31.2457, FYI: Teaching Materials for Undergrad Semantics Course

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-2457. Tue Aug 04 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.2457, FYI: Teaching Materials for Undergrad Semantics Course

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Date: Tue, 04 Aug 2020 05:59:47
From: Nadine Theiler [nadine.theiler at uconn.edu]
Subject: Teaching Materials for Undergrad Semantics Course

 
We (Masha Esipova, Nadine Theiler, and Lucas Champollion) are pleased to
announce an updated version of our undergraduate semantics teaching materials.
The materials are freely available at https://wp.nyu.edu/introsem. The newest
version supports remote instruction through homeworks that can be submitted
and graded online.

The course is designed as an undergraduate-level introduction to
truth-conditional, compositional semantics for students with no or little
formal background and has been taught at NYU and UConn. It introduces set
theory, propositional logic, and predicate logic as formal tools and covers a
wide variety of natural language phenomena, including presuppositions and
implicatures, nominal and adverbial modification, tense and aspect,
generalized quantifiers, modals, and propositional attitudes. 

The course is primarily based on Paul Portner’s textbook `What is Meaning?
Fundamentals of Formal Semantics’. Some parts are based on Elizabeth Coppock
and Lucas Champollion’s draft textbook `Invitation to Formal Semantics‘.

The materials we make available include:

* PDF handouts for each topic, including the main contents of the class as
well as in-class exercises, questions and activities
* a syllabus
* weekly homework questions/problem sets (password-protected, available on
request)
* midterm and final exams, and exam review sheets (password-protected,
available on request) 

The materials are available under a Creative Commons license. We are happy to
share LaTeX sources on demand for those who wish to modify them, and we
welcome contributions to the course.

Changes with respect to the previous version of the materials:

* The course has been adapted for teaching without a teaching assistant or
recitation sections: there are more exercises incorporated directly into the
handouts and some topics are covered in less depth. 
* The course has also been shortened to fit into a ten-week term.
* The homeworks are available as online Google forms and many homework
questions have been adapted to fit this format.

The materials from the earlier version of the course continue to be available
and include handouts for a 14-week term, including a separate set of handouts
that can be used in recitation.
 



Linguistic Field(s): Semantics





 



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