Topics in Linguistic Theory: Propositional Attitudes
MIT's graduate linguistics seminar looks at how natural language represents propositional attitudes such as belief, knowledge, and desire, and speech acts such as saying and asking. The focus is on the semantics of predicates like believe, know, want, say, and ask, alongside the syntax of main and embedded clauses and formal treatments of conversational pragmatics. Materials from MIT OpenCourseWare include readings drawn from linguistics and philosophy of language, and the course builds practice in both written and oral argumentation through discussion and analysis of specific constructions. It suits students who already have some background in syntax or semantics and want to work through a focused theoretical problem rather than survey an entire field. As with other MIT OCW offerings, the course is free to access with no certificate attached.