course description

Humans build and understand sentences they have never heard before. They talk about mere possibilities. They describe situations that could never exist in reality. How do they do it? What makes them so smart? Humans use symbols, but they do not just use symbols to pick out things in the world. They have symbols that can interact with each other to produce complex descriptions of real or merely possible people, things, events, and situations. The most powerful symbols of human languages are "function symbols", little words like not, if, and, or, every, and some, or pieces of inflection, like plural or tense morphology. Function symbols are the glue that allows humans to create complex meanings from strings of words that they perceive as arranged into hierarchical tree structures. Function symbols occupy distinguished positions ("head positions") in those structures, from where they control the process of meaning composition. Function symbols are the kind of symbols scholars of human languages are most interested in. They are the key players in connecting language with creative thought.

In addition to a tight mechanism for meaning composition, humans use particles and intonation to mark given, new, or contrastive information, and to indicate what they are wondering about, what they put up for discussion, and what they take to be established facts. They also use perfectly synchronized gestures to accompany their speech. Most mysteriously, humans seem to systematically exploit each other's mind reading capabilities to convey much more than what they literally say.

This course introduces you to the craft of doing semantics. Semantics is a thriving subdiscipline of linguistics with close ties to philosophy of language, logic, and cognitive psychology. This class is for you if you are interested in linguistic meaning, have an analytic mind, enjoy theory building, and are curious about how highly abstract theories connect with everyday situations. The class comes with a lab that functions as a scientific initiation component. You will acquire hands-on experience with semantic fieldwork and mini-experiments. Prerequisite: Ling 201, Ling 401.

course materials

Readings (except for Elbourne's book), handouts, and slides will be made available for download from this website. The readings for the current week will be posted on the home page. Past readings will be available from the schedule throughout the semester. You can access them with your UMail user name and password.

lab

During the lab sessions, you practice technical skills, design and test fieldwork questionnaires or experimental materials, or think some more about a theoretical issue.

course requirements (summary to download)

In-class exams: There will be three scheduled in-class open-book exams related to the lectures and the lab sessions. The two best exams will contribute 15% each to your final course grade. The third exam is there to cover absences for whatever reasons (no questions asked), or to allow you to just have a bad day without being penalized for it. You can also earn bonus points if you submit three good exams (see below). You can bring your own books, articles, notes, and print-outs of handouts and slides to the exam, and you can also ask the instructors for help if you are stuck or need a reminder. You cannot use laptops during the exams, or talk to each other in any way - no texting, for example. There will be no individual make-up exams. If you need further accommodations, your needs must be documented by a health care professional at the beginning of the semester.

Junior Writing: This class satisfies the Junior Writing Requirement, and we will therefore do a certain amount of writing. You will do lab reports for some of the lab sessions and some short in-class writing exercises. You will receive individual feedback on each piece you write, and will then be asked to revise and type up or retype your piece and add both the original and the revised version to your writing portfolio. Writing portfolios will be collected twice during the semester at designated times (see schedule). Both times, you will receive a grade of Pass, Fail, or Excellent for all the writing you did during the relevant period. Your writing will be assessed for both form and content: style, organization, accuracy of information, relation to readings and what went on in class or in the lab, etc. We do not accept late or electronic submissions of writing portfolios.

Lab reports for fieldwork: We will have a few semantic fieldwork sessions, typically during the Thursday lab. You are asked to formulate testable hypotheses from a set of given data, and then proceed to elicit new data that might confirm or disconfirm your hypothesis. You work in a smaller group to come up with a first hypothesis and test it, and are then exposed to more data elicited by other groups. For each fieldwork session, you will be asked to submit a lab report by a fixed date. While data elicitation is a collective activity, everyone does their own lab report, documenting what went on during the lab session relying on their individual notes. What if you missed a fieldwork elicitation session? Could you get the elicited data from someone else? The answer is a clear "no". This would be a violation of the UMass Honesty Policy. A lab report is a report on how you and your classmates produced data of a particular kind to test particular hypotheses, and what kind of results were obtained. If you weren't present and didn't participate in the activities, you can't copy the data from somebody else. This would be a case of cheating.

Project: At the end of February, you will begin to work on a small individual project in several stages under our guidance. Your project is the most important piece of work for this class. Projects are negotiated individually and will involve fieldwork on a language other than Standard English or a semantic mini-experiment. You are strongly advised to check in with us about your project on a regular basis. At fixed dates, you will (1) submit a first project description, (2) submit a revised project description, (3) deliver a slide presentation, and (4) submit a final project report: at least 5 pages of written prose, typed and double spaced, not counting the bibliography, the fieldwork questionnaire or the experimental materials.

The UMass Academic Honesty Policy applies to all work for this class in all respects, unless explicitly specified otherwise. Since what is happening in class is important, you will not do well if you don't attend. If you absolutely have to miss a class, make sure you work through the slides or handouts, which you can download from this website. We are also most willing to help you catch up.

grading        

Exams: 30% (15% each for the two best exams out of three scheduled exams).

Project: 50% (planning, consulting, responding to feedback 15%; slides and presentation of slides 10%; final paper: 25%).

Writing portfolios: 20%. The grade for the writing portfolios will be computed from the grades for the two submitted portfolios as follows:

Two grades of Excellent: A

One Excellent, one Pass: A

Two grades of Pass, or one Excellent and one Fail: B

One Pass, one Fail: C

Two grades of Fail: F

Bonus system and methods of redemption: A final grade of B or lower for the writing portfolios will be raised by one full grade point if you do a third exam, and all three of your exams receive a grade of B+ or higher: B will be raised to A, C to B, and F to D. If one of the two submitted writing portfolios is assessed as Excellent, the combined grade for your two best exams will be raised to the next higher grade on the scale: A- goes to A, B+ to A-, B to B+, etc. If both writing portfolios are assessed as Excellent, the combined grade for your two best exams will be raised by one full grade point: A-, B+, and B will all go to A, B- will go to A-, etc.

missed exams and writing assignments 

The requirements for ling 510 are constructed in such a way that you are yourself in control of making up for missed work. We all have a bad day sometimes, get sick, etc. In this class, there are many methods of redemption - but you have to plan well from the very start. If you miss too many lectures or labs for no good reasons earlier in the semester, you may have used up your opportunities for redemption if you get a really bad flu later in the semester. If there are emergencies and hardships that extend for longer stretches of time, we need to have a conversation and you need documentation showing that the make-up possibilities you were already given are not sufficient to cover your case. Here is the kind of scenario you want to avoid: Student A misses exam 1 without good reasons, takes exam 2, and then gets really sick on the day exam 3 is given. She presents documentation that she was seen by Health Services on the day of exam 3. She will not be given a make-up exam since she presented no documentation for missing exam 1.

contact info for angelika kratzer

Course website: http://courses.umass.edu/ling510/

kratzer[at]linguist.umass.edu

office hours: wednesday & friday from 11:00 to 12:00.

south college 309.

contact info for noah constant

constant[at]linguist.umass.edu

office hours:to be announced.