This course provides an introduction to the goals and methods of formal semantics, and to some of the core empirical phenomena and questions that drive contemporary research in this area. Topics to be addressed include patterns of inference (entailment vs. implicature vs. presupposition), compositionality and the syntax-semantics interface, ambiguity, intensionality and subjectivity. Topics will be explored through lectures, readings (available online) and problem sets. Some previous exposure to linguistics will be helpful, especially basic concepts in syntax (constituent structure, well-formedness conditions), as will experience with basic concepts of set theory and logic.