ARA 402 Semantics & Pragmatics

People use sentences to convey information about themselves and about the world in which they live. In this course, students study how meaning is encoded and expressed in language. They explore linguistic meaning through two disciplines: semantics, the study of the literal meaning of words and sentences, and pragmatics, the study of how speakers use words and sentences in specific situations. Students critically examine topics such as how words and sentences (linguistic objects) relate to entities in the world, the ways in which concepts mediate the relationship, the formal representation of meaning, and how the study of meaning is relevant to other areas of linguistic analysis such as syntax; how and why language differs from other communication systems; and how people employ language to communicate various types of meaning.