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Welcome to 24.979 Topics in Semantics/Syntax. 

Instructors: Kai von Fintel, Danny Fox, Nina Haslinger, Sabine Iatridou

Tuesdays 2-5, Room 32-D461, first class: Tuesday Sept 10

This semester’s 24.979 is a semantics/syntax seminar, which means it can be taken for credit as either a semantics seminar or a syntax seminar. A central question will be whether and how the syntax and semantics of sentences include information about the speech acts that the sentences are used to perform. For example, are there “speech act operators” in the syntactic structures of sentences?

Slightly more concretely, some of the topics are:

  - Speech acts and the (Neo-) Performative Hypothesis
  - Unasked questions
  - Performative utterances
  - QUDs
  - Ignorance inferences

Requirements:

  - attendance and participation in class discussion
  - weekly reading and submission of weekly questions/comments
  - final seminar paper