Overview

This course is a continuation of Semantics 1, and uses the foundation in compositional analysis and type theory developed there to explore several core issues, phenomena and open questions in the study of meaning in natural language: modality, the semantics of definite/indefinite descriptions and anaphora, dynamic aspects of meaning, and the semantics and pragmatics of questions.

Course requirements

Students who enroll in the course for credit will be required to do all the readings and participate in class discussions. Students will also be asked to provide summaries and critical assessments of three non-assigned readings (to include any subsections of the Portner book that we do not discuss in class); these will be due at the end of the fourth, sixth and ninth weeks.

Students will also be expected to write a 10-15 page research paper on some topic in semantics (not necessarily directly connected to the content of this course), which will be due on Thursday, June 12. You should consult with me on the topic by the end of the seventh week, and we will have short presentations of the projects during the tenth week.

Schedule

UPDATE (21 April): For those interested in a second general resource on the issues we're discussing in this class (in addition to the Portner ms.), and one in particular that uses the same technical machinery, formalisms, and syntactic assumptions as Heim and Kratzer, check out Kai von Fintel and Irene Heim's lecture notes on intensional semantics.

• Week 1: Discourse referents
  Karttunen 1971
  Optional (for the bold): Montague 1974

  
  

• Week 2: Modal logic
  Paul Portner, Modality, chapter 2
  NB: There will be no class April 7 and 9; we will rescedule one of these on April 11, and the other later in the quarter.

  
  

• Week 3: Kratzer
  Kratzer 1977
  Portner chapter 3, section 3.1
  Optional: Kratzer 1981

  
  

• Week 4: Modality and grammar
  Portner, chapter 4, sections 4.1-4.2
  Kratzer 1986, Davis et al. 2007
  Optional: Stephenson 2007, Bach ms, Macfarlane 2005, Lasersohn 2005

  
  

• Week 5: Donkeys, paychecks and pronouns
  Heim 1982, chapter 1
  Evans 1977a
  Optional: Evans 1977b, 1980

  
  

• Week 6: Interlude on indefinites, scope and quantificational force
  Heim 1982, chapter 2
  Farkas 1981, Reinhart 1997
  Optional: Lidz 2006, Matthewson 1999

  
  

• Week 7: Going dynamic
  Heim 1982, chapter 3; Heim 1983 (this is a condensed version of Heim 1982, ch. 3)
  Roberts 1987, chapter 1
  Portner, section 3.2 and 4.4
  Optional: Elbourne 2005, chs. 1-2, Lewis 1979

  
  

• Week 8: Presuppositions revisited
  Heim 1992
  Optional: Karttunen 1973, Stalnaker 1973

  
  

• Week 9: Questions
  Karttunen 1977, Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002
  Optional: Groenendijk and Stokhof 1982, Hamblin 1973
  NB: There will be no class Monday, May 26.

  
  

• Week 10: Answers?
  Student presentations of research projects

Final paper due by 5pm, Thursday, June 12