Semantics

Human beings have a distinct capacity to communicate through language. Our linguistic capacity allows us to understand sentences we have never encountered before, and generate indefinitely many novel, meaningful sentences by exploiting a finite vocabulary. It also underscores our ability to communicate thoughts to each other. How is this possible? And how is it that our sentences are meaningful to begin with? This course is an introduction to semantics, the study of linguistic meaning. You will learn about formal tools and techniques of semantic theory that allow us to develop formally precise theories of linguistic meaning.