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.

Degrees in semantics

Degrees play an important role in natural language semantics and have in fact enjoyed a surge in popularity in recent years. Gradability, comparison, partitivity, and vagueness are all phenomena for which degrees have been called on to help resolve. The aim of this course is to offer an introduction to degree-based semantics and to critically examine how degrees have been used to account for various semantic phenomena. Although the emphasis will be on semantic applications, the discussion of the ontology of degrees will be more thorough and systematic than what is customary in semantics courses. Topics to be covered include the following: * Models for degrees: degrees as equivalence classes, degrees as points, degrees as intervals * Gradable predicates: leading analyses of gradable adjectives and comparatives, degree modification * Gradability in the verbal domain: the treatment of gradual change and incrementality * Vagueness more generally: supervaluations, first-order vagueness versus second-order vagueness, fuzzy sets (as time permits) The prerequisite for this course is a basic background in formal semantics.