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LING 055 The Meaning of Language
COURSE OUTLINE
A (tentative) outline of the course follows. We will cover topics 1 to 5, and at least two of the topics listed on 6 through 9.
- Animal communication and human communication.
- Does animal communication involve "meanings" as in human?
- Do animal messages create a mental representation in the recipient (content oriented messages), or are they simply goal oriented?
- The meaning of Nouns and Verbs: how is it acquired?
- Goodman's problem
- Gleitman on universal settings
- Language and cognition: does our language "shape" our thoughts?
- False belief ("Theory of Mind")
- Motion verbs
- The meaning of functional expressions I: Determiners.
- Backgroung on Set Theory
- Mathematical properties of Determiners and finite-state automata.
- Logical aspects of meaning: scope.
- Scope possibilities in First Order Predicate Logic. Tools: Tarski's World..
- Ways of encoding scope in natural language. Data from: Catalan, Stat'imcets, Spanish, French, Hindi, German, Japanese, Medieval Latin, American Sign Language.
- The meaning of functional expressions II: Tense.
- Languages with sequence of tense: English (to some extent)
- Languages without sequence of tense: Japanese.
- Clause-internal long distance dependencies: co-reference versus binding.
- Co-referential and bound pronouns in ellipsis.
- Reflexives: types; coordination versus subordination in ellipsis.
- Data from: English, Dutch, Kannada.
- Clause-external long distance dependencies: computational algorithms of discourse anaphora resolution.
- Extensions of Centering Theory: impact of Subjecthood, gender/number features, word order.
- Data from: English, German, Hindi, Modern Greek, Finnish.
- The meaning of intonation: the role of Focus stress in truth-conditional semantics.
- Focus particles only, even, too. The notion of presupposition.
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