An introduction to Semantics

In the Syntax und Semantik module (1003) you learned about the basics of truth-conditional semantics, and how to interpret trees with traces in models (a la Heim & Kratzer ‘98).

The main empirical thrust of the present course is to investigate the (cross-linguistic) semantic properties of determiners, coordinators, and other categories. We will see that the denotation domains underlying these syntactic types have a rich structure - they are boolean algebras. This structure allows us to explain why words like and, or, and not are so flexible, able to be combined with objects of very different semantic type.

In this post I want us to refocus our thoughts on the point of semantics. What is the point of computing the truth conditions of a sentence? If someone tells me that the Hungarian sentence “Tón a lud átusz” is true if and only if the duck swam across the lake, what have I gained? In any scientific study, there must be some data that we are trying to get a handle on, to use the theory to help us understand. The data that we are initially interested in explaining might change as we develop our theory, but in order to avoid becoming pseudoscience we must maintain some connection to the observable world. In semantics, we are interested in explaining how we do ‘semantic-y’ things with language, such as

  1. judging that a sentence is true in a particular situation
  2. judging that a sentence is entailed by another (or contradicts another)

Truth-conditional semantics helps us to explain these kinds of phenomena. If our theory predicts a sentence to have certain truth conditions, we then predict that this sentence will be judged true in any situation where these truth conditions are satisfied. Similarly, if the truth conditions of two sentences are impossible to be jointly satisfied, then we predict that they will be judged to be contradictories.

We will adopt this perspective on semantics, and in the upcoming weeks refine our semantic analyses of sentences so as to capture more and more semantic observations about people’s semantic behaviour.

Reading for next week