Homework 4 comments

Two brief notes on homework 4:

• By `components of grammar’, I primarily just mean syntax and semantics as the relevant ones. Of course your explanation should go beyond that and discuss the specific issues that come up, but that’s all.
• Remember that the last question has been postponed to the next homework, since we didn’t get started on definites yet.

Readings updated

Two notes on the readings for the class:

• I’ve added a link to Heim & Kratzer, chapter 2 in the readings section.
• I’ve also added links to the first two chapters on logic in Partee, ter Meulen & Wall, which you should read for Monday
• Another great resource, Potts’s ‘Logic for Linguists’ is also linked to under readings; you should look at chapter 4 for Monday.

Homework grades…

… for the first homework are now posted on Blackboard. I’ll return them in class, and we can go over any questions you might have then.

Class location

A quick reminder: from today on, we will meet in the seminar room in the linguistics department (616 Williams Hall).

Issues with link for first reading

There seems to have been a problem with the link for Chapter 1 of Heim & Kratzer. It should be fixed now, but if you’re still having trouble or run into this type of problem in the future, you should always be able to access the files by signing into the course on Blackboard.

Background Survey

Please fill out this little background survey ASAP!

Welcome & First Readings

Welcome to LING 380/580, Fall 2010 edition! The syllabus for the class can be found here.

If you’d like to get a head start, you could take a look at the first two chapters of Larson & Segal’s ‘Knowledge of Meaning‘ (restricted link to screen-only version of entire book; should work from within Penn), as well as the first chapter of Bach 1989 and the article Varieties of Semantic Evidence (draft) by Manfred Krifka.

On a somewhat more basic, but very intuitive, level, you could also have a look at the first two chapters of Portner 2005.

Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet’s Chapters 1 & 2 also provide a great introduction to the formal semantics enterprise. I highly recommend looking at least some subset of these suggested readings, especially if you have not really had any serious encounters with semantics before. It can be very helpful to see different types of presentation of the general approach underlying most of what we will cover in this course.

Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions in the meantime!