Semàntica i pragmàtica

 

Semantics and pragmatics

 

 

Code: 31363 (MLTA)

Professors: Berit Gehrke and Laia Mayol

Office: 52.610

Phone: 93 542 2232

E-mail: [email protected], [email protected]

Office hours: Thursday 12-1, or on appointment

 

Goals

 

This course is an introduction to natural language semantics and pragmatics, including the basic issues and data that have traditionally been the focus of study in formal approaches, the most influential theoretical frameworks, and the most commonly used research methodologies. The overall goal is to develop the student's ability to analyze natural language semantic and pragmatic phenomena.

 

Class times:  Fridays, 14.30-17.30

 

Schedule & Topics

January 13 (G&M)      Introduction, organizational issues; What is meaning? The roles of content and context in meaning, Semantics vs. Pragmatics vs. other modules in grammar, basic notions in semantics and pragmatics

January 20 (G)         Word meaning and sentence meaning, Compositionality

January 27 (G)         Predicates, Modification

February 3 (G)         Reference, Binding

February 10 (M)       Conversational Implicature, Speech Acts

February 17 (G)        Quantifiers

February 24 (M)        Presuppositions, Conventional Implicature             

March 2 (M)             Information structure

March 9 (M)             Anaphora

March 16 (G&M)       General discussion, outlook    

 

Materials

There will be weekly readings and mostly weekly exercises, all of which will be posted on the Aula Global Moodle for the course. The readings and exercises should be done BEFORE the class in which they are discussed.

Most readings will come from the following book:

Portner, P. (2005). What is Meaning? Fundamentals of Formal Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.

 

There is also a bulkpack of readings, on sale at OCE.

 

 Course grade

The grade for the course will be based on performance on a set of exercises done over the course of the quarter (50% of the final grade), and a short paper (50% of the final grade).

 

 

 

Partial bibliography

Chierchia, G. & S. McConnell‑Ginet (1990). Meaning and Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Davis, S. (ed.) (1991). Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dowty, D (1979). Word Meaning and Montague Grammar. Berlin: Springer.

Escandell-Vidal, M. V. (2004). Fundamentos de Semántica Composicional. Ariel.Green, G.M. (1989). Pragmatics and natural language understanding. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Heim, I. & A. Kratzer (1998). Semantics in Generative Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.

Horn, Laurence R. (eds); Gregory L. Ward (2004). The Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Kadmon, N. (2001). Formal Pragmatics: Semantics, Pragmatics, Presupposition, and Focus. Oxford: Blackwell.

Kamp, J. A. W. & U. Reyle (1993). Introduction to Discourse Representation Theory. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Levinson, S.C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mey, J.L. (1993) Pragmatics: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.

Partee, Barbara, Alice Ter Meulen, and Robert Wall (1990). Mathematical Methods in Linguistics. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Portner, Paul & Barbara Partee (eds.) (2002). Formal semantics: the essential readings, Oxford: Blackwell.

Portner, P. (2005). What is Meaning? Fundamentals of Formal Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.

de Swart, H. (1998). Introduction to Natural Language Semantics. Stanford: CSLI Publications.