Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Note: Graduate students only.

This course provides a graduate-level introduction to the study of lexical semantics. 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, psycholinguistic experiments, computational approaches using word embedding models, 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; syntactic and semantic properties of classes of adjectives; differences in lexicalization patterns across languages.

HISP-S 611     #29787      12:45P-2:00P    MW      LI 851      Prof. Patricia Amaral