Department of Spanish and Portuguese

VT:  Topics in Lexical Semantic                

Prerequisite: Must be a Graduate student

This course provides a graduate-level introduction to the study of lexical semantics, with a focus on Spanish. It explores questions raised by the study of word meaning like the following: How can word meanings be described? How do they interact with syntactic constructions? Can the context dependence of word meaning be systematically studied? The first half of the course introduces theoretical background regarding some of the linguistic controversies surrounding word meaning and its interface with syntax, morphology, and pragmatics. We will also discuss several methodologies that have been used to explore word meaning, e.g. introspection, corpus-based methods, and psycholinguistic experiments, and compare their relative merits. In the second half of the course we will examine how the theoretical approaches introduced before allow us to study specific word classes (nouns, verbs, and adjectives). Topics addressed in this course include: the differences in meaning expressed by content words and grammatical words; ambiguity, polysemy and vagueness; the nature of events described by words and its relation to verbal classes; argument alternations; different classes of adjectives; differences in lexicalization patterns across languages.

HISP-S 611    # 13311      3:00P-4:15P       MW         BH 010       Prof. Patricia Amaral

Note:  Departmental Consent Required