Linguistics II 3800-KOG-L2

The goal of the course is to acquaint students with semantic research and methodology. We will study formal techniques and empirical motivations of various major semantic frameworks and see how they address a number of natural language phenomena such as coordination and anaphora. Topics include:
1. Referential theory of meaning and the principle of compositionality.
2. Predicate Logic (PL) as a formal language representation for sentences in natural language (problems: quantifiers, coordinate structures, anaphora).
3. Direct compositionality and Type Logic (TL).
4. Combinatory Categorial Grammars (CCG).
5. TL+CCG for (a fragment of) natural language: quantifiers, coordinate structures.
6. Discourse anaphora and donkey sentences.
7. Dynamic Predicate Logic (DPL).
8. Discourse Representation Theory (DRT).
9. Plurals.
10. Van den Berg’s Static/Dynamic Plural Logic