LING 214-000: Meaning in Human Language (Spring 2010)

Semester Details: Much of the language you hear over the course of a day consists of sentences you have never heard before, and yet you are able to understand them. How is this possible? The principle of compositionality states that the meaning of a sentence is determined by combining the meanings of the words it contains. In the first part of this course, students will learn a system for doing just this - combining phrase structure trees and computing the meanings that result, using the formal language of predicate logic to represent sentence meanings. Then, in the second part of the course, we'll focus on utterance meaning - aspects of meaning that go beyond what is shown in the predicate logic. For example, what enables us to understand a sentence like There's ice cream on your shirt as a simple informative description in some contexts, as an accusation in others, and as a warning in still others? We'll discuss speech acts, implicature, information structure, and other aspects of utterance meaning as we explore the close relationship between semantics and pragmatics.