Veneeta Dayal
Courses
Ling 263/663 - Semantics I
ntroduction to truth-conditional compositional semantics. Set theory, first- and higher-order logic, and the lambda calculus as they relate to the study of natural language meaning. Some attention to analyzing the meanings of tense/aspect markers, adverbs, and modals.
This course can be applied towards the following Yale College distributional requirements:
- Quantitative Reasoning
- Social Sciences
Ling 392/792 - From Morpho-Syntax to Meaning: Definiteness, Indefiniteness, Genericity
This course explores how individual languages encode the notions of definiteness, indefiniteness and genericity, and whether it is possible to predict such meanings when overt morpho-syntactic cues are absent. Languages with and without definite/indefinite articles provide critical test cases. Students read primary semantic literature on each of these three topics to get a solid grounding in the theoretical issues surrounding them. They also evaluate how empirical discoveries from different languages have shaped our understanding of the connection between morpho-syntax and semantics. The broader question considered here is the possibility of a restrictive theory of cross-linguistic variation in the interpretation of nominals.
Prerequisite: LING 263 or permission of instructor.