Laurence R. Horn - Teaching
Fall 2007
263a/663a Introduction to Semantics
Introduction to truth-conditional and lexical semantics. Survey of propositional and predicate
logic. Compositional theories of sense and reference. Entailment and presupposition. Opacity,
intensionality, and belief contexts. The relation between semantics and pragmatics. Special topic:
ambiguity, vagueness, and underspecification.
190a/590a Topics in the History of Linguistics:
The Linguistic Wars
Controversies in the history of generative grammar in the late 1960s and 1970s, focusing on the
struggle between generative semanticists (Lakoff, Ross, McCawley, Postal) and adherents of
Chomsky’s “Extended Standard Theory” paradigm. Echoes of those disputes in more recent
clashes between formal and functional approaches to language.
