Laurence R. Horn - Teaching

Spring 2012

LING 146/546/PSYC 329, Language, Sex, and Gender

Sex-based asymmetries in language structure and language use. Role of language in encoding, reflecting, or reinforcing social attititudes and behavior. The “he/man” lexicon: sex-marking, reform, and resistance. Gender and sexual diversity as linguistic variables. Genderlects: differences (real and perceived) between male and female speech, conversational styles, and linguistic communities.

LING 275/675 Pragmatics.      Laurence Horn & Tamina Stephenson.
Context-dependent aspects of meaning and inference. Speech act theory, presupposition, implicature. Role of pragmatics in the lexicon and in meaning change. The semantics-pragmatics distinction from different perspectives; the position of pragmatics in linguistic theory.

Fall 2011

On leave of absence

Spring 2011

LING 108 Structure and History of English Words

 Sources and resources of the English lexicon.  The development and internal structure of English words, especially those of classical origin.  Application of linguistic principles to the study of etymology, word meaning, and semantic change.  The goal of the course is to convey an understanding of the richness of the English vocabulary and its cultural roots while providing students with tools to analyze words and their elements.

LING 276/676    Implicature and Pragmatic Theory                  

Diverse approaches to the characterization of what is said and what is meant. Pragmatic intrusion into truth-conditional meaning in neo-Gricean pragmatics and relevance theory; the problem of “embedded implicatures” and the grammatical view of scalar implicature. Experimental studies of implicature and the grammar/pragmatics interface. 

LING 491    The Senior Essay                             

 A weekly colloquium in which senior linguistics majors, in rotation, will make presentations of research material that will culminate in the development of their senior essays.  Under the guidance of departmental faculty (or in some case supporting faculty in other departments), students will select a topic, present material related to the research on that topic, and give preliminary versions of their essay.

Fall 2010

LING 169/569 Meaning                                           

Approaches to truth-conditional and lexical semantics of natural language. Survey of propositional and predicate logic. Compositional theories of sense, reference, and belief contexts; entailment, presupposition, and implicature. The relations between semantics and pragmatics.

LING 290/690 Negation and Polarity                               

Meaning and expression of negation and negative polarity. Asymmetry of negation vs. affirmation. Semantic and pragmatic factors in the meaning of negative sentences: contradictory vs. contrary opposition; metalinguistic vs. descriptive uses of negation. Cross-linguistic expression of affixal negation, negative polarity, and negative concord. The roles of configuration, scope, entailment, and implicature in the licensing of polarity items.  

Spring 2009

108 Structure and History of English Words

Sources and resources of the English lexicon. The development and internal structure of English words, especially those of classical origin. Application of linguistic principles to the study of etymology, word meaning, and semantic change. The goal of the course is to convey an understanding of the richness of the English vocabulary and its cultural roots while providing students with tools to analyze words and their elements.

270/670 Topics in Semantics: Focus
Also taught by Assistant Professor Ashwini Deo.

Focus as the expression of information structural prominence in natural language discourse. Semantic and pragmatic properties of focus and its phonological, lexical, and word-order correlates. Treatment of focus-sensitive and scalar particles (“only”, “even”, “too”, “almost”, et al.) in dynamic models of meaning. Parallels with the semantics of questions.