Solutions to Assignment 3 can be found here.

Solutions to the practice translations into predicate logic can be found here.

Course description

People use sentences to mean things: to convey information about themselves and about states of affairs in the world. This class provides an introduction to the study of how meaning is encoded and expressed in language. We will examine basic concepts in word and sentence meaning (lexical and compositional semantics) and the way sentences are used and interpreted in context (pragmatics). Topics will include: implicature, presupposition, truth conditions and entailment, quantification, sense and reference, word meaning and speech acts.

Course requirements

Readings; short weekly assignments (20%); two quizzes (20%); final exam (40%).

The final exam for this class is Thursday, December 13 at 9.00 am.

Readings

The textbook for the class is Levinson, S. 1983, Pragmatics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, which is available at Norris Bookstore. Parts of this book are somewhat difficult, so I recommend reading the chapters both before and after the corresponding lectures. The other readings are collected in a course reader, which is available at Copy Cat (corner of Sherman and Emerson in Evanston).

Experimental Requirement

This course has an experimental requirement. Students may fulfill this requirement by either participating in two experiments of one hour each, or by attending two lectures of one hour each. The experiments will be part of ongoing research in the department and will illustrate features of language structure and use that are relevant to topics covered in the core linguistics curriculum. The lectures will be part of the regular speaker series organized by the Language . That is: A goes to A-, A- goes to B+, B+ goes to B, B goes to B- etc.

Go here for information about the Language and Cognition lecture series, which can be used to satisfy the experimental requirement.

Schedule

Week 1: Theoretical and methodological preliminaries

• A catalogue of inference types (Chierchia \& McConnell-Ginet,1990 ch.~1)
• Semantics vs.~pragmatics (Levinson ch.~1 )

Week 2: Implicature

• What is said vs. what is meant (Levinson ch.~2)
• Grice's maxims, the Cooperative Principle, and scalar implicature

Week 3: Some formal tools

• Propositional logic and truth tables (de Swart 1998 ch.~3)

Week 4: Presupposition

• What is presumed vs. what is at issue (Levinson ch.~3)
• Theories of presupposition and the projection problem

FIRST QUIZ

Week 5: Truth conditional meaning

• Denotation, sense and reference (Bach 1989, Chierchia \& McConnell-Ginet ch.~2)
• Principle of compositionality

Week 6: More formal tools

• Simple predicate logic (de Swart 1998 ch.~4)
• Quantification and the syntax-semantics interface

Week 7: Reference

• Definite descriptions (Russell 1905, Levinson ch.~2 (optional))

SECOND QUIZ

Weeks 8-9: Word meaning

• Eskimo words for snow (Pullum 1991)
• Argument structure (Fillmore 1970)
• Aspect (time permitting) (Vendler 1967)

Week 10: Speech Acts

• How to do things with words (Levinson ch.~4)

FINAL EXAM

Reading List

Bach, E., 1989: Informal Lectures on Formal Semantics, SUNY Press, Albany, NY, ch.~1.

Chierchia, G. and S.~McConnell-Ginet, 1990: Meaning and Grammar, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, chapters 1 and 2.

Fillmore, C., 1970: The Grammar of hitting and breaking, in Jacobs, R. and P. Rosenbaum (eds.), Readings in English Transformational Grammar, Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C.

Levinson, S. 1983, Pragmatics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Pullum, G.K., 1991: The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, in The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.

Russell, B., 1905: On Denoting, Mind {\bf 14}, 479-493.

de Swart, H., 1998: Introduction to Natural Language Semantics, CSLI Publications, Stanford, CA, chapters 3 and 4.

Vendler, Z., 1967: Verbs and Times, in Linguistics in Philosophy, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.