Semantics 531/731 Lecturelets

Click on an icon to jump to a module

The nature of meaning

Welcome to the course

Welcomes you to the course and introduces the lecturelet.

Discusses the nature of compositional meaning, and its benefits for semanticists.

Discusses different expressions and how we need to keep them distinct

Techniques on building contexts and using stimuli to gather semantic evidence.

Examines relationships like contradiction and synonymy.

Explores entailment in detail, notably upward and downward entailment.

Discusses the nature of semantic ambiguity and some of its sources.

Introduces the concept of felicity, and the different ways that expression can be "bad" in the semantics.

Introduces the concept of saturation.

A new way for propositions to relate to each other.

Reading: Huang 2006, 3.1, 3.2 (64-75)

Introduces concepts of reference and the various types of definiteness

Readings : Lyons 1999, ch 1
McGinn

Introduces various types of modification

Types of pronouns

Introduction to pragmatics

Introduction to temporal encoding

(Handout = Klein reading)

Formal fundamentals

Introduces what formal semantics is and why we use it.

Absolute introduction to set theory

What is a meaning? How do we express it? And what are those weird double brackets, anyways?

Abstracting over a set to find a property that applies to its members.

Important relations between sets

Introduces functions in a broad sense

Introduces characteristic functions, and links them to denotations and abstracted sets

Introduces composition and compositional processes, starting with three basic compositional rules.

Rules: TN, NN, FA

Introduces the common and useful way to write functions.

What happens when a verb (and a function) has two arguments?

Why we use if and only if in our functions

Introduces and discusses type-driven interpretation

Time to take functional application to the next level!!!

Crucial discussion on how we formalize meanings, involving the word the

Formalizes modification

Rule: PM

Analytically figure out how prepositions compose.

Introduces assignment functions

How we use variable assignments to interpret pronoun reference

Rule: LT, PR

How to modify an assignment to our whims

How do we build relative clauses? What do traces mean? How can we add arguments to a formal expression?

Rule: PA

Simpler ways to write things, now that we know what they're simplifications of.

Review video to remind you when to use functional application.

Review video about using predicate/lambda abstraction.

The syntax-semantics interface

Discusses the basic concepts behind how the grammar is organized, and the semantics' place in it, so that we can see just what linguistic objects we're trying to explain the meaning of.

Sketches out how nominal expressions are built.

Situates the base-generation of subjects inside the VP.

Quantification

Introduces the notion of quantification, and some of the key concepts.

Quantification with a, some

Quantification with all, every, each

Introduction to scope relations

Quick practice in composition

A very crucial problem with a big solution

The power of binding and a new kind of ambiguity

Verbal Semantics

A monumental change to our ontology

How do we re-write our verb denotations and our adverbial denotations to fit Davidsonian events?

Discusses why we need to existentially quantify over events.

Explains how tense is tied to the context.

Introduces aspect

Formalizes tense and aspect

Exploring the internal temporal properties of event descriptions

Introducing argument structure and valency

Relation between argument stucture and Valency

Major development in linking semantics and syntax

Read Saeed Ch 6 in advance

More of a syntax lecturelet, but fitting here

A way to add thematic roles to the composition

A very important asymmetry, and our first decomposition of the argument structure. Reading: Kratzer 1996

Breaking down events