Meaning (270-0-20)

Instructors

Eszter Ronai
2001 Sheridan Road, Office 4174
Office Hours: By appt

Meeting Info

Harris Hall 107: Tues, Thurs 2:00PM - 3:20PM

Overview of class

People use language to convey information. What makes a language suitable for this purpose, and how does it work? This question is at the center of the study of linguistic meaning. In this course, we will consider questions like these: How do the meanings of words like "everyone", "a", "hit", and "saw", give rise to the similarities and differences between "Everyone saw a hit," "Everyone hit a saw," "A saw hit everyone", etc.? Can we always tell for sure what a given sentence means, and does it mean the same on all occasions? Does meaning come from sentences or from a speaker's use of sentences? What are the different types of meaning (e.g., linguistic, contextual, social)? What's the place of meaning in an overall theory of language? We will explore a variety of approaches to these questions and discuss their theoretical assumptions, methodological tools, and empirical strengths and weaknesses. LING 270 satisfies the WCAS Area II (Formal Studies) Distribution Requirement and the Empirical and Deductive Reasoning Foundational Discipline (FD-EDR) Requirement.

Learning Objectives

-Students will identify how humans express meaning
-Students will distinguish various kinds of linguistic meaning (including entailment, implicature, and presupposition)
-Students will analyze meaning in terms of a logical framework

Teaching Method

Lecture and discussion

Evaluation Method

Participation, quizzes, midterm, final, data collection

Class Materials (Required)

Katarzyna Jaszczolt - Semantics, pragmatics, philosophy: a journey through meaning (online access available through the library)

Class Materials (Suggested)

Kate Kearns - Semantics

Class Attributes

Empirical and Deductive Reasoning Foundational Dis
SoC Individual and Social Behavior Distro