Poznan09

Introduction to Semantics (and Pragmatics) - 10 classes

Hedde Zeijlstra

What is the meaning of a sentence? How is the meaning of a sentence built up from the units it consists of? How can it be that we use sentences quite often in a different way from what they literally mean?

In this course we discuss and explore the basic notions of semantic theory. We will discuss the basics of truth-conditional semantics and semantic type theory. We will focus on the difference between intensional and extensional semantics and introduce the concept of ‘a possible world’. Apart from that we will discuss the behaviour of quantifiers, binding of variables and, if time allows, us some backgrounds of the semantics of temporal expressions.
After that, we will focus on the basic notions in pragmatics, such as presuppositions and implicatures. And see how meaning and usage are correlated.

Further references:
- Heim, Irene und Angelika Kratzer (1998). Semantics in Generative Grammar. Blackwell

- Von Stechow, Arnim. Schritte zur Satzsemantik. Reader in German, available under 'Lehre' at http://www2.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~arnim10/

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