Fall 2006

LIN 372L • Syntax & Semantics: The Structure & Meaning of Utterances

Course Description

In this course we study the syntax and semantics of human language. Syntax is concerned with how words are combined to form sentences. Semantics is concerned with what those sentences mean, and how the meaning of a sentence is constructed from the meanings of the component words. We will survey and analyze syntactic and semantic phenomena from a wide variety of the world‘s languages. This will reveal interesting patterns lurking within human languages, despite their sometimes chaotic surface appearance. We will also discover surprising similarities across seemingly diverse languages.

Texts

Paul Kroeger 2004. Analyzing Syntax-- A Lexical-functional Approach. Cambridge UP. ISBN 0 521 01654 1

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