Welcome & First Readings

Welcome to LING 380/580, Fall 2012 edition! First class is Wednesday, 9/5, in the department seminar room.

Class materials will be made available through Zotero. You’ll need to create an account there and request an invitation for joining the group.

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. The new book by Paul Elbourne also makes for excellent introductory reading on the side.

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!