Philosophy of Language

Several members of the Department of Philosophy are actively involved in philosophy of language. Our topics include modality, conditionals, events, tense and aspect, speech acts, implicit content and presupposition, as well as foundational questions in the theory of meaning, and in its relation to cognitive science. Seminars in these areas are offered regularly at the undergraduate and graduate level. There is also regular collaboration with linguists in seminars, reading groups, dissertation committees, and experimental projects.  Faculty working in the area:

The department regularly offers advanced undergraduate courses and graduate seminars covering many topics in philosophy of language and semantics. Students interested in semantics also benefit from interactions with the rich language community at Maryland, and especially the linguistics department.  

Recent graduate courses in this area:

• Conditionals and Conditional Reasoning (Santorio, 2021)
• Representation of Language: Philosophical Issues in a Chomskyan Linguistics (Rey, 2021) 
• Modality: Themes and variations on force and flavor (Hacquard and Goodhue, 2021)
• Issues in Semantics (Hacquard, 2021)
• The Modal Future (Cariani, 2021)
• Pragmatics (Williams, 2020)
• Semantics (Williams, 2020)
• Counterfactuals between Probability and Semantics (Santorio, 2020)
• Modal Logic (Pacuit, 2019)
• Thematic relations in grammar, acquisition and processing (Williams, with E. Lau and J. Lidz, 2019)