A cartoon illustration of structural ambiguity. (Image courtesy of OCW.)
Course Highlights
Course Description
This course gives an introduction to the science of linguistic meaning. There are two branches to this discipline: semantics, the study of conventional, "compositional meaning", and pragmatics, the study of interactional meaning. There are other contributaries: philosophy, logic, syntax, and psychology. We will try to give you an understanding of the concepts of semantics and pragmatics and of some of the technical tools that we use.
*Some translations represent previous versions of courses.