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 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.