Let’s Talk About Frodo: Foundations of the Semantics of Fiction

About

Providing a semantic theory that applies to both serious and fictional uses of language is challenging. Fiction is about pretence, or make-believe: when we produce or interpret a fictional text, we typically read fictional statements as if they were true by imagining a fictional world. A good semantics of fiction should model how this pretence component operates both at the sentential level (what is "truth in the fiction" as opposed to truth simpliciter?) and at the level of reference (what is the semantic contribution of a fictional name as opposed to a real name?). This course will take students into the very active and growing area of research today concerned with providing a good semantics of fiction. This field contains many open problems. It is essentially interdisciplinary (at the intersection of philosophy of language, formal linguistics, logic and literary studies) and it questions the foundations of our best semantic theories.

Course leader

Merel Semeijn and Louis Rouillé

Target group

Students

Fee info