Instructor: Haoze Li

Course description

Formal Semantics is an interdisciplinary subfield of both linguistics and philosophy devoted to the study of language meaning. It studies meaning in natural language using formal tools borrowed from formal logic, mathematics and computer science. It provides explanations for:

• what linguistic expressions mean

• why do they mean what they mean, and

• how the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meaning of its parts

This course is designed to introduce you to some of the classical topics in Formal Semantics and the basic formal tools used to study these topics. We will also learn how to read the literature of Formal Semantics and how to conduct semantics research. Upon the completion of this course, you will be able to:

• identify different types of meaning

• translate linguistic expressions into model-theoretic objects

• translate natural language into a formal language such as propositional logic or predicate logic

• understand some fundamental issues of Formal Semantics

The course will be divided into four subject areas, with the following order of presentation.

• Model-theoretic semantics:
  Topics: Interpreting linguistic expressions in terms of a model of an actual or possible state of the world
  Tools: Introduction to sets, functions, relations, types, etc.

• Nominal meaning:
  Topics: Quantifiers, determiners, modifiers and scope
  Tools: Predicate logic, lambda calculus, the theory of Generalized Quantifiers

• Verbal meaning:
  Topics: Verbs, adverbs, thematic roles, aspects
  Tools: Event semantics

References

• Barwise, Jon and Robin Cooper. 1981. Generalized quantifiers and natural language. Linguitics and Philosophy.

• Dowty, David. 1979. Word meaning and Montague grammar. Dordrecht: Reidel.

• Dowty, David, Robert Wall and Stanley Peters. 1981. Introduction to Montague Semantics. Dordrecht: Reidel.

• von Fintel, Kai and Irene Heim. 2011. Intensional semantics. Lecture notes, MIT.

• Heim, Irene and Angelika Kratzer. 1998. Semantics in generative grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.

• Huang, C.T. James. 1994. Logical Form. In Government and Binding Theory and the Minimalist Program. ed. G. Webelbuth, 127—175. Oxford: Blackwell.

• Karttunen, Lauri. 1973. Presupposition in compound sentences. Linguistic Inquiry.

• Kearns, Kate. 2011. Semantics (2nd edition). Palgrave Macmillan.

• Schlenker. Philippe. To appear. What it all means. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

• Partee, Barbara. 2011. Formal semantics: Origins, issues and early impact. In Baltic international yearbook of cognition, logic and communication, 1—15.

• Parsons, Terence. 1990. Events in the semantics of English. Cambridge, MA: MIT press.

• Szabolcsi, Anna. 2010. Quantification. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• 蒋严、潘海华. 2005. 形式语义学引论. 中国科技出版社。