Semantics

Meaning is one of the most obvious features of language, but also one of its most intangible and complex aspects to study. Formal semantics is the branch of linguistics that studies the meaning expressed by the elements of a language and the interpretation of the expressions that result from their combinations. We will be setting up a number of basic tools for formally representing the meaning of complex expressions, and look at some specific phenomena.

On successful completion of this course, students should be able to:             

• identify how the parts of a sentence are integrated, which is the basis for understanding its meaning (compositional hypothesis),
• perform simple and more complex semantic analyses (formulae) in core types of phenomena

There are no prerequisites. The course is open to students with no prior knowledge of semantics.
A basic introduction to general linguistics is helpful but not required.