Linguistic Semantics as Science

本项目的目标是创建一门大二水平的本科课程，向来自不同背景的学生介绍语言语义学的原理和结果。本课程的核心是一个软件“工作簿”，在一个交互式的图形环境中呈现材料。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的关系（形态学和句法），它与心理表征系统的关系（认知），以及意义和用法之间的相互作用。本课程的目标是向学生揭示我们作为母语使用者的能力背后复杂的内部规则和原则的内部系统，让他们体验到发现这些原则并努力以精确的方式阐述它们所带来的一些智力上的兴奋，并鼓励他们探索计算机作为我们如何，作为人类，思考和理解。这项工作的结果将在向本科生介绍科学推理原理方面具有重要价值，在帮助那些不考虑科学专业或广泛的科学选修课的学生方面具有重要价值，并有助于培养对认知科学的兴趣和跨学科探索。

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.