In Semantics, we will cover issues dealing with the literal meaning of linguistic expressions and what ‘meaning’ really is. In the first few weeks of the course we will focus on literal meaning – we will look at truth conditions, propositional and predicate logic, logical fallacies and quantification. The last few weeks will be dedicated to the interface between semantics and pragmatics; in other words, where should the boundary be drawn between literal and context-dependent meaning. Accordingly, we will look at phenomena like reference and deixis, as well as literal meaning vs. implicature, semantic minimalism and the limits of semantic meaning.
