Last week, we tackled compositional semantics: a systematic method for constructing the logical form of a sentence from its syntactic structure. Compositional semantics focuses on capturing the logical aspects of sentence meaning (where the meaning is confined to literal meaning): for instance, that "Kim buttered the toast at midnight" entails "Kim buttered something". But when sentences are put together in an extended discourse, the content of that discourse is more than just the conjunction of the compositional semantics of its individual sentences. Meaning is influenced by context, and in particular the prior sentences in the discourse. The study of such meanings is known as pragmatics. We will talk about how to represent pragmatic content and how to parse discourse into a representation that captures its compositional semantics and pragmatics in lecture 19.
Analysing meaning involves more than capturing entailments that are supported by symbolic logic, even for individual sentences. Symbolic logic interprets non-logical words like "toast" as the set of things the word denotes, but imposes no constraints on what those things are, nor how they relate to the denotations of other symbols (e.g., the relationship between the denotation of "bread" and the denotation of "toast"). In the course of two lectures (20 and 21), we'll study ways in which to capture word meanings and the relationships among those meanings.
The content of the folowing pages is as follows:
19: Discourse
20: Lexical Semantics I
21: Lexical Semantics II
As always, each of the above includes slides, required reading and a post lecture quiz. The quiz is a chance for you to gauge your understanding of the material presented here, and so we strongly encourage you to review this content in the above order, and then complete the quiz. If there is anything you don't understand, then you have several options:
- Post a question on piazza;
- Ask a question at the in person lectures; and/or
- Ask your tutor.