Veneeta Dayal
Courses
Term: Fall 2019
LING 263 Semantics I
Introduction 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.
LING 394 Asserting, Asking, Answering
This course introduces students to some of the current debates in the literature on questions. It articulates the relationship between declarative/interrogative structures and the speech acts of asserting and asking. It also probes the status of an assertion as an answer to a question. Some of the main approaches to the semantics of questions are introduced, with special attention on linguistic phenomena. These include pair-list answers, quantificational variability effects, scope marking, alternative questions and polar question particles. The left periphery of interrogative clauses is explored by studying the behavior of interrogatives under different embedding predicates, and by locating the points at which direct question intonation and pragmatic bias in questioning can enter the derivation.
Prerequisite: LING 263 or permission of instructor.