Meaning in Language

Catalog description

When we talk, we talk about the world as it is. Sometimes. But we also talk about how the world was, how it will be, or how it should be but isn't. We talk about possibilities, unrealized or otherwise. We also sometimes fail to tell the truth, whether deliberately - in order to mislead - or simply because we don't know. These are issues taken up in the course, Meaning in Language. It is a course on what words mean and how word meanings combine to give sentence meaning, according to their morphological form and the syntactic structures in which they appear. It is therefore a course on the theory of natural language meaning, semantics. The theory developed must be flexible enough to explain how language can express what is the case, but also how it can express what is not the case. The theory must also be general enough to potentially apply to any human language. Natural language semantics, as it has emerged over the last seventy years or so, aims to give precise answers to questions of linguistic meaning, to answer in terms compatible with other subfields of linguistics, and to develop tools general enough for meaning in any human language. Prerequisite: 80-180