Introduction to Semantics

Undergraduate

examines the foundations of semantics, the study of linguistic meaning. The focus is on sentence-level semantics, involving both lexical meaning and logical/quantificational semantic operations. How do utterances get their meanings? How do we combine simple meanings to create complex ones? How are meanings connected to syntactic structure and intonation? What does context contribute to meaning? Set theory is introduced, as is some formal logic (from propositional logic to a typed lambda-calculus). All sections of this course follow Quantitative Reasoning guidelines available at www.mun.ca/hss/qr .