This Seminar is "advanced". Some background in Syntax and/or semantics required. Recommended for students interested in semantics and its relationship to syntax.

This class is an introduction to the formal analysis of linguistic meaning, specifically focusing on its close links with syntactic structure. We will examine the semantic principles that underlie a core feature of the faculty of language – the human ability to understand infinitely many expressions – namely, the principles by which individual words combine to form phrases whose meaning is entirely predictable. To make our claims precise, we will master a fragment of the formal system commonly used in contemporary generative grammar to describe semantic phenomena. Ideally, the class will spark your interest in questions of meaning and structure, and will prepare you to begin further in-depth study in this area of linguistics.

Week 1

Truth-conditional semantics. Lexical meaning and phrasal meaning. Compositionality. Nominal, verbal and adjectival predicates, and their arguments and modifiers. Type-driven interpretation.

Week 2

Traces of movement and pronouns as variables. Predicate abstraction. Variable binding. Quantifiers. Logical Form. Quantificational determiners, adverbs of quantification, degree quantifiers.

Week 3

Weak and strong determiners. Referential and bound pronouns.