USC undergraduate seminar (latest Fall 2018): 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. How do these various discussions relate to each other? And in particular, do we mean the same thing by "event"? We explore these questions through a variety of interrelated topics including: the nature of actions; the logic underlying event talk; the distinction between event participants and (mere) bystanders; the structural similarities between ordinary objects and events; and, the emergence of our intuitions about these things in early childhood. This study thus engages with the analytic techniques of linguistics and philosophy, and the experimental methods of cognitive psychology. These tools help us to appreciate the complicated relationship between the way the world is (or, the way it might be) and the way we think it is. As such, the course will be appropriate for students that are curious about the nature of language and mind, seeking an introduction to the use of formal methods in philosophical/scientific inquiry, and/or who would like to see how a research topic can span traditional disciplinary divides.

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.

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.