USC graduate seminar (co-taught with Barry Schein) (Fall 2019): Semantic analysis often suggests the appropriateness of positing different sorts of entities, whether simple or structured, to act as, at least, targets for reference and quantification. Postulating some of these entities may accord well enough with intuition (e.g., objects and events) while others can seem more mysterious (e.g., processes and states). In this course, we examine the evidence for some of these posits, with a major focus on the mass-count and telicity distinctions, and their interactions with degree constructions (i.e., sentences with more, less, enough, etc). Here, technical notions from mereology, mereotopology, and measurement theory are introduced. More broadly, we explore questions like: what is the role that ontology can play in semantic explanation? And, what do we mean by "ontology"? Should we understand, in particular, the "natural language metaphysics" produced in semantic theory as (properly) metaphysics, or something else? If metaphysics wants to read (worldly) ontology off of the logical form of English or any other language, what justifies this move? Correspondingly, if cognitive psychologists want to read human conceptual structure off of logical form, how is that justified? Etc.

USC graduate seminar (Spring 2018): This is a course at the intersection of degree semantics and modal semantics. Building on the recent surge of work on scalar (i.e. degree-based) modality, it aims to guide students to appreciate and investigate foundational, methodological and empirical questions in this paradigm. After introducing both standard degree semantics and standard modal semantics, we explore questions like: When is a degree-theoretic treatment appropriate? Should there be morphosyntactic requirements (e.g. explicit degree morphemes) that characterize expressions suited to such a treatment? Are there translations between some degree-theoretic semantic theories and some standard (non-degree based) theories?

NU graduate core course (latest Spring 2017): This is an advanced graduate-level course in formal semantics. It presupposes knowledge of the material covered in the Heim & Kratzer (1998) textbook at least through chapter 8, including basic set theory, propositional logic, predicate logic, type theory, and the lambda calculus. The course has a bipartite structure: half is focused on expanding the student's basic semantic toolkit, and half is focused on discussing classic papers. Throughout, we focus on a small subset of the major areas of interest to classic and contemporary research in formal semantics. The topics can be broadly categorized according to the types of new entities they introduce, namely worlds, times, pluralities, eventualities, and… stuff.

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.

NU graduate seminar (Spring 2015): Linguists, psychologists, and philosophers love to talk about 'events.' What are they? Are they like or unlike 'objects'? Are they out there in the world, or merely ways we think about things in the world? In this course, we investigate the logic of the sentences we use to talk about events, and other potentially mysterious entities like 'states.'' We begin by considering the traditional semantics for sentences like 'Juliet kicked Romeo,' in which it expresses a relation between two entities. Next, we examine evidence that there is more structure to the logical form of such sentences, involving quantification over events. As the course goes on, we look at more phenomena that the event analysis has been recruited to explain, and the greater elaborations to logical form that these phenomena have been taken to suggest. Throughout, we consider the significance of the event analysis to the relation between language and mind.