Final Exam and Final Office Hours

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Final Exam Date/Time:  Tuesday, May 7, 12:30-2:30pm (CAS 324, our usual classroom)

Office Hours:  Friday May 3, 11:30am-1pm; Monday May 6, 3:30-5pm

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 and  English (logic vs. pragmatics)

Presupposition: 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; pronouns and variables; models, assignment functions, and the semantics of PredL

Word-Level Semantic Relations:  hyponymy; types of opposites

Quantified Arguments:  the universal and existential quantifiers; the Aristotelian Square of Opposition; ambiguities involving quantified arguments; restricted quantifiers; negative polarity items

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

OPTIONAL: Reading for Th 5/2: Vendler (1962)

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The following article, which can be downloaded from the Readings section of this website, is your optional reading for Th 5/2:

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 will be able to only scratch the surface of these puzzles in Thursday’s class (and in fact, not all of them have been solved yet!), the data are quite interesting, and the paper is 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!