Course Description
One of mankind’s most distinctive and consequential cognitive capacities is our ability to form an unlimited number of novel, meaningful linguistic expressions. This course introduces students to the formal study of one facet of this capacity: the cognitive system that computes the meanings of these expressions. Throughout this course, students will be trained in the tools and techniques of formal semantic theory, as well as certain basic results of the field. Students will develop experience with a particular formal semantic system (Heim & Kratzer 1998), largely by learning how such a system can be adjusted and expanded to cover ever larger domains of linguistic phenomena. Through the development of this formal system, students will gain a better understanding of how the human mind is able, through language, to express an infinite variety of thoughts and experiences.
Area Tags: Semantics, Pragmatics
(Sessions 1 & 2) Tuesday/Friday 10:30am – 11:50am
Location: ILC S231
Instructor: Seth Cable
Seth Cable’s interests lie in the intersection of formal semantics, linguistic fieldwork, and language documentation. He received his PhD from MIT in 2007, and then held a Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship at UBC, before joining the faculty at UMass. He also holds an MS in Mathematical Logic from the University of Amsterdam. Seth is an Associate Editor at both Linguistics & Philosophy and International Journal of American Linguistics, as well as a past Associate Editor for the Journal of Semantics. He also serves on the editorial board for Linguistic Inquiry and Semantics and Pragmatics.
