Meaning composition in compounds and phrasal syntax. Semantic fossils.

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 Wednesday's lab session, we 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 Wednesday's lab session, we will do some exercises on relations and functions.

A first project description (about one typed page, double-spaced) is due on Monday in class, no electronic submissions. Even if you work in a group, submit an individual project description explaining your anticipated contribution to the group.

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

Building formal background. Chapter 2 and chapter 3 from Partee, ter Meulen and Wall (1.20 MB each).

President's Day on Monday. Monday Schedule on Tuesday.

We will continue our discussion of names for kinds and the acquisition of word meanings.

Take-home 1 is given out on Friday.

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

Now directly relevant: Paul Bloom on names for natural kinds and artifacts (1.6 MB) and Paul Bloom on word learning (30KB).

Short video about the birth of a language from PBS.

Conversational implicatures

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).

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

The meaning of sentence connectives: the puzzling properties of or. Semantics or pragmatics?

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).

The lab session will be on Friday this week and will continue last week's discussion of experimental design.

More on exclusive or.

Meaning and intonation.

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.

We'll talk about meaning and intonation on Wednesday and will have a lab session on the topic on Friday.

More on Meaning and Intonation.

Back to truth-conditional meanings: Meaning composition in phrasal syntax: the contribution of verbs.

Take-home 2 is due on Friday.

Excerpt from chapter 3 of Terry Parsons: A Primer in the Semantics of English (PDF).

If you want to read the complete Parsons manuscript, you can find it here.

Meaning composition in phrasal syntax: the contribution of verbs. Continued. Moving towards an event semantics.

Still: Excerpt from chapter 3 of Terry Parsons: A Primer in the Semantics of English (PDF).

If you want to read the complete Parsons manuscript, you can find it here.

Davidsonian event semantics. Adverbial modification. Adjectives.

Take-home 3 is given out on Friday.

This is is good 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.

Quantifiers

Take-home 3 is due on Friday.

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.

No class, but virtual consultation hours on Wednesday. See take-home exam 3 for details.

Holiday on Monday.

Mini-Conference: Presentation of semester projects.

Wednesday: Null pronouns in Russian; Aspect and modality in Russian; Double modals in Southern varieties of American English; Same and different in English.

Friday: Conjunctions and the order of events; Opacity, coreference, and pronouns; Broken plurals in Arabic; Reciprocals in French.

Mini-Conference: Presentation of semester projects.

Take-home 4 was given out on Friday.

Monday: The copula in Irish, and maybe Spanish; Ser and estar in Spanish; Wa and ga in Japanese; Less or fewer?

Wednesday: Autism, implicatures, and Theory of Mind: Generating predictions; Autism, implicatures, and Theory of Mind: Testing some predictions; Or or and?; Computing scalar implicatures in the scope of determiners.

Friday: The subjunctive in Spanish; Negative quantifiers in Spanish; More on negative quantifiers in Spanish; Free choice in Italian.

Mini-Conference: Presentation of semester projects.

Monday: Compositionality in Compounds; Constructing compounds: a crosslinguistic comparison; Shit's all around us; German doch.

Wednesday: What drives metonomy?; Processing structural ambiguities; On bearing and using arms; On plinking.

Friday: "each" and "every". Represented speech in Sherlock Holmes: parentheticals.

Monday: Last session of this class. Doughnuts. Final paper and take-home 4 are due at the beginning of class. No extensions . Grades will be submitted on May 14.

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