This course is an introduction to the field of natural language semantics, which is a branch of linguistics concerned with meaning. We will aim to understand how the meaning of complex expressions arises through the meaning of their parts and the way these parts are combined in the syntax. Our approach to understanding these combinatorial phenomena will be rooted in truth-conditional, model-theoretic semantics, following Gottlob Frege’s insights.
Frege conjectured that semantic composition involves a ‘saturation’ of an ‘unsaturated’ meaning component and modeled this ‘saturation’ using mathematical functions. Frege’s treatment of semantic composition as functional application will serve as our guiding principle, and for this, we will learn some descriptive tools, including set theory, propositional and predicate logic, λ-calculus, and type theory. We will explore how these formal tools apply (and do not apply) to natural languages and discuss how we can achieve a more comprehensive understanding of meaning.
Frege conjectured that semantic composition involves a ‘saturation’ of an ‘unsaturated’ meaning component and modeled this ‘saturation’ using mathematical functions. Frege’s treatment of semantic composition as functional application will serve as our guiding principle, and for this, we will learn some descriptive tools, including set theory, propositional and predicate logic, λ-calculus, and type theory. We will explore how these formal tools apply (and do not apply) to natural languages and discuss how we can achieve a more comprehensive understanding of meaning.
- Teacher: Yagmur Sag Parvardeh