Semantics

Course description: This course offers an introduction to the basic concepts and methods in the analysis of natural language meaning with a range of semantic topics. The course will have students work with real language data. The learning tasks and exercises, established on an outline of semantic concepts and issues, and being philosophical and practical in their nature, encourage students to build a solid knowledge on semantic terms, clarify the issues by analyzing and synthesizing different semantic characteristics within English language. The contents include the topics in semantic field theory, semantic categories, context and inference, thematic role, and speech acts.