Course Information

This course will be held online (here, on this blog) for the Summer Semester 2020 (or at least until they tell us we can meet in person).

These circumstances are unusual, and it will be a learning experience for me too! Normally, during a lecture, I would be monitoring your cherubic faces for signs of distress, and adjust my teaching accordingly. In order for me to succeed in teaching you this semester, I will need your help. Please let me know what is working for you, and what is not!

Starting from next week, I plan on having comments enabled on this blog. Please leave your comments or questions for the ‘lecture’ there, and please comment on your compatriots' comments etc.

Grades

To receive a grade for the module Grammatiktheorie you must take a final exam (Klausur) and write a term paper (Hausarbeit). The final exam will be for this component of the module (Semantics), and you may choose which of Morphology or Syntax you write the term paper in. You may choose which (two) courses you want to be graded in, and for these two courses, which method you would like to be graded by.

Tutor

The tutor for this course is Nicola Bruni, a MA student in our department. Nicola is well-versed in semantics (and philosophy of language), having studied with Chris Tancredi in Tokyo. The current plan is for him to assist with the theoretical semantic part of the course.

Literature

We will have occasional readings from the following books:

• Winter’s textbook (at the publisher)
• Keenan & Moss' textbook (at the publisher)

Computation

In order to get a hands on experience with semantics, we will be implementing our theories of semantics in Haskell, a functional programming language. Haskell can be downloaded from this website, and the wiki provides many useful links. A user friendly online tutorial is the humorously titled Learn You a Haskell for Great Good.

Once you have installed Haskell, you will need to write programs in text files. The extension for Haskell program files is hs (which presumably stands for ‘h’askell ’s’ource). While you could just write the program in an application like Notepad or TextEdit, it is very helpful to have an application which makes writing programs easier, an integrated development environment or IDE. There is no standard for Haskell, I personally use Emacs (for everything), but many people find Atom easy to get started with.

These helpful slides were put together by the tutors for the computational linguistics course in the winter semester of 2019. They discuss some of these issues in more detail (and in German).