Semantics 2, SoSe 2015

Course description

In this course we will look at questions concerning the meaning of adjectives and adverbs such as

• What is the meaning of "tall" and "small" if a "tall mouse" is much smaller than a "small elephant"?
• How come a "red car" is both red and a car, but a "fake car" is not even a car?
• If you give "the right answer", any other answer would have been wrong, but if you give "the wrong answer" why is then not every other answer correct?
• How can we capture the observation that a "beautiful dancer" can be someone ugly who dances

beautifully, but a "beautiful dancing shoes" cannot be ugly shoes for dancing beautifully?

We will discuss both the empirical side of these and other issues and how we can formalize our observations and integrate them into the framework of the syntax-semantics interface developed in the "Semantics 1" class.

After the class, the participants will be able to distinguish various types of modifiers and to characterize their meaning in a precise way.