What does it mean to understand an utterance? By producing and hearing utterances, we learn new things about the world and about the interlocutors, and communicate our own beliefs and desires. How does this happen? What types of inferences do we make in the process? This course provides an overview of how linguistics meaning and inferences have been analyzed from various angles. We will investigate key issues concerning ‘meaning’ in compositional/lexical semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics. Topics will comprise types of linguistic inferences, and connections between language and time, causation and identity.
