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LING 055 -- The Meaning of Language
Maribel Romero
Studying the meaning of linguistic utterances posits questions like the following:
- How does animal communication differ from human language communication? For example, can animal communication encode false belief? In other words, do animals "lie"?
- What kinds of meanings are encoded in different parts of speech (e.g., Nouns Verbs)? E.g., why don't languages have a word for the concept "object that is green and was previously blue"? (Goodman's problem)
- Once we put words together in sentences, why are some sentences ambiguous?
For example, in (1), the sentence after than can be understood as "Mary defended Mary" or "Mary defended Susan". The sentence (2) has different meanings depending on intonation. If we stress Bill, as in (2a), it means that Susan dated Bill and nobody
else; if we stress the verb, as in (2b), it means that she dated -but not married- Bill.
(1) Susan defended herself better than Mary did.
(2) Susan only dated Bill.
a. Susan only dated BILL.
b. Susan only DATED Bill.
In answering these questions, a selective overview will be provided of the relation between semantic interpretation and psycholinguistics, cognitive science, learnability theory and computational linguistics. A wide range of linguistic data will be examin
ed to illustrate and analyze the phenomena at issue, including language in birds and in whales, English, Romance languages, American Sign Language, Japanese, Hindi, Salish, Finnish, Modern Greek, etc.
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