Introduction to semantics
Yasutada Sudo (week 1) & Berit Gehrke (week 2)
In this course, we will give students a basic introduction to the tools of formal semantics and how they are important for the understanding of natural language. It will run for 2 weeks, but if you already have some knowledge of formal semantics you can also join the course in week 2, and also if you only visit week 1 you will already get a good first impression of what formal semantics is about.
No background reading is required, but we will loosely base our classes on various introductory textbooks on formal semantics (e.g. Heim & Kratzer 1998, Kearns 2011, Coppock & Champollion 2025).
Topics that we will cover include the following:
- Linguistic meaning
- Compositional semantics
- Quantifiers
- Presupposition
- Quantifier scope and movement
- Modification
- Event semantics
Some recommended further readings:
- Coppock, Elizabeth & Lucas Champollion (2025). Invitation to formal semantics. https://eecoppock.info/bootcamp/semantics-boot-camp.pdf
- von Fintel, Kai & Irene Heim (2011). Intensional semantics. MIT. https://web.mit.edu/fintel/fintel-heim-intensional.pdf
- Heim, Irene & Angelika Kratzer (1998). Semantics in generative grammar. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
- Kearns, Kate (2011). Semantics. Second edition. New York, NY: Palgrave-Macmillan.
- Klinedienst, Nathan & Yasutada Sudo (2024). The study of meaning. UCL. https://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucjtudo/teaching/the_study_of_meaning.html
- de Swart, Henriëtte (1998). Introduction to natural language semantics. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.