Creativity is one of the main features of natural language. We are able to understand and produce sentences that we never ever heard before. Formal semantics explains how complex meanings may be derived from more simple meanings and by rules of semantic composition. Formal semantics in particular provides us with a tool for the analysis of many function words. And it helps us understand predication (e.g. the composition of a verbal element with its arguments) and modification (e.g. of a noun by an adjective).
This course aims at introducing the elementary techniques used in formal semantics. It is a prerequisite for reading more advanced literature in formal semantics.
