Areas

Philsophy of Language

Faculty at Texas study the philosophy of language from a variety of perspectives: discourse representation theory, dynamic semantics, formal semantics and pragmatics, situation theory, and speech act theory. Special areas of interest include theories of context, conditionals, discourse relations, implicature, modality, plurals, quantification, reference and anaphora, variables, and vagueness.

An interdisciplinary seminar each fall, team-taught by faculty from Computer Sciences, Linguistics, Philosophy, and Psychology, introduces students to key areas of cognitive science.

Each year there is an informal reading group in the philosophy of language, focusing on a variety of themes in dynamic semantics such as lexical semantics, the semantics of tense and aspect, and modal subordination.