Knowledge of Meaning

LING 106 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

This course is an introduction to the field of natural language semantics, which is a branch of linguistics concerned with meaning. What does it mean to know the meaning of a sentence? How do different parts of a sentence compose to form a sentence meaning? We will start by looking at sentence-level meanings and relations between them. Then, we will investigate how the meanings of sentence-internal elements (like verbs, subjects, and adjectives) are composed to form sentence meanings. During the process, we will cover some formal tools that allow us to talk about language in a precise way: set theory, propositional logic, predicate logic, and lambda notation. We will consider how the formal tools apply (and not apply) to natural languages and discuss how we can achieve a more comprehensive understanding of meaning.