Linguistic Semantics as Science

这个项目的目标是创建一门二年级的本科课程，向来自不同背景的学生介绍语言语义学的原理和结果。本课程的核心是一本软件“练习册”，它在交互式、图形化的环境中展示材料。课程和练习册涉及意义的各个方面，包括它与单词和句子形式(词法和句法)的关系，它与心理表征系统(认知)的关系，以及意义和使用之间的相互作用。这门课程的目标是向学生揭示内部规则和原则的复杂内部系统，这些规则和原则是我们作为母语使用者能力的基础，让他们体验到发现这些原则并努力以准确的方式表达这些原则所带来的智力兴奋，并鼓励他们探索计算机，将其作为我们作为人类如何思考和理解的模型。这项工作的结果将对向本科生介绍科学推理的原理，接触到不考虑科学专业或广泛的科学选修课的学生，以及帮助培养对认知科学的兴趣和跨学科探索具有重要价值。

The goal of this project is to create a sophomore-level undergraduate course introducing students from a wide variety of backgrounds to the principles and results of linguistic semantics. The heart of this course is a software "workbook" that presents the material in an interactive, graphic environment. The course and workbook address various aspects of meaning, including its relation to word and sentence form (morphology & syntax), its relation to systems of mental representation (cognition), and the interaction between meaning and use. The goals of the course are to reveal to students the complex internal system of internal rules and principles that underlie our abilities as native language speakers, to let them experience some of the intellectual excitement that comes with discovering such principles and struggling to formulate them in a precise way, and to encourage them to explore the computer as a model of how we, as human beings, think and understand. The results of this work will be of significant value in introducing undergraduates to the principles of scientific reasoning, in reaching students not otherwise considering science majors or extensive science electives, and in helping to foster interest and interdisciplinary exploration in the cognitive sciences.