NU graduate and advanced undergraduate core course (latest Fall 2016): Human languages pair 'sounds' with 'meanings'. But what are 'meanings'? We approach this difficult question by focusing on what speakers know about how meaning is expressed in language. Of primary interest is the traditional model that characterizes semantic competence in terms of knowledge of compositional truth conditions. Here, we pay close attention to which aspects of speakers' knowledge that this model captures well, and those that it has more difficulty with. Along the way, we probe different types of meaning 'indeterminacy', and the distinctions between: semantics and pragmatics, sense and reference, and meaning and truth. A good deal of the course is geared towards developing proficiency with the mathematical and logical tools used in formal semantics.

NU graduate and advanced undergraduate seminar (Fall 2016): Research falling under the heading 'experimental semantics' comes in two important varieties: (i) research designed to test the predictions of truth-conditional theories (this is most often what's meant by "experimental semantics"), and (ii) research designed to explore finer-grained aspects of meaning, in particular the relationship between meaning and non-linguistic cognition (I've heard this called "psychosemantics", but we need a better name). These two categories of research have importantly different scope, limits, and methods, but (at least in terms of the research we will cover) both are strongly intertwined with the tradition of compositional formal semantics. In this course, we will develop an understanding of the state of contemporary experimental research in meaning through readings, lecture, and discussion. Specific topics to be covered include presupposition, the mass/count distinction, plurality, event semantics, quantification, numerals, and presupposition.