The Boundary of Semantics and Pragmatics

Catalog description

This course will examine some phenomena with an eye to the question of how much is actually encoded in the grammar vs. what sorts of facts can be accounted for by pragmatics. We begin by focussing on recent controversies regarding the question concerning the status of so called "Gricean inferences". We will also look at some facts surrounding negation, as well as certain constructions which appear to require an idiosyncratic grammatical account with an eye to explaining the idiosyncracies. Prerequisite: LING 1410 , CLPS 1340 or LING 1412 . Enrollment limited to 40.