This website contains a complete set of teaching materials for an undergraduate-level introduction to semantics, developed by Maria Esipova and Lucas Champollion and taught in Fall 2017 and Fall 2018 as LING-UA 4 ‘Introduction to Semantics’ at NYU Linguistics. This course provides an introduction to truth-conditional, compositional semantics of natural language. It has a formal component that introduces set theory, propositional logic, and predicate logic. Using these tools, the course investigates various natural language phenomena, such as nominal and verbal modifiers, referential expressions, quantifiers, tense and aspect, modals, propositional attitudes, presuppositions and implicatures, focus, and indexicals. The course is based primarily on Paul Portner’s textbook ‘What is Meaning? Fundamentals of Formal Semantics‘, and draws on some additional sources such as Elizabeth Coppock and Lucas Champollion’s draft textbook ‘Formal Semantics Boot Camp‘ and various handbook articles.

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