Final Exam & Final Office Hours

Posted by on

Final Exam Date/Time: Tuesday, May 10, 12:30-2:30pm

Pete’s Office Hours: Monday, May 9, 2-5pm
Paul’s Office Hours: Monday, May 9, 1-4pm

General Format: The exam will be cumulative, covering the entire semester’s material.  But the emphasis will be on the material that we’ve covered since the second midterm exam.  As with your two previous midterm exams, the questions will closely resemble those that you’ve seen in your homework assignments, though they will be designed to be completed in a shorter amount of time.

Topics that we’ve covered this semester (use this list as a guide when studying):

Literal Meaning vs. Utterance Meaning:  entailment vs. implicature; Grice’s maxims; types of implicatures (e.g., scalar)

Propositional Logic: truth tables; logical relations b/w sentences; the “fit” between PropL &, v, –> and  English and, or, if…then… (logic vs. pragmatics)

Presupposition: the S-family test; presupposition triggers; different effects of presuppositions vs. ordinary entailments on the common ground (given vs. new information)

Predicate Logic: predicates and arguments; PredL translations; pronouns and variables

Word-Level Semantic Relations:  hyponymy; types of opposition; types of adjectival modification

Quantified Arguments: the universal and existential quantifiers; FOPL translations; the Aristotelian Square of Opposition;  ambiguities involving quantified arguments & negation; ambiguities involving multiple quantified arguments; restricted quantifier notation

Lexical Semantics:  aspectual classes of VPs; plural NPs and distributive vs. collective predicates

 

 

 

Reading for F 4/29 & M 5/1: Vendler (1962)

Posted by on

For F 4/29 and M 5/1, please read the following article, which can be downloaded from the Readings section of this website:

Vendler, Zeno. 1962. Each and Every, Any and All. Mind 71(282): 145-160.

The article describes some interesting puzzles concerning the interpretation of plural noun phrases and universally quantified arguments.  Although we won’t have time to discuss all of these puzzles (and in fact, not all of them have been solved yet!), the data are quite interesting, and the paper is quite fun to read.  Reading the paper should also serve as an indication of just how much you’ve learned this semester…when you’re done, imagine trying to read it without having taken this course!