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Honors in Linguistics

Why Major in Linguistics?

V61.0004 Introduction to Semantics

Prof. Paul Postal and Prof. Anna Szabolcsi

Fall 2000

The undergraduate course "Introduction to Semantics" is also available for graduate students taking Directed Readings with Profs. Postal and Szabolcsi.

In Fall 2000, Introduction to Semantics will be co-taught by Profs. Paul Postal and Anna Szabolcsi. It will differ from the standard offering in that it will work like a research seminar. It has no prerequisite (although Grammatical Analysis is ideal preparation) but it will require a great deal of attention to detail, persistence in analyzing linguistic data, and focused participation in classroom discussion.

"Negative polarity items" are expressions like "ever", "any more", "at all". Their occurrence in sentences is rather restricted. Compare:

I don't think I have ever been there -- acceptable

I think I have ever been there -- unacceptable

or,

I don't like it at all -- acceptable

I like it at all -- unacceptable

The received wisdom is that negative polarity items are acceptable when they occur within the "c-command domain" of a "negative operator". Prof. Postal's current research questions both these assumptions, because it has uncovered a wide array of new linguistic facts about negative polarity items. Among the novelties is the discovery of a set of negative polarity items which he calls "taboo minimizers", whose behavior is quite unique:

He doesn't understand squat -- acceptable, means: "he doesn't understand anything"

He understands squat -- acceptable, means: "he doesn't understand anything"

The first half of the course, taught by Szabolcsi, will be a standard introduction to the fundamentals of sentence semantics. It will introduce some basic notions of logic, syntactic structure, and semantics. We will use Allwood, Anderson, and Dahl, "Logic in Linguistics", Cambridge UP (first 5 chapters) and Fromkin, editor, "Linguistics: Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics", Blackwell's, 2000 (parts of the Syntax I-II and the Semantics I-II chapters).

These will provide a sufficient background for the second half, co-taught by Postal and Szabolcsi, focusing on negative polarity items, based on Prof. Postal's manuscript. We will survey and carefully analyze large sets of data. Students will be learning to make subtle judgments regarding acceptability and to look for patterns and explanations.

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