ELL2018F: semantics & Pragmatics
Course Outline 2007
Lecturer: Sean Bowerman
Class times: Mondays & Tuesdays, 12:00
Consultation: Monday 11:00-11:45; Wednesday 14:00-15:30, or by appointment
The Semantics section of the module consists of two parts, illustrating two different
approaches to the study of meaning. The first is a logical approach, reducing linguistic
expressions to a representation of their meaningful content—a rigid and precise
treatment of language, which is often not felt to adequately capture all facets of language.
The second part of the module looks at a cognitive approach, which breaks down the
precise boundaries used in the formal approach in favour of a much fuzzier system of
categorisation, criticised by proponents of a formal approach for its lack of precision!
The two approaches are chosen because both are active in contemporary research, and
students are encouraged to look for common ground (as well as no-go areas!) between
them.
The third part of the module is devoted to Pragmatics: the study of language used in
context.
Readings listed below are highly recommended; there is no prescribed text for this
course. Class notes will be provided, and constitute compulsory reading. This course
outline is somewhat idealised: any unit ‘lecture x’ may well take more or less than one
lecture period to complete.
PART I: INTRODUCTION TO FORMAL SEMANTICS
Lecture 1 - 2: Meaning and sense
 Types of meaning
 Basic concepts: denotation, sense and reference
 Sentence, utterance and proposition
Reading: Hurford & Heasley Units 1-2; Kearns pp. 1-16
Lecture 3: Worlds of meaning (denotations)
 Semantic / syntactic composition and denotation
 Denotation of lexical items
 Truth conditions and denotation of sentences
Reading: Hurford & Heasley Units 3-4; Kearns pp. 16-24.
Lecture 4: Language and logic
 Predication: predicators and their arguments
 Types of predicate
 Complex predication
Reading: Hurford & Heasley Units 5 and 12-13; Kearns pp. 35-41
Lecture 5: Logical operations
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The basic AUX operators: Tense, Aspect and Modality
Operators and truth conditions
Negative and Interrogative operators
Operators and scope
Reading: Hurford & Heasley Units 14-15; Kearns pp. 25-34.
Lecture 6: Logical quantifiers
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Existential quantifiers
Universal quantifiers
Negation and quantification
Quantifier scope
Reading: Kearns pp. 41-51.
PART II: INTRODUCTION TO COGNITIVE SEMANTICS
Lecture 7: The representation of meaning as categorisation
 Meaning vs. category
 Classical and prototype approaches to meaning
 Boundaries
Reading: Taylor Ch. 2-3.2; class notes.
Lecture 8: Levels of categorisation
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Levels of categorisation
How do we determine levels of categorisation?
Folk vs. expert categorisation
Revisiting boundaries: hedging
Reading: Taylor Ch. 3.3-4.
Lecture 9: Sense revisited
 Metaphor in a formal approach
 Elastic boundaries: category extension
 Metonymy and metaphor
Taylor Ch. 7; class notes.
Lecture 10: Semantics and grammar (i)
 The role of grammatical categories in conveying meaning:
o Grammatical morphology
o Grammatical operations
 Grammatical objects and formal representations
Lecture 11: Semantics and grammar (ii)
 The elasticity of grammatical categories
 Polysemous grammatical categories
Taylor Ch. 8
PART III: PRAGMATICS
Lecture 12: Grice
 The Principle of Coversational Cooperation
 The maxims of cooperation
Reading: Levinson Ch. 3.1
Lecture 13: Speech acts (i)
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Utterance vs. proposition
The Descriptive Fallacy
Types of utterance / speech act
Illocution and perlocution
Reading: Hurford & Heasley Units 21-22.
Lecture 14: Speech acts (ii)
 Illocutionary force
 Directness
 Felicity
Reading: Hurford & Heasley Units 23-24.
Lecture 15: Implicature and presupposition
 A more formal approach to pragmatics
 Conversational implicature
 Information: presupposition
Reading: Hurford & Heasley Unit 26; Levinson Chs 4.0-4.2
Lecture 16: General review
Please bring any questions you may have about the Semantics and Pragmatics module to
this lecture.
READING LIST
Note that there is no prescribed text for this course; but there are prescribed readings.
These are available from Short Loan.
Hurford, James & Heasley, Brendan (1993). Semantics: a Coursebook. Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press.
Kearns, Kate (2000). Semantics. Houndsmills, Macmillan.
Levinson, Stephen (1985). Pragmatics. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, John (1995). Linguistic Categorization: prototypes in linguistic theory. Oxford, Oxford
University Press.
Outcomes
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This module gives students a thorough introduction to three important perspectives on
the study of meaning in language. It provides a basis for more advanced study in
semantics, as well as for specialisation in the field.