PLIN3004/PLING218 Advanced Semantic Theory Lecture Notes: Week 1

1 Truth-Conditional Semantics
This course (PLIN3004/PLING218 Advanced Semantic Theory) is an introduction to formal
semantics. Formal semanticists study natural language semantics using formal/mathematical
tools and techniques. It has its roots in philosophy and logic, which study formal/mathematical/logical
languages such as Propositional Logic and Predicate Logic. The central tenet of formal seman-
tics is to treat natural languages on a par with such formal languages.
In Lecture 1 we review the concept of truth-condition (which you must have learned in other
semantics/pragmatics modules). The aspect of meaning pertinent to truth-conditions, or the
truth-conditional meaning, is what we focus on in this course. It corresponds to what is often
called the ‘literal meaning’.
Note that this is not to deny the existence of other types of meaning that natural language is
capable of expressing, or to suggest that such meanings are not amenable to the approach we
adopt here. We ignore non-truth-conditional meanings due to the limited time.
One of the reasons why we focus on truth-conditional meanings is because our intuitions
about them are relatively clear. The clarity of data is very important for us, as we want to build
a theory of natural language semantics and test it against empirical data. If the data are unclear,
we can’t learn much from them.
A particularly important fact about truth-conditions is that you, as a native speaker of English
(or any other language, for that matter), know the truth-conditions of any declarative sentence in
English (or whatever language you are a native speaker of). Let us state this fact as follows: For
any grammatical declarative sentence, a native speaker has truth-conditional intuitions about
it, i.e. he or she knows in what situations it is true and in what situations it is false.
Admittedly, sometimes your intuitions might not be very clear. For example, when is “There
are many tall buildings in this city” true and when is it false? But, if you are given the
sentence and a particular situation, you (often) can tell whether the sentence is true or false.
Throughout this term we primarily look at sentences for which your truth-conditional intuitions
are particularly clearcut.
Here is an example illustrating the fact that you have truth-conditional intuitions.

(1) There is a circle in a square.

If you are given a situation depicted below, you know that the sentence is true.

On the other hand, in the following situation, the sentence is false.

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 Of course these are not the only situations that you should consider, and in fact there are
infinitely many situations where the sentence in (1) is true and infinitely many situations where
it is false. However, it is not difficult to see that the sentence in (1) is true in any situation where
there is a circle and there is a square and the circle is in the square, and and is false in any
situations where there isn’t a circle in a square. We take this to be a good characterization of
the truth-condition of the sentence. We will state the truth-conditions of various sentences in a
similar manner.
Because writing such lengthy statements all the time would be too cumbersome, we usually
abbreviate truth-conditions using ‘iff’ (short for ‘if and only if’). For example, we write the
truth-condition of (1) as follows:

(2) “There is a circle in a square” is true iff there is a circle in a square.

More generally, the truth-condition of any declarative sentence φ can be written as:

(3) “φ” is true iff φ.

This might look trivial but it is not. In particular, it is important to distinguish the object
language—which is the language we study—and metalanguage—which is the language we
use to state our analysis. The sentence in “ ” in the above statement is part of the object language,
while the rest belongs to the metalanguage. In our examples so far, we are using English both as
our object language and as our metalanguage, so the truth-conditions deceivingly look trivial,
but consider the following Czech sentence instead:

(4) Vlk zmrzl, zhltl hrst zrn.

Suppose your job as a semanticist is to figure out the truth-condition of this sentence. You ask
your native speaker informants, and find out that the speakers judge it to be true whenever there
is a wolf that froze and swallowed a handful of grains. Then, your analysis of the sentence can
be stated as:

(5) “Vlk zmrzl, zhltl hrst zrn” is true iff a wolf froze and swallowed a handful of grains.

As you can see, this is not at all trivial, because it can be a correct or incorrect description of
the truth-condition of the sentence.
We take truth-conditional intuitions to be part of the native speaker’s linguistic knowledge,
on a par with other linguistic intuitions like grammaticality judgments. One of the primary
questions in formal semantics is how the truth-conditional intuitions arise.
What is particularly important here is the fact that native speakers have truth-conditional
intuitions about all grammatical declarative sentences. This is important because it entails that
it’s impossible to simply memorise all pairs of declarative sentences and their truth-conditions,
because there would be infinitely many pairs to memorise, which is not possible!! Rather, there
must be a finite mechanism that computes the truth-conditions of arbitrarily complex sentences.

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 One goal of formal semantics is to develop a finite semantic system that computes the truth-
conditions of all grammatical declarative sentences in a given natural language. We’ll start with
a rather simple system in the next lecture, and gradually enrich it as we go along. In doing so,
we learn interesting properties of natural language semantics.

2 Set Theory
Formal semantics uses various logical and mathematical concepts, and you need to be familiar
with them. Here we review set theory.
• A set is a collection of objects.
– A set containing z, 9, $ and nothing else is written t z, 9, $ u.
– Sets are defined by their members (alt.: elements). The members are not ordered.
So, t z, 9, $ u “ t 9, z, $ u “ t $, 9, 9, z, 9, z, 9 u
– The set with no members t u is called the empty set and written H.
– A set can contain another set (including the empty set), e.g. t z, H, t 10, 3 u u.
– The size of the set A is called the cardinality of A and written |A|.
e.g. | t 3, a, H u | “ 3, | t 7, H, John, t a, 1 u , $ u | “ 5
• Two ways of defining sets
– Extensional definition (enumeration): Put tu around the members, e.g. t d, 1, H, Bill u.
Sets with infinite members cannot be defined this way.
– Intensional definition (abstraction): Use a variable and state the conditions for the mem-
bership, e.g. t x | x is an even number u (« the set of x’s such that x is an even num-
ber). Sometimes : is used in place of |. The variable name does not matter, e.g.
t x | x is a natural number u “ t y | y is a natural number u “ N.
• Relations among sets
– If every member of A is also a member of B, we say A is a subset of B and write A Ď B.
Notice for any set A, A Ď A.
– H is a subset of every set, including H itself.
– A and B are equivalent (written A “ B) iff A Ď B and B Ď A.
– If A Ď B and A ‰ B, we say A is a proper subset of B and write A Ă B.
– The set of all subsets of a set A is called its power set, ℘pAq (or sometimes ‘PowpAq’)
e.g. ℘pt a, b uq “ t H, t a u , t b u , t a, b u u
• Useful operations on sets
– Intersection: A X B “ t x | x P A and x P B u
– Union: A Y B “ t x | x P A or x P B u
– Set subtraction/Relative complementation: A ´ B “ t x | x P A and x R B u