Course Outline:
This seminar addresses a major branch of linguistic theory devoted to the study of meaning in language. Apart from linguistics, the term semantics has a long history in philosophy and logic ranging back to the writings of Plato and Aristotle.
While philosophical semantics deals in particular with the relationship between the speech signs and the phenomena in the world they refer to (reference, intension, truth conditions), structural semantics stresses the notion of language-internal relationships between speech signs, viz. sense relations such as synonymy, antonymy, hyponomy, etc.
More recently, especially through psychological and cognitive studies, theories have moved to the fore, which concentrate on the aspects involved in the mental processing of words.
Currently, the so-called semantics-pragmatic interface dealing with interpersonal meaning at the borderline of the two disciplines is under discussion.
