Formal Diachronic Semantics (In Hebrew And Other Languages)

The course seeks to bring together two sub-disciplines within linguistics: historical linguistics and formal semantics. Both of these sub-disciplines have evolved from distant intellectual fields: the first comes from the philological world, while the second has its origins in the world of mathematical logic. Recently, there has been a rapprochement between these fields dealing mostly with the study of changes of meaning, grammaticalization and reanalysis. This course aims to examine the research paradigms that attempt to integrate them and explore new methodologies for building bridges between them. The course will focus on examples from Hebrew, but there is no requirement of Hebrew, and studies and examples from many other languages will be provided as well. 

M W 3:00pm-4:20pm