Abbreviations

For more information about the lecture halls and seminar rooms, see our lecture room page. The names listed under "Technical Assistance" are student volunteers who will act as a contact person for technical questions of the lecturers and workshop speakers during the course or workshop.

Perspective and perspective shift

Characterizing how the interpretation of words and phrases depends on the (lingustic and extra-linguistic) context has driven much contemporary work on the semantics/pragmatics interface. This class will review current trends, with three goals in mind: 1) To provide a survey of context-dependent expressions whose analysis has driven contemporary research, including indexical pronouns, evaluative expressions ("tasty", "great"), locative and directional phrases ("in front of"), perspectival verbs ("come", "go"), and temporal markers ("thee days ago"), addressing the issue of context shift; 2) To describing the cross-linguistic variation that has been observed with respect to context dependency and context shift; and 3) To introduce Kaplan's context theory and competing fully extensional theories, showing how context dependency and general restrictions on context dependency are captured in each theory, and comparing them.