Advanced Semantic Theory

Module Code: PLIN0020

About

In this module you will learn about advanced theoretical topics in Natural Language Semantics, by conducting original research on a linguistic phenomenon that concerns 'meaning' (broadly construed) in a language that you do not speak natively, preferably a language that is understudied in the theoretical literature (so, avoid English, French, German, Mandarin Chinese, etc.). The lectures are meant to help you identify a topic to work on. All the course materials (slides, lecture notes, references, etc.) will be uploaded on this webpage.

Each lecture (about 1 hour) will be pre-recorded and made available on Moodle (https://moodle.ucl.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=9026). There will be weekly synchronous discussion sessions at 10:00-11:00 UK time on Thursdays. Please watch the lecture and do the reading before the synchronous session each week.

Assessment

It is necessary to find a native speaker informant that you can consult with throughout the semester (deadline for finding an informant: 28 Oct 2021). You will arrange regular data elicitation sessions with them. Your primary task in this module is to identify a theoretically interesting semantic phenomenon in that language, give a short presentation about it at the end of the module, and write an essay where you summarize your findings and discuss their theoretical implications. The final mark is entirely based on the final essay (2500 words).

You can write about any aspect of your target language, as long as 'meaning' is involved. It can be semantic or pragmatic. It can be about the syntax-semantics interface, the morphology-semantics interface, pragmatics, etc. And you do not necessarily need to pick a topic from the lecture materials.

In your essay, you should desribe what you have noticed in your language and then try to discuss it from a theoretical perfective. The theoretical discussion can be about language universals and variation (e.g. whether or not honorifics in Japanese pose an issue for effability) or it can be specific to the phenomenon you are looking at (e.g. what is the semantics and pragmatics of dual in Slovenian, in light of the markedness among number cateogries).

Overall, there are four tasks for you:

Find a language informant: It is necessary to find a native speaker informant that you can consult with throughout the semester. Please find your informant by 28 Oct 2021. Then you will arrange regular data elicitation sessions with them.
Find a topic: Try to find a linguistic phenomenon in the language that interests you by 2 Dec 2021. Lectures are meant to help you in this process.
Give an in-class presentation: You will give a short presentation in the last class of the module on 9 or 16 Dec 2021, which will not be assessed but given feedback via email. In the presentation, you should tell everyone the basic information about the language, what your topic is with a brief literature review (typically about related phenomena in other languages), and what your new findings are, but you do not need to have a conclusion or analysis at this point.
Write an essay: Then you will write an essay where you summarize your findings and discuss their theoretical implications. The final mark is entirely based on the final essay (2500 words), due on 18 January 2022.

See the Moodle site (https://moodle.ucl.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=9026) for more information about the assessment.

Schedule

Week 1 (7 Oct 2021): Semantic Fieldwork and Semantic Universals

Reading: Lisa Matthewson (2011) Methods in cross-linguistic semantics. In C. Maienborn, K. von Heusinger & P. Portner (eds.), Semantics. pp. 268--285. de Gruyter.
Slides

Week 2 (14 Oct 2021): Number

Reading 1: Greville G. Corbett (2004) Number. In Keith Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2d edition, pp. 724–731. Elsevier.
Reading 2: Uli Sauerland (2008) On the semantic markedness of phi-features. In Daniel Harbour and David Adger & Susana B&eacut;jar (eds.), Phi Theory: Phi-features across Modules and Interfaces, pp. 57–82. Oxford University Press.
Optional reading: Franc Marušič, Rok Žaucer, Yasutada Sudo & Andrew Nevins (2020) Inflectional competition and interpretation: A case study on the Slovenian dual. Ms.
Slides

Week 3 (21 Oct 2021): More on Number

Reading: Yasutada Sudo (2015) Countable nouns in Japanese. To appear in Proceedings of WAFL 11.
Optional reading: Suzi Lima (2018) New perspectives on the count–mass distinction: Understudied languages and psycholinguistics. Language and Linguistics Compass, 12(11).
Slides

Week 4 (28 Oct 2021): Gender

Deadline for finding a language informant
Reading 1: Greville G. Corbett (2004) Gender, grammatical. In Keith Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2d edition, pp. 749–756. Elsevier.
Reading 2: Giorgos Spathas & Yasutada Sudo (2020) Gender on Animal Nouns in Greek. Catalan Journal of Linguistics, 19: 25--48.
Slides

Week 5 (4 Nov 2020): Tense and Aspect

Reading: C. Fabricius-Hansen (2006) Tense. In K. Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (2d ed), Vol. 12, pp. 566–573. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Optional reading: Toshiyuki Ogihara (2007) Tense and aspect in truth-conditional semantics. Lingua, 117: 392–418.
Slides

Week 6 (18 Nov 2021): Degree constructions

Reading: Vera Hohaus & M. Ryan Bochnak (2020) The grammar of degree: gradability across languages. Annual Review of Linguistics, 6: 235–59.
Optional reading: Yasutada Sudo (2015) Hidden nominal structures in Japanese clausal comparatives. Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 24(1):1-51.
Slides

Week 7 (25 Nov 2021): Indexicals and Perspectival Items

Reading: Kirill Shklovsky & Yasutada Sudo (2014) The syntax of monsters. Linguistic Inquiry, 45(3): 381–402.
Optional reading: Philippe Schlenker (2012) Indexicality and de se reports. In Klaus von Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn, and Paul Portner (eds.), Semantics, Vol. 2. pp. 1561–1604. De Gruyter.
Slides

Week 8 (2 Dec 2021): Politeness and Discourse Particles

Deadline for deciding a topic to work on
Reading: Yasutada Sudo (2013) Biased polar questions in English and Japanese. In Daniel Gutzmann and Hans-Martin Gaertner (eds.), Beyond Expressives: Explorations in Use-Conditional Meaning. Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface (CRiSPI) 28. Leiden: Brill.
Optional reading: McCready & Davis (2020) Sentence-final particles in Japanese. In Jacobsen & Takubo (eds.), Handbook of Japanese Semantics and Pragmatics. pp. 655–684. de Gruyter.
Slides

Week 9 (9 Dec 2021): Student presentations 1

Week 10 (16 Dec 2021): Student presentations 2

Supplementary Readings

Additional readings on semantic fieldwork:

Lisa Matthewson (2004) On the methodology of semantic fieldwork. International Journal of American Linguistics, 70(4): 369-415.
M. Ryan Bochnak & Lisa Matthewson (eds.) (2015) Methodologies in Semantic Fieldwork. Oxford University Press.

If you want to know more about the basics of formal semantics, there's a number of introductory textbooks (no need to read allof them obviously; their contents overlap quite a bit):

Irene Heim & Angelika Kratzer (1998) Semantics in Generative Grammar. Blackwell.
Henriëtte de Swart (1998) Introduction to Natural Language Semantics. University of Chicago Press.
Kate Kearns (2011) Semantics. Palgrave.
Thomas Ede Zimmermann & Wolfgang Sternefeld (2013) Introduction to Semantics: An Essential Guide to the Composition of Meaning. De Gruyter.
Pauline Jacobson (2014) Compositional Semantics. Oxford University Press.
Yoad Winter (2016) Elements of Formal Sematnics. University of Edinburgh Press.
Elizabeth Coppock & Lucas Champollion (ms.) Invitation to Formal Semantics. [ link ]