Wednesday, January 12, 13.00 - Saturday, January 15, 13.00

Six two-hour lectures. Homework will be assigned after each of the first five lectures, with partial answers provided. Homework is optional but recommended. A list of suggested advance readings is found below. These readings will be helpful, but will not be presupposed.

Wednesday January 12, 13-15
Lecture 1. Introduction to formal semantics and compositionality.
Introduction to formal semantics and the principle of compositionality. Illustration: the formal syntax and semantics of the predicate calculus. First introduction of lambda-abstraction.

Homework 1 & consultation

Thursday January 13, 9-11
Lecture 2. Introduction to formal semantics, continued.
Montague's Intensional Logic (mainly the extensional part), including type theory and model structures. A simple fragment of English grammar, including category-type correspondences, syntactic and semantic rules, lexicon, meaning postulates. More lambdas, in linguistic applications.

Homework 2 & consultation

Thursday January 13, 14-16
Lecture 3. Lexical semantics and the integration of lexical and formal semantics.
Approaches to lexical semantics. Integration of information from multiple sources via meaning postulates. Case study: some issues in the semantics of adjectives, including issues of adjective sorts (intersective and non-intersective, etc) and semantic composition, vagueness, scalars, encyclopedia-lexicon issues. First introduction of the topic of genitives, relational nouns, and relational adjectives (the topic of lecture 5).

Homework 3 & consultation

Friday January 13, 9-11
Lecture 4. Semantic types and type-shifting.
Type multiplicity, type-shifting, and coercion. Case studies mainly on conjunction and type-shifting and on noun phrase interpretation and type-shifting principles. More applications of the lambda-calculus.

Homework 4 & consultation

Friday January 14, 14-16
Lecture 5. The integration of formal and lexical semantics and the problem of genitives.
Semantic integration, sort-shifting, context, and compositionality. Case study: genitives, relational nouns, relational adjectives.

Homework 5 & consultation

Saturay January 15, 9-12
Lecture 6. Summary and open discussion.
Summary, wrapping up loose ends, open discussion, issues raised in homework assignments, suggested topics for further reading and research.

Suggested background readings

Course prerequisites:

Students will be expected to have basic knowledge of first order predicate logic corresponding to of Allwood, Andersson, Dahl: Logic in Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 1977) chapters 1 to 5; or Henriëtte de Swart: Introduction to Natural Language Semantics (CSLI Publications, Spring 1998) chapters 1 to 4.

 

Other introductory readings: any one of the following:

Bach, Emmon (1989): Informal Lectures on Formal Semantics. State University of New York Press, Albany. Lectures I - IV.

Chierchia, Gennaro and Sally McConnell-Ginet (1990): Meaning and Grammar: An Introduction to Semantics. MIT Press, Cambridge. Chapters 1 and 2.

Heim, Irene and Angelika Kratzer (1997): Semantics in Generative Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell. Chapters 1-4.

 

Another introductory reading which is less comprehensive but is directly relevant to some of the issues in the course, especially Lecture 3, is the following:

Partee, B., 1995: 'Lexical semantics and compositionality.' In Invitation to Cognitive Science, 2nd edition. D. Osherson, general editor; in Part I: Language, L. Gleitman and M. Liberman, eds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 311-360.

 

Further suggested background readings for those interested in learning more about the topics of the course in advance are listed below. Lecture numbers indicate the lectures to whose topics the given reading is most relevant.

Dowty, D., 1979: Word Meaning and Montague Grammar, Dordrecht: Reidel. (Lec. 3)

Jensen, Per Anker and Carl Vikner (1994): "Lexical knowledge and the semantic analysis of Danish genitive constructions" in S.L.Hansen and H.Wegener, eds., Topics in Knowledge-based NLP Systems, Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur. (Lec. 5 and symposium)

Jensen, Per Anker and Carl Vikner (1996): "The double nature of the verb have", in LAMBDA 21, OMNIS Workshop 23-24 Nov. 1995, Institut for Datalingvistik, Handelshøjskolen i København, pp. 25-37. (Lec. 5)

Mel'chuk, Igor (1982): "Lexical functions in lexicographic description" in Proceedings of the VIIIth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society, Berkeley, CA: BLS. (427-444). (Lec. 3)

Partee, Barbara (1983/1996): "Uniformity vs. Versatility: A Case Study", appendix to Theo Janssen, (1996), "Compositionality", in

Johan van Benthem and Alice ter Meulen, eds., The Handbook of Logic and Language. Amsterdam; Elsevier. (Lec. 5)

Partee, Barbara (1987): "Noun phrase interpretation and type-shifting principles", in J. Groenendijk, D. de Jongh, and M. Stokhof, eds.,
Studies in Discourse Representation Theory and the Theory of Generalized Quantifiers, GRASS 8, Foris, Dordrecht, 115-143. (Lec. 4)

Partee, Barbara and Mats Rooth (1983): "Generalized conjunction and type ambiguity", in R. Bauerle, C. Schwarze, and A. von Stechow (eds.) Meaning, Use and Interpretation of Language, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin. 361-383. (Lec. 4)

Partee, Barbara and Vladimir Borschev (1998): "Integrating lexical and formal semantics: Genitives, relational nouns, and type-shifting." In: R. Cooper and Th. Gamkrelidze, eds., Proceedings of the Second Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic, and Computation. Tbilisi: Center of Language, Logic, and Speech, Tbilisi State University, 229-241. (Lec. 5)

Pustejovsky, James (1993): "Type coercion and lexical selection", in J. Pustejovsky, ed., Semantics and the Lexicon, Reidel: Kluwer. (73-94). (Lec. 3, 4, 5)

Vikner, Carl and Per Anker Jensen (Unplished ms 1999): "A semantic analysis of the English genitive: Interaction of lexical and formal semantics."

Sponsors
The course is sponsored by the Danish Graduate School in Language and Communication. The course is arranged by Per Anker Jensen.