Course Info for Ling 889A, Spring 2003

Course Info for Ling 889A, Spring 2003
Lexical Semantics at the Syntax Interface

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Essentials

Instructor: Philip Resnik.
Location and time of the class: Marie Mount Hall 1413 (CNL conference room), Thursday, 2-5pm. (Note: Location has changed!)
Text: Weekly readings in Linguistics Department readings folders. See the list of readings.
Office hours: by appointment.

What's the course about?

This seminar will look at lexical meaning, covering core material in lexical semantics and moving on to look at specific issues at the interface between lexical representation and syntactic realization. A variety of approaches to the lexicon will be examined, including perspectives from theoretical linguistics, computational linguistics, and psycholinguistics. The syllabus is likely to change somewhat over the course of the semester as guided by the interests of the course participants.

(Philosophical perspectives on word meaning will not be covered in any depth, though see some nice Web material on this topic from a recent course taught at Arizona by Heidi Harley and Dr. Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini at http://w3.arizona.edu/~ling/hh/522/.)

While covering topics in lexical semantics over the course of the semester, we will also be exploring a secondary theme: the nature of linguistic evidence. Students will make use of the Linguist's Search Engine, a tool designed to help linguists utilize the Web as a corpus for empirical linguistic research ( NSF project IIS-0112429).

How will the course be graded?:

Students will be evaluated on their ability to master the content of the material in the course and to think critically about ideas presented to them.

Class assignments: Students will write short reaction pieces in response to readings.
Class presentations: Twice during the semester, each student will take responsibility for an article (or related articles), discuss the material with the instructor, and lead class discussion of the material and reactions to it.
Final paper: Students will write a paper exploring an issue in lexical semantics, using both conventional (introspective) and Web-based sources of evidence.
Class participation: contribution to class discussions will also be a factor in evaluating performance in the course. Preparedness is essential.

What's the Plan?

See the schedule of topics.