Language and its Structure III: Semantics and Pragmatics
Linguistic meaning is the subject, split into semantics, the study of conventional compositional meaning, and pragmatics, the study of how meaning depends on context and interaction. The course draws on philosophy, logic, syntax, and psychology to build the technical toolkit linguists use to analyze meaning, including truth conditions, entailment, presupposition, and implicature. Materials come from MIT OpenCourseWare and include lecture notes, readings, and problem sets covering topics such as reference, quantification, speech acts, and conversational inference. The course assumes some prior linguistics background, fitting as the third installment in a sequence on language structure. It suits students who want a grounded, technical introduction to how sentences carry meaning and how listeners infer more than what is literally said, rather than a general survey of language.