Knowledge of language structure and its relationship to meaning allow you to understand new sentences you have never heard before. For example, chances are, you have never before heard or read the following sentence: "The professor's execution was postponed until after the final submission of grades." Yet, you have no trouble understanding its meaning. You also know how this sentence means something very different from "The final submission of grades was postponed until after the professor's execution." This is because you implicitly understand how to put together the "ingredient" parts in the sentence and compute a meaning out of them based on how the parts are put together. A useful analogy for this knowledge is your knowledge of arithmetic. Once you know how arithmetic operations work, you can crank through any numbers to compute an answer, even numbers you have never seen before.

Semanticists study linguistic meaning and try to build a theory of what these operations look like. This is a very young field, and there are more questions than answers about the correct way to characterize meaning and its relation to linguistic structure. In this class, you'll learn about the kinds of questions semanticists ask, and what kinds of tools seem promising in answering them, as well as the limitations of these tools.

This course is intended to provide you with 1) an introduction to some formal and conceptual tools used to characterize linguistic meaning; and 2) just as importantly, a sense of the methods by which theories of meaning are developed. Approximately half the class will focus on the application of the tools of logic to understanding meaning. The second section explores some of the limits of logical approaches to modeling meaning, and is devoted to discussions of ways in which the formal system introduced in the first section might be augmented or complemented to deal with these problems. By the end of the course, you will have a basic knowledge of and (hopefully!) an appreciation for the theoretical foundations of formal semantics and pragmatics, and the empirical domain these fields address. Upon completion, you will be prepared to take advanced, graduate-level semantics courses, and be able to read at least some, though by no means all, primary papers in journals and professional books. And most importantly, you will have been exposed in detail to the intricacies and challenges of devising theories of meaning in language.

Here are some of the topics that we cover in this class:

1. Propositional Logic
2. Quantification & Predication
3. Generalized Quantifiers
4. Semantics of time
5. "Possible worlds" semantics

1. Conversational Implicature
2. Presupposition

This class focuses on regular working-through of problem sets and semantic puzzles. Class participation is an important component. There are numerous take-home problem sets and a final take-home exam.