Record. I'm assuming that all of you are okay if I'm recorded. Your questions might be recorded

as well but typically not that much. Right, so we've done all the admin-y stuff. Are there any

questions that have surfaced over the break? Yes, I have a question and I think it's perfect to start

the recording with because I remember the course being 5 ECTS and now it's 2.5. So what has changed

in the course curriculum and can we benefit from the material of the previous semester like with

the 5 ECTS? The materials is in the recording so the theory stuff is already there but that's going

to be kind of the core of this. So basically we had a theory lab thing which was two lectures

per week. Typically the Tuesday was the theory lecture and the Thursday was the we're going to

get our hands dirty to get their lab lecture and we're not changing much. We're just giving the

lab a new and official lame and making it 5 ECTS. So this is only the theory part. The other part

stays essentially the same. Hopefully better organized this time because it's less spontaneous.

Does that answer your question? I couldn't quite hear that. I'll take that as a yes. Any more

questions? That does not seem to be the case so I would like to kind of start with a general

introduction of what this is about. What this course is about and it's about natural language

and its meaning. Probably everybody of you has the feeling oh I know what language means and so

the first part of this course is I would like to raise a little bit more of a scientific awareness

of what the meaning of language might be and that it's not as trivial as you might think.

The kind of technical name for what we're doing is natural language semantics, the meaning of

natural language. So I'll probably just first give you a definition of what semantics is and

philosophically or generically it's semantics is the study of reference or meaning or truth.

And now of course you can ask yourselves what are they? So here's kind of the official definitions.

So the first word reference is that we take a word and that refers to something. The word

FAU refers to something. Now when I say sign and so on in the interpreter and so on that's kind of

the full thing of it. A sign is kind of like a word but it could also be a letter,

so something you write to the wall or other kinds of signs, something you type into the computer

or something I say to you in the spoken language or something I write here or maybe a very expressive

movement in a dance or in music or a scene in the film, all of those are kind of signs that are

supposed to mean something, to refer to something. So anything that can refer to something else in

the mind of something, an agent, is a sign and it refers to something. That's another question

ideally in the world out there. I'll tell you something about the building over there with this

funny circuit board like wallpaper or whatever it is. That is a sign and refers to an object in the world.

Now another thing is the sign Michael Kohlhaase

refers to an object in the world, this one. If you compare that to say the sign Odysseus,

we're starting to have problems.

We're starting to have problems.

What's the problem with this?

Oh Odysseus certainly is not an object in the world. There might be some bones left over but

probably not and we don't really know whether it actually is fictional or not. So it refers to

something maybe not in the physical world, maybe in the world of our imagination because we've all

had to kind of pretend to read Homer in high school. Those kinds of things.

So it refers to something which might be something a reference in the world or in some

imagined world or impossible world or becomes murky and interesting there.

Meaning is really what a sign refers to. Semantics is about meaning and of course truth. We are very

much obsessed with if somebody says something whether that's true or false.

If I say Peter, love, and Mary and we know both of them then that might be true or not.

Or even somewhat true or something like this. So truth is going to be something important.

If you want to try and write this down it becomes very difficult but somehow it has to do

with reality. The world around us and being true in that. Which of course has some problems as well.

If you think about

the Riemann conjecture which is something about the zeros of the zeta function in math.