(USC graduate seminar, Fall 2024) Born in the philosophy of action, the claim that sentences like Bill kicked Carl express descriptions of events—rather than mere relations between individuals—has blossomed into several decades of incredibly productive research in natural language syntax and semantics. Since its inception, the 'event semantics' framework has profitably engaged metaphysical questions about what events are, whether there are fundamentally different kinds of 'eventualities', which events are to be properly counted as 'agential', and, more generally, what it means to be a privileged 'participant' in an event, as opposed to a mere bystander. Applications of the framework have also uncovered systematic cross-linguistic patterning in the grammatical encoding of such notions. Davidson (1967) initiates the project by noting a wide range of systematic, intuitively-valid reasoning patterns in natural language that cannot be modeled as logical validities under standard first-order assumptions. In response, he revises the logic so that at least action verbs in English translate as predicates with additional argument positions that, he argues, range over 'events'. Fast forward almost 60 years, and a growing number of linguistic semanticists suppose that even simple clauses like It rained involve multiple layers of event description (e.g. Schein 2016). Meanwhile, applications of 'the event analysis' have been shown to be critical for the analysis of aspect, attitude reports, modal claims, and more. Yet, these developments have proceeded almost entirely outside of contemporary philosophy of language. This course aims to remedy that. In the first part, we read and discuss classic papers towards establishing an event-semantic framework for the analysis of natural language. In the second part, we discuss works at the cutting-edge of this framework. On the first meeting, I introduce Davidson's core arguments and some assumptions from theoretical linguistics that will be useful throughout the semester. The remaining meetings will focus on a targeted paper or small collection of papers, with discussion led by students or invited faculty experts (Paul Pietroski, Valentine Hacquard, Alexander Williams, Daniel Altshuler).

USC Cognitive Science undergraduate core course (latest: Spring 2024): This course is an introduction to the foundational questions animating the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science. For example: How much of what we know is learned (i.e., based in experience), and how much is innate? How much of what we’re able to do with our minds is the result of just plain smarts, as opposed to faculties ‘designed’ to carry out certain tasks? How is what we know represented or recorded in the mind, and how do we come to speak what we know? Are our minds really different from those of other animals? Can we build an artificial mind? We begin to explore these questions as they play out across philosophy, cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and computer science. Along the way, we gain experience and familiarity with formal, experimental, and computational tools used to shed light on their eventual answers. Students should emerge from the course with a deeper appreciation of the richness (and sometimes strangeness) of minds, as well as an understanding of how experience depends on the concepts, categories, and processes in one’s ‘mind design’. In Lab Sections, students will gain a deeper appreciation of the basic concepts, theories, and research methods in cognitive science.

USC General Education freshman seminar (latest: Spring 2023): Linguists say that sentences describe events, while nouns describe objects. Psychologists describe principles of event perception, and philosophers debate the metaphysics of event identity. Our legal system holds us responsible for our actions (presumably, particular sorts of events), and, in some cases, our failures to act. But what are events? In this course, we look closely at ordinary thought and talk to gain insight into how people (implicitly) view this fundamental category of experience. We explore questions like: how do our descriptions of events relate to the events they describe? Are events different from objects, and if so, how? Are there importantly different kinds of events, and what are their properties? How are actions different from (mere) events? How can we distinguish ‘participants’ from ‘bystanders’? Etc. In exploring these questions, we make use of the tools of philosophical logic and linguistic semantics to precisely render hypotheses about what our event talk means and what it commits us to. As such, this course will be appropriate for students that are curious about the nature of human language and mind; seeking an introduction to the use of logical methods in philosophical or scientific inquiry; eager to improve their abilities in reading, reasoning, and argumentation; and interested to see how a research topic can span traditional disciplinary divides.

USC graduate seminar (co-taught with Roumyana Pancheva) (Fall 2021) This course analyzes the language that people use to describe quantities. We take the perspective of compositional formal semantics, and keep a close eye on the details of cross-linguistic universality and variation. In the first part of the course, we establish the core assumptions and accomplishments of contemporary degree semantics as developed primarily to account for modification of adjectives (very tall, more intelligent, best). Here, we discuss some topics of broad recent interest in linguistics and philosophy such as the absolute-relative distinction (compare completely full with ?completely tall), and look closely at grammatical variation (e.g., languages without adjectives, comparatives without degrees). Next, we examine the successes and challenges of extending the degree-semantic toolkit to related phenomena with nouns (more intelligence, less of a chance) and verbs (jog more, want φ more), and its possible extension to bare number words (seventeen), modified number words (more than five, at least six), and measure phrases (six feet tall, two litres of water). In the final section, we consider some important outstanding formal questions related to degree constructions and, if we have time, we may consider interactions with questions about belief and evidence.

USC graduate seminar (co-taught with Jeremy Goodman) (Spring 2021) This course has two interwoven themes. The first is how to make sense of talk about the meaning of a word, as both philosophers of language and semanticists often do. We explore views that reject this assumption (or modify what is meant by “meaning”), based on consideration of polysemy, vagueness, the semantic paradoxes, and/or puzzles about propositional attitude ascriptions that appear to show that a single word can have many meanings (and not just because of ambiguity and familiar kinds of context-sensitivity). The second theme is the representational theory of mind. We will approach it from two directions: via the philosophy of language and propositional attitude ascriptions, and via the cognitive revolution in psychology, in particular the Chomskyan revolution in generative linguistics. We will consider both how mental representations provide a framework for theorizing about meaning multiplicity in language and whether there is meaning multiplicity not just for words but for mental representations themselves. The first part of the course lays the groundwork by reviewing classic papers on these topics. The middle part of the course focuses on recent projects on meaning multiplicity by Cian Dorr and Paul Pietroski, each of which highlights connections between linguistic meaning and thought. In the last part of the course we connect these themes to some of our own work on propositional attitudes and quantifiers.

USC graduate seminar (Fall 2019): This course explores the relationship between form and meaning in natural language, with an eye towards the development of a semantic theory that is continuous with the foundational goals of generative linguistics, the predominant scientific approach to language. Generative linguistics aims to explain (i) what knowledge of language consists in, (ii) how it is acquired by children, and (iii) what advantages it confers to its bearer. In important respects, the answers proffered by the philosophy of language and natural language semantics (the predominant scientific approach to the study of meaning) have been discontinuous with contemporary theorizing in syntax and morphology. This course aims to get beyond the impasse. In the first part of the course, we study foundational issues, traditional approaches, and recent developments in linguistic theory and semantic theory. In the second part, we dive deeper into the details of ‘form’—crucially, syntactic and morphological—in order to appreciate important boundary conditions that linguistic structure can impose on a theory of meaning. Along the way, we consider the relationships between language, thought, and reality, and debate which of these relationships a properly scientific semantic theory can account for.

USC graduate seminar (co-taught with Barry Schein) (Fall 2019): Semantic analysis often suggests the appropriateness of positing different sorts of entities, whether simple or structured, to act as, at least, targets for reference and quantification. Postulating some of these entities may accord well enough with intuition (e.g., objects and events) while others can seem more mysterious (e.g., processes and states). In this course, we examine the evidence for some of these posits, with a major focus on the mass-count and telicity distinctions, and their interactions with degree constructions (i.e., sentences with more, less, enough, etc). Here, technical notions from mereology, mereotopology, and measurement theory are introduced. More broadly, we explore questions like: what is the role that ontology can play in semantic explanation? And, what do we mean by "ontology"? Should we understand, in particular, the "natural language metaphysics" produced in semantic theory as (properly) metaphysics, or something else? If metaphysics wants to read (worldly) ontology off of the logical form of English or any other language, what justifies this move? Correspondingly, if cognitive psychologists want to read human conceptual structure off of logical form, how is that justified? Etc.

USC graduate seminar (Spring 2018): This is a course at the intersection of degree semantics and modal semantics. Building on the recent surge of work on scalar (i.e. degree-based) modality, it aims to guide students to appreciate and investigate foundational, methodological and empirical questions in this paradigm. After introducing both standard degree semantics and standard modal semantics, we explore questions like: When is a degree-theoretic treatment appropriate? Should there be morphosyntactic requirements (e.g. explicit degree morphemes) that characterize expressions suited to such a treatment? Are there translations between some degree-theoretic semantic theories and some standard (non-degree based) theories?

NU graduate core course (latest Spring 2017): This is an advanced graduate-level course in formal semantics. It presupposes knowledge of the material covered in the Heim & Kratzer (1998) textbook at least through chapter 8, including basic set theory, propositional logic, predicate logic, type theory, and the lambda calculus. The course has a bipartite structure: half is focused on expanding the student's basic semantic toolkit, and half is focused on discussing classic papers. Throughout, we focus on a small subset of the major areas of interest to classic and contemporary research in formal semantics. The topics can be broadly categorized according to the types of new entities they introduce, namely worlds, times, pluralities, eventualities, and… stuff.

NU graduate and advanced undergraduate core course (latest Fall 2016): Human languages pair 'sounds' with 'meanings'. But what are 'meanings'? We approach this difficult question by focusing on what speakers know about how meaning is expressed in language. Of primary interest is the traditional model that characterizes semantic competence in terms of knowledge of compositional truth conditions. Here, we pay close attention to which aspects of speakers' knowledge that this model captures well, and those that it has more difficulty with. Along the way, we probe different types of meaning 'indeterminacy', and the distinctions between: semantics and pragmatics, sense and reference, and meaning and truth. A good deal of the course is geared towards developing proficiency with the mathematical and logical tools used in formal semantics.

NU graduate and advanced undergraduate seminar (Fall 2016): Research falling under the heading 'experimental semantics' comes in two important varieties: (i) research designed to test the predictions of truth-conditional theories (this is most often what's meant by "experimental semantics"), and (ii) research designed to explore finer-grained aspects of meaning, in particular the relationship between meaning and non-linguistic cognition (I've heard this called "psychosemantics", but we need a better name). These two categories of research have importantly different scope, limits, and methods, but (at least in terms of the research we will cover) both are strongly intertwined with the tradition of compositional formal semantics. In this course, we will develop an understanding of the state of contemporary experimental research in meaning through readings, lecture, and discussion. Specific topics to be covered include presupposition, the mass/count distinction, plurality, event semantics, quantification, numerals, and presupposition.

NU undergraduate core course (Spring 2016): The ability to use language to communicate meaning is one of the most fundamental aspects of being human. But what is `meaning'? We approach this question by investigating what speakers know about how meaning is conveyed in language, including the distinction between what expressions literally mean, and the different shades of meaning that expressions can take on in different contexts of use. In carrying out this study, we plumb the linguist's toolkit (which includes tools borrowed from mathematics, logic, language acquisition, and cognitive neuroscience) to discover how linguistic scientists determine, in a rigorous way, what a given word or sentence means, and whether that word or sentence means the same thing across occasions of use. This inquiry will lead the student to an understanding of the scientific study of language, by examining how it plays out in the domain of linguistic meaning. And by the end of the course, students will have gained a deeper appreciation for one of the most important, yet still most elusive aspects of the human capacity for language.

NU graduate and advanced undergraduate course (Fall 2015): This course investigates first language acquisition, with an emphasis on how children acquire knowledge of syntax and semantics. We discuss the poverty of the stimulus, the roles of input and intake, and how children infer grammatical properties from data. Along the way, we become familiar with a variety of analytic and behavioral methods deployed by developmental linguists. Students will learn how to define a learning problem surrounding a linguistic phenomenon, to identify the potential roles of prior grammatical knowledge and experience in learning the grammar of that phenomenon, how to identify potential extralinguistic contributions or barriers to acquisition, and to design an experiment to test children’s knowledge.

NU graduate seminar (Spring 2015): Linguists, psychologists, and philosophers love to talk about 'events.' What are they? Are they like or unlike 'objects'? Are they out there in the world, or merely ways we think about things in the world? In this course, we investigate the logic of the sentences we use to talk about events, and other potentially mysterious entities like 'states.'' We begin by considering the traditional semantics for sentences like 'Juliet kicked Romeo,' in which it expresses a relation between two entities. Next, we examine evidence that there is more structure to the logical form of such sentences, involving quantification over events. As the course goes on, we look at more phenomena that the event analysis has been recruited to explain, and the greater elaborations to logical form that these phenomena have been taken to suggest. Throughout, we consider the significance of the event analysis to the relation between language and mind.

UMD advanced undergraduate seminar (Spring 2013): Language contains a number of devices for talking about the relative quantities of things. In this course, we investigate the nature of speaker knowledge of the semantics of degree constructions like the positive Al is tall, comparative Bill is taller than Al, equative Al is as tall as Carl, excessive Bill is too tall, superlative Bill is the tallest, and others. A prominent approach to such devices makes reference to abstract entities called degrees, where "degree morphemes" are interpreted as expressing different sorts of relations between those entities. In this course, we study the relevant descriptive generalizations, as well as theoretical techniques for modeling speaker knowledge of such talk. In addition to developing basic competency in a number of important semantic distinctions such as gradable/non-gradable (adjectives), mass/count (nouns), atelic/telic (verbs), we will become familiar with the mathematical tools used to encode interactions between these categories and degree operators. We will also read and critically analyze contemporary theoretical research in this domain.