Semantics

Course goals

Content

This course is part of the track Reasoning.

What are the relations between mathematical logic and meanings in natural language? Can the semantics of natural languages be described in mathematical-logical means? What sort of linguistic phenomena are most amenable to logical treatments? How expressible should such logics be, and how can they be defined? How can logical treatments of natural language meaning help computers to understand it? What is the experimental support for semantic theory? 
This course gives an intensive introduction to the study of these questions in contemporary theoretical, computational and experimental linguistics. We will start from basic notions in formal semantics: entailment, ambiguity, compositionality, direct model-theoretic interpretation, types and model structure, boolean operators and generalized quantifiers. Motivations and examples will draw on recent findings in experimental and computational semantics. A selection of diverse semantic problems involving plural expressions, presupposition, modification, lexical meaning and pragmatics will be discussed.
Part of the course will cover on-going work on the computation of meaning for natural language. We will learn about applications of formal semantics for reasoning using natural language, for the representation of ambiguity, and for translation from English to the Haskell programming language. We will cover on-going computational work in distributional semantics: the automatic acquisition of meaning from big data and the relations between such learning algorithms and the logical topics of this course.
For literature see the list of materials (“materialen”). The course will also draw on articles that will be distributed to the students.