Meaning in Language

Course goals

Students:

• acquire insight in major notions, principles, and approaches of semantics and pragmatics.
• develop the skill to apply these in the analysis of meaning phenomena in languages of the world.

Content

This course offers a thorough introduction into semantics and a first encounter with pragmatics, the two disciplines that deal with meaning in natural language. Although meaning might seem like an elusive phenomenon, there are in fact many different methods (developed in linguistics, logic, philosophy, psychology) that can help us to think fruitfully about the meaning of words and sentences: in terms of reference, concepts, truth, context, inference. A number of meaning phenomena and approaches will feature in this course (with an important role for formal semantics, the analysis of meaning with logical and mathematical tools):
- General notions in the study of meaning in semantics and pragmatics: truth conditions, reference, compositionality, entailment, presuppositions, implicatures, speech acts
- Analysis and description of lexical meaning phenomena: hyponymy, antonymy, polysemy, prototypes, aspect, referentiality, decomposition
- Propositional and predicate logic (connectives, truth tables, variables, quantifiers, scope)

Additional information

Early Exit option for international exchange students (5 ECTS)
Exchange students who are required to return to their home university before January, are allowed to choose an Early Exit option for this course. The Early Exit option means that students can finish the course before Christmas break, receiving 5 ECTS for the course. Students must make arrangements with the course coordinator at the start of the course.


This course is part of the minor Linguistics.