Course Information

Course description

This course explores issues in the semantics of natural language from both a linguistic and a psychological perspective. In particular, we will examine the scope of quantifiers, negation, propositional attitude verbs, and definite/indefinite descriptions in sentences of English and other languages. We will investigate how these phenomena interact with language processing, reasoning, and semantic representation. (The course will be co-taught by Profs. Lance Rips of Psychology and Chris Kennedy of Linguistics.)

• Prerequisites: Graduate status or permission of the instructor
• Teaching method: Lecture and discussion
• Evaluation: Term paper
• Readings: Selected readings from primary literature

Syllabus