Phil 565: Forms and Meaning

USC graduate seminar (Fall 2019): This course explores the relationship between form and meaning in natural language, with an eye towards the development of a semantic theory that is continuous with the foundational goals of generative linguistics, the predominant scientific approach to language. Generative linguistics aims to explain (i) what knowledge of language consists in, (ii) how it is acquired by children, and (iii) what advantages it confers to its bearer. In important respects, the answers proffered by the philosophy of language and natural language semantics (the predominant scientific approach to the study of meaning) have been discontinuous with contemporary theorizing in syntax and morphology. This course aims to get beyond the impasse. In the first part of the course, we study foundational issues, traditional approaches, and recent developments in linguistic theory and semantic theory. In the second part, we dive deeper into the details of ‘form’—crucially, syntactic and morphological—in order to appreciate important boundary conditions that linguistic structure can impose on a theory of meaning. Along the way, we consider the relationships between language, thought, and reality, and debate which of these relationships a properly scientific semantic theory can account for.