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LING 255
FORMAL SEMANTICS AND COGNITIVE
SCIENCE
SYLLABUS
This course introduces the components and formal mechanisms underlying meaning in human language and uses them as a window on the human mind, its psychological development and adult cognitive processes. Topics include what kinds of concepts a no
un or a determiner can encode; how children learn the meaning of words; how these "atoms" of meaning are combined in a mathematical procedure to yield the meaning of sentences; how semantic ambiguities are processed psychologically; and the development of
a theory of mind. Formal tools from Set Theory and Predicate Logic will be introduced and applied both to the linguistic and to the cognitive characterization of meaning.
INSTRUCTOR:
- Maribel Romero (short for Maria-Isabel Romero Sangüesa)
- 610 Williams Hall
- romero@ling.upenn.edu
- Office Hours: Mon 3-5pm
PREREQUISITES:
- None.
- Some background in Syntax is convenient, but not necessary.
ORGANIZATION OF THE COURSEThe course builds an
interpretation procedure for natural language sentences in four stages.
Each stage has two parts: it introduces new formal tools to compute the
semantics of increasingly more complex sentences, and it applies the
acquired theoretical notions to some topics in Cognitive Science.
READINGSTextbook: G. Chierchia and S.
McConnell-Ginet, Meaning and Grammar. An Introduction to
Semantics. MIT Press.
This book is available at "House of our Own", 3920 Spruce St., 215 222-1576.
Other readings will be distributed by the instructor.
REQUIREMENTS AND GRADE
| Homework assignments (approx. 3)
(together) |
60% |
| Class presentation of assigned
reading |
10% |
| One term paper (joint) |
20% |
| Attendance and class participation |
10% |
See your Class of 200x Handbook for University policy on
academic integrity.
Top
| I. The meaning of open-class lexical
items. Building simple sentences. |
- Set Theory
- Propositional and Predicate Logic
- Compositionaliy in the semantic of NatLg
- Computing ambiguities from syntactic attachment
- Readings:
- Partee, ter Meulen and Wall, ch 1-2 pp. 3-37; ch. 6 pp.
97-121.
- Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet, ch. 2 pp. 53-98.
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- Goodman’s induction problem for lexical words.
- The child’s learning of lexical words. Constraints on word
meaning.
- Readings:
- Goodman, N. 1983. Fact, fiction and forecast. Harvard
Univ. Press. Ch 3. Pp. 59-83.
- Markman, E. 1994, Constraints children place on word meanings.
In Bloom, ed., Lg Acquisition. Core Readings. MIT Press.
Pp. 154-173.
- Gleitman, L. and Gleitman, H. 1992. A picture is worth a
thousand words -- but that’s the problem. Current Directions in
Psychological Science 1.
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| II. The meaning of functional items:
Quantifiers. Building more complex sentences. |
- Quantification and the sentence. Scope ambiguities.
- Quantifiers as relations between sets.
- Mathematical properties of quantifiers. Their impact on the
grammar: Negative Polarity Items, there-sentences.
- Readings:
- Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet, ch. 3 pp. 142-187; ch. 9 pp. 501-528.
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- Psycholinguistic processing of scope ambiguities.
- Children’s meaning of every.
- Learnability and function words: constraints on the meaning of
quantifiers.
- Readings:
- Crain, S., et al. 1996. Quantification without Qualification.
Language Acquisition 5.2.
- Kurtzman, H. and McDonals, M. 1993. Resolution of quantifier
scope ambiguities, Cognition 48, pp. 243-279.
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| III. Intensionality. Building
embedded clauses. |
- Modality.
- Conditionals.
- Attitude reports.
- Readings:
- Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet, ch. 5 pp. 257-311.
- Kratzer, A. 1991. Modality. In von Stechow & Wunderlich,
eds. , Semantik/Semantics: An international handbook of
contemporary research. Berlin: de Gruyter.
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- Animal communication and levels on intensionality.
- Acquisition of Theory of Mind: intensionality in children.
- Language and thought.
- Readings:
- Cheney, D. and Seyfarth, R. 1990. How monkeys see the
world. Univ. Chicago Press. Ch 7: Deception.
- Zuberbühler, K., Cheney, D. and Seyfarth, R. 1999. Conceptual
Semantics in a Nonhuman Primate. Journal of comparative
psychology 113.
- De Villiers, J. 2000. Language and Theory of Mind: What are
the developmental relationships. In Baron-Cohen, S. et al., eds.,
Understanding other minds: Perspective from developmental
cognitive neuroscience.
- Lucy, J. 1992. Language diversity and thought. A
reformulation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis.
Cambridge Univ. Press.
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| IV. Other aspects of meaning. |
- Anaphora and discourse.
- Implicatures.
- Expressive tier
- Readings:
- Heim, I. and A. Kratzer. 1998. ch. 10, pp. 260-276.
- Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet, ch. 4 pp. 187-203.
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- Psycholinguistic processing of anaphora resolution.
- The development of implicatures in children.
- Readings:
- Arnold, A. et al. 2000. The rapid use of gender inform.:
evidence of the time course of pronoun resolutionfrom eyetracking,
Cognition 76(1), pp. B13-B26.
- Chierchia, G. et al. 2001. The acquisition of disjunction:
evidence for a grammatical view of scalar implicatures. 25th B.U.
Conference.
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Top
- Topic I. Simple Sentences
- Topic II: Complex Sentences with Quantifiers.
- Topic III: Intensionality and Other.
Top
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