After the course the student will be able to
- understand and appreciate different aspects of and perspectives on meaning
- engage with semantic and pragmatic literature that is not too specialized
- analyze basic meaning phenomena using important semantic/pragmatic notions and techniques
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Semantics and pragmatics are the two linguistic subdisciplines that deal with meaning in language. Semantics studies meaning from the perspective of reference and truth, pragmatics studies meaning from the perspective of language use in communication and discourse. Many concepts and tools in these disciplines find their origins in philosophy and logic, and they have been successfully applied to a wide range of empirical phenomena in natural language that involve meaning.
The course focuses on two subjects:
1 Semantics: The mathematical basis for doing formal, model-theoretic semantics (sets, relations, functions, type theory, lambda abstraction) and its application in accounting for entailment patterns and meaning composition.
2 Pragmatics: The role of presuppositions and implicatures in language use.
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