Course Description
The course introduces formal theories of context-dependency, presupposition, implicature, context-change, focus and topic. Special emphasis is on the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics. It also covers applications to the analysis of quantification, definiteness, presupposition projection, conditionals …
The course introduces formal theories of context-dependency, presupposition, implicature, context-change, focus and topic. Special emphasis is on the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics. It also covers applications to the analysis of quantification, definiteness, presupposition projection, conditionals and modality, anaphora, questions and answers.
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notes
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assignment
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An example of an implicature. One explanation for the blocking of the inference of Addressee(2) is there is a known convention for letter writing: Write only good things. Learn more about implicatures in Lectures 1-8 in lecture notes. (Image courtesy of MIT OpenCourseWare, Prof. Fox, and Prof. Menendez-Benito.)
