HW3 (due F 2/15 @ 5pm by email or at my office)

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Your third homework assignment is now available for download–just click on the link below for a PDF version. It will be due on Friday, February 15, at 5pm.  Since we do not have a class meeting on Friday 2/15, please submit your assignment either via email, or by delivering a hard copy to my office.  (Of course, you are also welcome to bring your completed assignment to our class meeting on Thursday, February 14.)

HW3 (due F 2/15 @ 5pm by email or at my office)

Reading for Tu 2/12 : Löbner §4.2-4.3 (pgs. 62-73)

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I’ve posted a short excerpt from another Semantics textbook (written by Sebastian Löbner) in the “Readings” section of the website.  It discusses how certain semantic relationships between sentences, such as entailment, can be modeled in Propositional Logic.  Please read this excerpt for Tu 2/12.

(Note: §4.2 of the reading uses some terms that you won’t be familiar with, such as “CoU” and “Principle of Polarity”.  Don’t worry too much about these…just make sure that you understand the terms “contingent”, “logically true”, and “logically false”.)

Handout on ‘all’, ‘most’, ‘some’, and their scalar implicatures

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Here’s a handout entitled “All, most, and some: A case study in scalar implicature”, which summarizes what we saw in today’s class.  The notion “scalar implicature” will remain with us throughout the semester, so it will pay to review this material, and make sure that you understand each step in the reasoning process that underlies scalar implicatures.

‘All’, ‘most’, and ‘some’: A case study in scalar implicature

Reading for Th 2/7: Kearns §2.1-2.2 (pgs. 24-32)

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For this Thursday 2/7, please read sections 2.1 and 2.2 (pgs. 24-32) of the Kearns textbook.  The reading describes the language of propositional logic, a precisely-defined formal language that allows us to represent the truth conditions of certain English sentences.  We will spend next week becoming acquainted with the language of propositional logic, and seeing how semanticists use logic to investigate literal meaning.

Reading for Tu 2/5: Birner §2.2-2.3 (pgs. 62-73), skip §2.2.2 (pgs. 66-68)

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For next Tuesday 2/5, please read sections 2.2 and 2.3 (pgs. 62-73) of the following book chapter, which is still available from the “Readings” section of this website:

Birner, Betty. 2012. Introduction to Pragmatics, Chap. 2 (‘Gricean Implicature’). Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Note:  you should skip section 2.2.2 (pgs. 66-68) of the reading.  This particular subsection deals with a phenomenon known as conventional implicature, which is related to, but ultimately rather different from, conversational implicature.  We will not be concerned with conventional implicatures in this course.