As a general text book I recommend
Lycan, William G. (2000), Philosophy of Language, Routledge Contemporary Introductions to Philosophy, Routledge, London.
In the following I list texts I am focusing on in my eight lectures. For more literature check the reading list at the faculty website.
1. Frege: Sense and reference
Frege, Gottlob (1892), Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 100, 25-50, reprinted in Funktion, Begriff, Bedeutung, Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, Göttingen, 1975, Günther Patzig (ed.), 40-65, various English translations:, usually as On sense and Meaning
2. Proper Names: Description and Cluster Theories
Searle, John (1958), Proper names, Mind 67, 166-73, available online
3. Kripke on Proper Names
Kripke, Saul: Naming and Necessity, Oxford: Blackwell, and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980, various reprints. The 1980 edition is an enlarged version of the original 1972 version.
4. Propositional attitude reports & natural kind terms
Kripke, Saul, ‘A puzzle about belief’ in A. Margalit (ed.). Meaning and Use. (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979), 239-283.
Putnam, Hilary, “The Meaning of Meaning,” in Mind, Language and Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
Gareth Evans, ‘The Causal Theory of Names’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 47 (1973), pp. 187–208.
5. Quine on analyticity
Quine, Willars V. ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, Philosophical Review 60 (1951), p20-43; repr. in From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953, 20-46.
6. The truth and nothing but the truth
The account of the liar paradox I have given involved the norm function. This comes from Raymond Smullyan, ‘Languages in which self reference is possible’, Journal of Symbolic Logic 22 (1957), 55–67
7. Tarski on truth
Tarski, Alfred. ‘The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4 (1944), p 341-75; repr. in L. Linsky (ed.) Semantics and the Philosophy of Language, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1952.
8. Tarski and deflationism
Field, Hartry (1972), ‘Tarski’s theory of truth’, Journal of Philosophy 69, 347–375.