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The topic of this class is intensionality, the ways in which language allows us to talk not only about what is going on right here and now and in our reality, but also about how things were or will be, and how they might or should be. We will cover a number of central topics, depending on participants’ previous knowledge, starting with tense, modal verbs, and belief and belief attribution.
The first part of the course will be based on the very gentle yet formally precise introductory text “Intensional Semantics” of von Fintel and Heim (available online). In the second part of the course, we will read selected papers that will be made available to participants. Note that this class presupposes knowledge of formal semantics (the typed lambda-calculus) as it is introduced in any introductory textbook on the topic, e.g. in Dowty, Wall and Peters (1979) or Heim and Kratzer (1998). |
