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Linguistics Dept. UC Santa Cruz 1156 High Street Santa Cruz, CA 95064-1077
Current
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Maintained by
webling@ling.ucsc.edu © 2009 UC Santa Cruz
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| Semantics One Home Ling 53: Semantics One This course is an introduction to the study of linguistic meaning. When we investigate how language is used in communication, we recognize two interacting systems: (a) the semantic system, which is part of our knowledge of the language we speak, and (b) the pragmatic principles that guide our interpretation of language in actual situations of use. This course is concerned with both the semantic and the pragmatic aspects of language understanding. Our goal is to investigate aspects of the semantic structure of English within the framework of an explicit theory of linguistic meaning. We begin with the pragmatic side, by distinguishing among different layers of meaning an utterance conveys. We then move on to explore the basic meaning of verbs, and the way the meaning of sentences is constructed from the meaning of their parts. We end with issues concerning reference and discourse. In talking about the meaning of sentences, we use the language of predicate calculus to help us arrive at a compositional account of the truth conditions of English sentences.
Prerequisites: None General Education Code: IH (Introduction to Humanities).
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