LING 4421 - Semantics I

(crosslisted) PHIL 4730
(ETM-AS, KCM-AS, SMR-AS)

Fall. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Prerequisite: LING 3303 or permission of instructor. Co-meets with LING 6421/PHIL 6730.

D. Abusch.

Introduces methods for theorizing about meaning within generative grammar. These techniques allow the creation of grammars that pair syntactic structures with meanings. Students look at several empirical areas in detail, among them complementation (combining heads with their arguments), modification, conjunction, definite descriptions, relative clauses, traces, bound pronouns, and quantification. An introduction to logical and mathematical concepts used in linguistic semantics (e.g., set theory, functions and their types, and the lambda notation for naming linguistic meanings) is included in the course.