Lexical Semantics

Undergraduate / Graduate

You can nail a postcard to the wall with a dart but you can't microwave it with anything other than a microwave. This seems not to be a fact about nails and microwaves, but rather about English verbs that are derived from nouns. Is it a random fact, or does it correlate systematically with other facts about verbs derived from nouns that a linguistic theory should account for? This class is an introduction to basic concepts and issues in the study of word meaning within theoretical linguistics. It explores grammatical regularities in word meaning, what kinds of information can be grammatically encoded by words, how the meaning of a word can determine the word's syntactic distribution, and how it relates to the inferences people draw from the utterances in which a word occurs. The course will demonstrate that addressing questions of lexical meaning draws on the full resources of linguistic theory and methodology.