Overview

The course will cover topics such as the following, in a foundational manner:

What is meaning?

• Word meaning and sentence meaning.
  • Concepts and Mental representations.
  • Sense and Lexical relations (homonymy, polysemy, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, meronymy). WordNet.
  • The semantics of Adjectives, Nouns and Verbs
  • Tense and Time.
  • Modality and Mood
  • Sentence Relations, Truth and Logic. Set Theory
  • Entailment and Presupposition
• Pragmatics & the Cooperative Principle
  • Speech Act Theory
  • Literal versus non-literal meaning.

Assessment Strategy

-threshold -D: Student has achieved the minimum acceptable standard of understanding and/or knowledge in all the learning outcomes. Student can demonstrate a minimum level of understanding of the basic concepts and be able to apply them to data with some degree of accuracy.

-good -B: Student has achieved a better-than-average standard of understanding and/or knowledge in all learning outcomes, and has a clear and accurate understanding of concepts; ability to apply concepts to data critically and thoughtfully; evidence of wide reading and clear and accurate reference to source materials; free from misunderstanding and errors of content; free from irrelevant material.

-excellent -A: Student has achieved a thorough standard of understanding and/or knowledge in all learning outcomes; or student has demonstrated an exceptional level of achievement in one or more learning outcomes together with a good overall standard: student has achieved a thorough understanding of the subject, both in terms of content and theory; student is able to apply concepts clearly and accurately; substantial evidence of critical and original thought and analysis; clear, logical argument; high level of communicative competence; free from irrelevant material and errors of spelling and punctuation; evidence of extensive reading beyond basic texts and clear and accurate references to source material.

Learning Outcomes

• Students will be able to do basic analysis of language data for pragmatic content, functions and strategic goals/objectives.

• Students will be able to do basic analysis of language data for semantic content, functions and relationships.

• Students will know basic terminology, concepts and techniques for the semantic and pragmatic analysis of language.

• Students will understand at a basic level a wide range of phenomena studied by those language scientists working in the sub-fields of semantic and pragmatics.