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