Course Description
This course is on discourse interpretation, i.e., the semantic and pragmatic rules underlying discourse meaning. The goal of the course is to motivate a theory that can be applied to quite intricate data to raise research questions that are currently pursued in the field. The set of phenomena that we aim to cover are: discourse structure, anaphora and presupposition. Our focus is discourse of natural language, including naturally occurring examples from literary and theatrical discourse. At the end of the course, we discuss how the theory developed can be extended to pictorial and mixed media discourse. We draw on leading research that uses tools and insight from Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) and related work on Discourse Coherence, including our own research.
Area Tags: Semantics, Pragmatics, Discourse, Literature
(Session 1) Tuesday/Friday 10:30am – 11:50pm
Location: ILC S140
Instructors: Daniel Altshuler & Julian Schlöder
Daniel Altshuler is Associate Professor of Semantics at the University of Oxford. He specializes in formal semantics and pragmatics. The theme of his research is context dependence with the aim of better understanding how compositional semantics interacts with discourse structure and discourse coherence. He also has active interests in philosophy of language and philosophy of literature, including their intersections. He is the author of “Events, States and Times” (de Gruyter, 2016), co-author of “A Course in Semantics” (MIT Press, 2019) and “Coordination and the Syntax – Discourse Interface” (OUP, 2022), and editor of “Linguistics meets Philosophy” (CUP, 2022).
Julian J. Schlöder is Assistant Research Professor for Logic and Philosophy at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. Their research deals with topics in logic, philosophy of language and their interface with semantics and pragmatics. The main theme of their research is the nature of linguistic knowledge and its role in cognition, with particular attention to the social uses of language and the richness of our inner lives that we reveal through language. They co-authored a monograph on these topics: “Reasoning With Attitude” (OUP, 2023).
