Introduction to Semantics 2024

This course is an introduction to the study of meaning in the context of generative linguistics. The perspective we’ll adopt is that of truth-conditional, compositional semantics, building on the foundational work of philosopher-logicians such as Gottlob Frege, Alfred Tarski, and Richard Montague. The notion of “meaning” we’ll explore is somewhat rarefied - concretely, we’ll develop the idea that to know the meaning of a sentence, is to know the conditions under which it is true. This perspective has been both influential and incredibly fruitful, laying the foundations for research in formal semantics right up to the present day. Although some knowledge of elementary logic and set theory will be useful, we’ll spend the beginning of the course brushing up on the necessary mathematical background, before diving into semantic analyses of particular linguistic phenomena, such as logical connectives, quantificational expressions, pronouns, etc.