Lexical semantics specifies the meanings of words. The purpose of this course is to look at ways of specifying such meanings and ways they combine to form the meanings of clauses and sentences. Linguistics is replete with many interesting observations about how words and certain parts of words interact to produce meaning; but in comparison to the more formally developed discipline of compositional semantics, lexical semanticists have until now not had the right formal tools to make precise models of the observations they have made—in particular with respect to the observations concerning coercion and copredication. These phenomena are ubiquitous in almost all languages. They are also particularly troubling for lexical semantics because they require an account of how words can appear to shift their meaning depending on the predicational context and discourse context in which they occur. One of the exciting and exciting developments in this field, is that the formal frameworks needed to make advances in lexical semantics open up new, deep parallels between the semantics of natural languages and programming languages.
In this course, we will give an overview of recent developments in lexical semantics, survey the problems that these approaches have, and develop a precise, yet descriptively rich framework for lexical semantics, the “type composition logic” (developed in Lexical Meaning in Context: A Web of Words, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press) that deals with these problems by using tools from computer science, compositional semantics and logic. We will pay particular attention to the theory of types. This course will be of interest not only to linguists and philosophers interested in lexical meaning, but also to computer scientists and other researchers interested in the ontologies developed for knowledge representation that are now widely used in computational applications.
