The goal of this course is to expand students’ understanding of the empirical domain and techniques in formal semantics and to develop the skills to do independent semantic analysis. The semantic system that we will develop has two central tenets. First, following the long tradition initiated by logicians like Frege, Tarski, Carnap and Montague, it aims at developing a truth conditional semantic system, one where the meaning of a sentence is determined by stating the conditions under which it is true in the world. Second, the semantic system that we will develop is compositional, i.e. it determines a systematic procedure that allows us to obtain the meaning of each sentence from the meaning of its parts. In the first half of the course we will learn standard formal tools which we will then apply and develop during the second half to a analyze a range of empirical phenomena, including adjectival modification, quantifiers and (in)definites, pronouns, etc.