LIN 437 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Implicature, Intension, Stephen Hawking
Document Summary
Richard montague: philosopher (late sixties, early seventies), brings attention to language. Makes a claim that english is a formal language like math, or computer code. You can talk about meaning in the same way. Did a lot of research and was murdered (unsolved). Generative grammar: set of ideas associated with being precise about language in a way that allows you to take linguistic intuitions as data, be precise about the cognitive processes driving language, A lot of progress has been made with phonology and syntax, but there isn"t a theory of meaning. We know where meaning is, but not necessarily what it is. Philosophers were more concerned about meaning than linguists were. She laid the foundation for a scientific theory about semantics. You can have a conversation without using words (non-linguistic) Non-conventionalized meaning (need to work it out yourself. Fillers (um, uh,)?, basic semantic meaning, we will be more concerned about this, but pragmatics also matters.
