ground is deep. / The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
  6. To what extent would you expect people who speak different languages to display fundamental differences in the way they think and perceive the world? Support your answer with examples from one particular domain, such as that of colour terms or number words.
  7. Why is it that the verbs know and see in the following pairs of examples behave differently, so that the progressive seems anomalous (as indicated by the asterisk) in the case of know, but not see?
    1. I know him well. / * I am knowing him well.
    2. I saw the movie. / I was seeing the movie.
  8. The following sentences have the same noun phrases (underlined) and denote more or less the same situation, involving a three-way relationship between Louise, Will and a flower. However, the noun phrases have different grammatical functions (for example, Louise is subject in a but not in b or c). How do we manage to understand that the situation is the same and that the relationship remains unchanged in spite of the syntactic differences between the sentences?
    1. Louise was given a flower by Will.
    2. Will gave a flower to Louise.
    3. A flower was given to Louise by Will.

Continuous assessment

Students who take this course as LIN5082 are given two assessable tasks during the course of the semester. This year, the tasks will take the form of short questions. An indicative deadline is provided for each task. You can submit your work by email.

  1. Task 1 (available online on 07/12/2010) can be downloaded from here (pdf). It is due by December 21
  2. Task 2 (available online on 07/12/2010) can be downloaded from here (pdf). It is due by January 5