Meaning composition in compounds and phrasal syntax. Semantic fossils.

The lab session was canceled because of snow. Our lecture on Friday will be about compositionality. The slides are here.

Short (100KB): Manfred Krifka's entry on compositionality in the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, which you can access via the CogNet Library.

Long (4MB): Barbara Partee on lexical semantics and compositionality (PDF version from the Semantics Archive). The screen-viewable published version from An Invitation to Cognitive Science can also be accessed via the CogNet Library and is here.

Long (2.2 MB): Ray Jackendoff giving an evolutionary perspective on meaning composition. Excerpt from Jackendoff's Foundations of Language.

We will come back to Partee's and Jackendoff's chapters again and again in the course of the semester. Give them a first reading this week.

This week's lectures will be on names for individuals and kinds. During the lab session, you will do some exercises on set theory to build formal background for our discussion of compositional semantics.

Psychological background: Paul Bloom on names for natural kinds and artifacts (1.6 MB).

Building formal background: set theory. Chapter 1 from Partee, ter Meulen, and Wall (1.5 MB).

This week's lectures will continue the discussion of names for individuals and kinds. During the lab session, you will do some exercises on relations and functions.

A first project description (about one typed page, double-spaced) is due on Friday in class, no electronic submissions. Check out the project guidelines.

Psychological background: Paul Bloom on word learning (30KB).

Building formal background. Chapter 2 from Partee, ter Meulen and Wall (1.20 MB ), but section 2.4 on function composition is optional. Chapter 3 is optional, too.

President's Day on Monday.

We will continue our discussion of names for kinds by looking at bare noun arguments in three varieties of Chinese. During the lab session, we will do semantic fieldwork on German discourse particles.

Take-home 1 is given out on Friday.

For the lab session: Lisa Matthewson on semantic fieldwork (PDF).

Paul Bloom's papers are still relevant as psychological background about names for kinds.

Conversational implicatures. During the lab session, you can ask questions about take-home 1.

Take-home 1 is due on Friday in class.

Assigned readings for lectures: Excerpt from Gamut, chapter 6: Pragmatics: Meaning and Usage (PDF, 2.3 MB).

The slides on or and scalar implicatures are here.

The meaning of sentence connectives: the puzzling properties of or. Semantics or pragmatics? Lab sessions on designing semantic mini-experiments.

Jennings' article on disjunction in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Still relevant: Excerpt from Gamut, chapter 6: Pragmatics: Meaning and Usage (PDF, 2.3 MB).

Assigned readings for lab session : Gordon on truth-value judgment tests and de Villiers and Roeper on testing children's comprehension of a sentence.

Jesse's slides on disjunction, expressives, experimental design 1 and experimental design 2.

Meaning and intonation. During the lab session you will hear a first-hand report about semantic fieldwork on an Amazonian language.

Take-home 2 is given out on Friday.

A second project description (about two typed pages, double-spaced) is due on Monday in class, no electronic submissions. You should now be in stage two or three.

Perfect design & meaning composition: verbs and adjectives

Take-home 2 is due on Friday.

The compositional meaning contributions of verbs. Here are the slides on "Perfect Design", which will take us back to the topic of compositionality. Reading (again): Barbara Partee on lexical semantics and compositionality (PDF version from the Semantics Archive). The screen-viewable published version from An Invitation to Cognitive Science can also be accessed via the CogNet Library and is here.

Verb meanings, adjectival modification. During the lab session, we will do fieldwork on singular bare noun arguments in Brazilian Portuguese.

We will solidify our knowledge of semantic composition by looking one more time at the compositional semantic contributions of verbs and verb phrases before moving on to adjectives and adjectival modification. Still time to reread: Barbara Partee on lexical semantics and compositionality (PDF version from the Semantics Archive). The screen-viewable published version from An Invitation to Cognitive Science can also be accessed via the CogNet Library and is here.

During the lab session, we will continue our fieldwork on singular bare noun arguments in Brazilian Portuguese.

Take-home 3 is given out on Friday.

Review of our semantic system. Beginning quantification.

During the lab session, you can ask questions about take-home 3.

Take-home 3 is due on Friday.

More on quantification.

Reading: Richard Larson on Semantics (PDF, 2.5 MB, not printable).From An Invitation to Cognitive Science, which can be accessed via the CogNet Library.

Holiday on Monday. Monday schedule on Tuesday.

Wrapping up quantification. Preparing for the Mini-conference

Mini-Conference: Presentation of semester projects.

Take-home 4 is given out on Friday.

Mini-conference. Schedule to be announced.

Mini-Conference: Presentation of semester projects.

Mini-conference. Schedule to be announced.

Monday: Last session of this class. Doughnuts. Final paper and take-home 4 are due at the beginning of class. No extensions .

We'll do evaluations and a final wrap-up of the course.