Semantics: Course Plan

When: Tuesdays 15 January - 4 March
Where: Common Room
Centre for Linguistics and Philology, Walton Street

Emmon Bach, SOAS, UMass(Amherst)
email: ebach@linguist.umass.edu
phones: home: 020 8444 4647
SOAS: 020 7898 4593
Copyright Emmon Bach 2008. All rights reserved.
Notes for classes will be posted at / linked to "http://www.people.umass.edu/ebach/courses/ox08-pl.htm"

Procedures:

Lectures and discussion
Exercises

Readings:
General background:

Bach, Emmon. 1989. Informal Lectures on Formal Semantics. Albany: SUNY Press.

Portner, Paul H. 2005. What is Meaning? Fundamentals of Formal Semantics. Blackwell Publishing.

Resources for some special topics:
Davis, Steven and Brendan S. Gillon, eds. 2004. Semantics: a Reader. Oxford University Press.

Portner, Paul, and Barbara H. Partee, eds. 2002. Formal Semantics: the Essential Readings. [Oxford] Blackwell. Term projects

Content of Course:

Review/exposition of basic model-theoretic semantics.
Exploration of selected topics of recent and current research.

Suggested Schedule

  1. (15 January) Basics: model theoretic semantics, preliminary assumptions, some formal tools.

  2. (22 January) Preliminaries continued; Quantification: dealing with generalities; Model structure I

  3. (29 January) Fragment I; Linguistic ontology: what do we talk as if there is?

  4. (5 February) Practice; Fragment II; Relations between syntax and semantics

  5. (12 February)Intensionality, language levels; Fragment III: relative clauses, quantifying in

  6. (19 February) On beyond quantification; Fragment IV: indexicality

  7. (26 February) Stuff and things: nominal domains, events and such

  8. (4 March) Structuring the Domain II; Wrapup

    9. References: will be found at here at "http://www.people.umass.edu/ebach/courses/semrefs.htm". They will be given in short form e.g.: Frege 1892