Coursera Flash Sale
40% Off Coursera Plus for 3 Months!
Grab it
Explore the fundamental principles of linguistic semantics through a comprehensive lecture series that systematically builds from basic concepts to advanced theoretical frameworks. Begin with foundational topics including entailment, implicature, and presupposition before progressing through set theory, relations, and functions as they apply to meaning analysis. Master propositional and predicate logic systems, then delve into truth-conditional semantics using model theory to understand how meaning is formally represented. Examine scope ambiguity and quantifier interpretation within structured semantic frameworks, followed by detailed analysis of pronoun semantics and reference resolution. Advance to lambda calculus and type theory as powerful tools for compositional semantic analysis, applying these methods to analyze declarative sentences, copular constructions, negation, and reflexive pronouns. Study how conjunctions, quantificational elements, and determiners function within lambda calculus frameworks, then explore intersective adjectives through type shifting mechanisms. Conclude with sophisticated topics including predicate modification, relative clause semantics, and quantifier raising operations, providing a thorough foundation in formal semantic theory and its practical applications to natural language analysis.
