Course Description:
Formal Semantics This course provides a high-level introduction to the field of formal semantics for natural language. The goal of formal semantics is to develop a theory capable of representing how the meanings of sentences are constructed from the meanings of their parts. The theory must thus be able to represent the meanings of sentence parts i.e. words and word constituents, and provide rules for how these meanings are combined. In the course, we will adopt the model-theoretic, truth conditional approach which is standard in linguistic semantics. Our talk of 'meaning' will thus be restricted to the assignment of model-theoretic objects -- individuals, sets, functions, and so on -- to expressions of the language. This approach utilizes translation of natural language into a formal language (logic); part of the task, then, is to identify an appropriate logic to serve as the translation language. No background in linguistic theory is required for the course. However, students must be comfortable with basic set theory and with quantified first-order (predicate) logic. This formal background will be assumed.