Formalities

This seminar is a Hauptseminar, which means it is suitable both for MSc and for advanced BSc students. The seminar language will be English.

The seminar will be carried out as a "Blockseminar", which means that all seminar sessions will take place within the same week: We will meet every day between 9-13 from Monday 10 April to Friday 14 April and have two talks on each day. Notice that the seminar is not shorter or any less work than any other seminar; it simply compresses all the talks into a single week.

You can obtain either a "small Schein" (5 credit points) or a "large Schein" (9 credit points); which of these you need depends on whether you're a BSc or MSc student and possibly other factors. If you want a large Schein, you will have to write a seminar paper. We expect that you will summarise the paper(s) that you presented in your paper and add some thoughts of your own. These could be a comparison of your papers, or a comparison of one underspecification formalism with another, or a sketch of a clever new idea, or an implementation or corpus case study. As a consequence, we envisage that papers will be 15-20 pages in length.

Your grade will consist 50-50 of a grade for the talk and a grade for the seminar paper. Note, however, that the grade for the talk is complex. In particular, we want you to give your talks in a way that encourages discussions afterwards. This is why we will take into account both how lively and interesting the discussion after your talk was, and how much you contributed to the discussions after other people's talks.

This seminar is about an advanced topic in semantics. We assume that you have successfully attended the BSc or MSc semantics lecture, or have acquired an equivalent knowledge about formal semantics (at least predicate logic, preferrably Montague Grammar) elsewhere.