Penn

University of Pennsylvania

LING 255: Formal Semantics and Cognitive Science

Instructor: Lance Nathan
613 Williams Hall
nathanla@ling.upenn.edu
Office Hours: Wed. 3-5pm (or by appt.)

Page at Penn Linguistics

Page at MIT
The syllabus in PDF format (also handed out on the first day of class)

Course Description

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 noun 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.

Readings and Texts

Textbook: None

Other texts: To be distributed.

Requirements and Grade

Homework assignments: 60% (total)

Class presentation of assigned reading: 10%

One term paper: 20%

Attendance and class participation: 10%

Violations of academic integrity will be taken seriously!
It is your responsibility to understand the University's policy.
See your Class Handbook, the university's website, etc.

Organization and Outline of the Course

The 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.

I. The meaning of open-class lexical items. Building simple sentences.
  • 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. Link to the paper (warning: 16MB file! It's not long; that's an artifact of scanning.)
  • Markman, E. 1994. Constraints children place on word meanings. In Bloom, ed., Lg Acquisition. Core Readings. MIT Press. Pp. 154-173. Link to the paper.
  • Gleitman, L. and Gleitman, H. 1992. A picture is worth a thousand words — but that’s the problem. Current Directions in Psychological Science 1. Link to the paper
  • Sedivy, Julie, et al. 1999. Achieving incremental semantic interpretation through contextual representation. Cognition 71, pp. 109-147. Link to the paper



II. The meaning of functional items: Quantifiers. Building more complex sentences.
  • 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. Link to the paper.
  • Kurtzman, H. and MacDonald, M. 1993. Resolution of quantifier scope ambiguities, Cognition 48, pp. 243-279. Link to the paper.
  • Musolino, Julien. 2006. Structure and meaning in the acquisition of scope. Link to the paper.



III. Intensionality. Building embedded clauses.
  • Modality.
  • Conditionals.
  • Attitude reports.
  • Animal communication and levels on intensionality.
  • Acquisition of Theory of Mind: intensionality in children.
  • Language and thought.

Readings:

  • Zuberbühler, K., Cheney, D. and Seyfarth, R. 1999. Conceptual Semantics in a Nonhuman Primate. Journal of comparative psychology 113. Link to the paper.



IV. Other aspects of meaning.
  • Anaphora and discourse.
  • Implicatures.
  • Expressive tier
  • Psycholinguistic processing of anaphora resolution.
  • The development of implicatures in children.

Readings:

  • Arnold, J. et al. 2000. The rapid use of gender information: evidence of the time course of pronoun resolution from eyetracking, Cognition 76(1), pp. B13-B26. Link to the paper.
  • Chierchia, G. et al. 2001. The acquisition of disjunction: evidence for a grammatical view of scalar implicatures. 25th B.U. Conference. Link to the paper.
  • Noveck, Ira. 2001. When children are more logical than adults: experimental investigations of scalar implicature. Cognition 78, pp. 165-188. Link to the paper.
  • Papafragou, Anna and Musolino, Julien. 2003. Scalar implicatures: experiments at the semantics-pragmatics interface. Cognition 86, pp. 253-282. Link to the paper.