Scribd
Upload
115 views17 pages

Semantics Introduction

semantics introduction

Uploaded by

وائل الصاوي
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF or read online on Scribd
115 views17 pages

Semantics Introduction

semantics introduction

Uploaded by

وائل الصاوي
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF or read online on Scribd
3 Semantics or Why Don’t Spaniards Watch Blue Movies? 3.1 The Function of Lexemes Chapter 2 dealt with the word, with its origins. But it said nothing of the function of the word, of the lexeme. Without a function a word is a mere sequence of sounds, just as a red light would be little more than decoration if it did not indicate to drivers that they should stop (or indicate whatever a red light in a ‘red light district’ indicates!}. So what is the function of a word, of a lexeme? In the sentence The daughter of the terrorist has been caught we can identify two distinct types of word. While we can tell somebody what a daughter or a terrorist is, we cannot tell them what a ‘the’ or an ‘of’ is, for while the words daughter and terrorist denote something in the real world, the words the and of do nol. What these latter words do is serve the others in some way, the by specifying, of by indicating a relationship. Daughter and terrorist are content words; the and of are function words. One can draw a parallel with an algebraic expression like 3y + 2z; the and the can be likened to content words in that they are symbols that represent something substantial, while the symbol <+> can be likened to a function word - it represents the function of addition in much the same way as the function word and indicates summation, The use of content words changes as society changes but the use of function words is much more stable; nouns and verbs may come and go for various reasons but we rarely have reason to change articles and prepositions. In this chapter our attention will be focused on content words. Function words belong rather to the field of syntax. 21 Semantics 23 and spaniels but not foxes and wolves. We have to reach a com- promise between having on the one hand an unmanageable array of categories and on the other insufficient precision. The trade-off between manageability and precision clearly depends on how precise one has to be. Arabs may need to be able to make finer distinctions between different types of came!s and different types of horses than we do. It has often been claimed that Eskimos have many more words than we do to identify different types of snow, although it is now widely accepted that this claim has been greatly exaggerated. 1am in no position to judge as 1 do not speak an Eskimo language. I do, however, speak Danish fairly well and in the Danish novel Freken Smillas fornentmelse for sne by Peter Hoeg (1992) the eponymous narrator, an expert on ice who was born in Greenland, refers, for example, to ganik, defining it as fine-grained powdery snow, and to pirluk, defining it as light snow. Similarly, those who specialise in a particular sphere of activity need to make finer distinctions in that sphere than others do. For most of us the word horse and a few others like mare and fon! are all that we need to be able to talk about horses, but those involved in horse racing need such terms as filly, yearling and gelding. We could, of course, refer to anything, if only by using what seems more like a dictionary definition than a lexeme; we could denote a filly using the phrase young mare. But the more significant an object or concept is to a community, the greater the tendency to lexicalise the label used to denote it, to have a more succinet term. The divisions that we draw in order to define our categories are very haphazard. In English we use the same verb, play, to denote the very different activities of a child amusing himself with his toys and a pianist performing at a concert. And yet the person who supervises a cricket match is given a different name to that given to the supervisor of a faotball match, the one being an umpire and the other a referee. When we eat lambs we call the meat lanth but when we eat calves we use a different word for the meat: veal, We distin- guish between roofs and ceilings but Spaniards do not; they use fecha for both. On the other hand Spaniards distinguish between an inter- nal corner (rineén) and an external corner (esquina) while we do not. The arbitrariness is clearly likely to be alll the greater where there is little natural distinctiveness in the subject area concerned. It is fairly clear cut what is and what is not an egg. But how big does a hill have to be before it is a mountain? How big does a village have 24 An Introduction to Linguistics to be before it is a town? How big does a stream have to be before it isa river? The more arbitrary the division, the less reason there is for different languages to make divisions at the same points; thus, for example, the Spanish word puebio equates to a large village or a small town. What we call a river can be denoted by either fleute or riviere in French, the general view being that the former flows into the sea while the latter flows into another river. Sweden also has two types of river, an iifv and and, the former being larger than the latter. Moreover, Swedes use a third word, flod, to denote a river outside of Scandinavia. The colour spectrum would appear to be a prime example of arbi- trary division. Russian has two equivalents of blue: rony6oi and cummii, The Welsh word glas equates to blue but also overlaps with green, as it also denotes the colour of grass. According to Berlin and Kay, however, colour terminology is not random for a study by them suggested a fairly universal hierarchy of terminology: If a language only has two colour terms they will, they claimed, be based on black and white; if it has three they will be based on black, white and red. The next distinction will be green or yellow, and so on (Berlin and Kay, 1969). The set of items that we identify by means of a word or lexeme is the semantic range of that word or lexeme. Such sets may be grouped with others with which they share a common feature to form a semantic field. Thus the semantic range of the English word red is that part of the colour spectrum that we denate with this word, a range considerably more restricted than that of the corresponding term in a language that distinguishes only three colours. The range of red together with that of the other colour terms can be referred to as the semantic field of colour. 3.4 The Definition of Semantic Range Presented with a colour chart or a box of paints we can, barring colour blindness, select a colour that most people would accept as being red. But there may be disagreement about whether something, is red or orange. Similarly, few of us would deny that a crow is a bird for it is and does what we expect a bird to be and do: it has two legs and feathers, it flies, it builds a nest and it lays eggs. But there are birds that do not fly and there are creatures such as bats that do fly Semantics 25 animal ! mammal ee cat _ dog ~ wolf \ poodle terrier ~~ spaniel Figure 3.1 but are not birds, creatures such as snakes that lay eggs but are not birds. Thus we need a way of determining the boundaries of the semantic range of the words red, bird or any other word if we are to be able to judge when it is appropriate to use it. We can define the English county of East Sussex either by saying which other counties surround it (West Sussex, Kent, and so on) or by saying which second-tier authorities it encompasses (Eastbourne, Wealden, and so on). Similarly, we can define a word in terms of what it is not or in terms of what it sabsumes. Thus we can define the range of the word dag either by saying that it is any animal that is not a wolf, a cat, a goat, and so on or by saying that it is any animal that is either a poodle, a terrier, a spaniel, and so on. We can be assisted in this by a hierarchical diagram like Figure 3.1. Such a relationship between words whereby more specific terms are arranged under their more general superordinate terms is known as hyponymy. The word poodle is a hyponym of the word dog, which in turn is a hyponym of the word manunal, and so on. One can compare this arrangement to the natural history classifications by class, ordes, family, genus and species; the dog and the wolf both belong to the genus Canis, the dog being the Canis fmitiaris and the wolf the Canis jupus. The hyponyms of a word define its semantic range. A super- ordinate like mammal ot animal can serve to designate a semantic field. Complications can, however, arise. Firstly, as Figure 3.2 shows, we may ascribe different meanings to a word with the result that that word appears at different points on the diagram; we use the word 26 An Introduction to Linguistics mammal cat dog, dog. bitch, Figure 3.2 dog to indicate gender as well as to denote the species in general. Secondly, we cannot put dag and bitch alongside poodle, terrier and spaniel as hyponyms of dog, for while being a poodle precludes being a spaniel it does not preclude being a bitch; we are dealing with another dimension. Love can be presented as a hyponym of emotion. But is it an immediate hyponym or is there something else in between? Roget's Thesaurus, which adopts a hierarchical arrange- ment like hyponymy, has love as a hyponym of sympathetic affections, which in turn is a hyponym of affections. How docs love relate to loyalty ox desire? Are they related? If so, are they all on the same level or is one a hyponym of another? Clearly some fields lend themselves to arrangement by hyponymy more than others do. Similarly, componential analysis, which defines the range of a word in terms of the presence or absence of particular components, is more easily applied to some fields than to others. Words denoting family relationship lend themselves to such a binary approach; words like daughter, son and mother denote either a male person or a female person, either an earlier generation or a later generation, and so on. In Figure 3.3 the ranges of the words sunt, mother, son and daughter are defined by giving each one a positive sign or a negative sign in respect of maleness, previous generation and relationship by birth. This is enough to give each word a unique range. What components would one identify to define the range of the word terrorist? There is no predetermined system of categories; one keeps identifying distinguishing components until one has a set unique to each word unless one believes that one is dealing with true synonyms or that the difference is one of style, formality, attitude, and so on rather than denotation, Terrorists are people who Semantics 27 Male Previous Related by generation birth Aunt - + - Mother - + + Son + - + Daughter - - + Figure 3.3 use force to achieve a certain aim. But then the same could be said of soldiers and bank robbers. So what other components can we adduce to distinguish between them? Perhaps +authorized for soldiers and ~authorized for terrorists in so far as soldiers operate within a framework established by their government whereas terrorists do not. Perhaps +political for terrorists and —political for bank robbers, thereby reflecting the aims of their actions. The semantic range of a word can be defined with the assistance of another word that means the same thing, 4 synonym, or a word that means the opposite, an antonym. Thus it can help us to use the word large if we know that it means much the same as the word big or that it means the opposite of the word small. Due in large part to the overlay of Norman French onto Old English, the English language has an extensive vocabulary. From Old English, for example, we have the word Iride and from Old French we have the word conceal. We can say He was determined to hide the fruth and Fe was determined to conceal the truth. Thus, as we can use either in this sentence, we might call the words hide and conceal synonyms. But if we try to replace hide by conceal in the sentence He was determined to hide we find that we do not get a satisfactory sentence, the reason being that, unlike hide, conceal cannot serve as an intransitive verb, cannot, that is, be used without an accompanying object. Thus the two words are not complete syno- nyms as they cannot substitute for each other in all circumstances. In this case the difference was one of syntax. In the case of the words high and tall there is a difference of reference; both may be used to qualify buildings but only ial? can be used to refer to the height (!) of people. In the case of antonyms we have to consider different types of relationship. The words tal! and short are opposites, antonyms, as 28 Aut Introduction to Linguistics are the words alive and dead. There is, however, a fundamental difference between these two pairs, for while one person can be shoster than another, one person. cannot be more dead than another; thus faf! and short ate termed gradable antonyms and alive and dead are termed complementary antoayms. Different again are pairs like uy and sell which denote, for example, two facets of an action; these are converse terms. When looking at antonyms we should note that a word can have different antonyms in different contexts; while the opposite of a short person is a tall person, the opposite of a short talk is not ‘a tall zwaik Context, indeed, plays a very important part in the definition of the meaning of words. If somebody tells us that a chair is yellow we think of a particular colour; if they tell us that a man is yellow we may think of cowardice. If they tell us that the chair is comfortable we understand that we would feel relaxed if we sat on it, but if we are told that a man is comfortable we are unlikely to conclude that it would be relaxing to sit on him. The meaning of the word bartk becomes clear when it is preceded by either savings or gravel. The context, then, can do much to determine the meaning of a word. It can, indeed, result in a different word being used; is there any substantial difference between what a referee and an umpire do or is the choice of word solely dependent on the sport that he or she supervises? Some linguists have concluded that one knows a word by the company that it keeps U. R. Firth) or that the meaning of a word is its use in the language (Ludwig, Wittgenstein). 3.5 Collocation and Idiom When a word becomes closely associated with a particular context to the exclusion of other words with a similar meaning such that they form what is almost a set phrase, we have what linguists call collocation. From a logical point of view we could perhaps refer to a *conpplete moon but we don’t, we refer toa fill moor. White coffee is not white and black coffee is not black; it would seem that whife and black are being used to indicate polarity rather than to give an accurate indication of colour. In this way Catalans refer to white wine (vi blanc) and black wine (@i hegre — not to be confused with vinagre!). If something is not far away a Catalan might refer to the 30 Ant tntraduction ta Linguistics espagnole). If a Spaniard thinks that a person is acting dumb he may say that he is making himself the Swede (se ttace ef sueco) 3.6 Homonymy and Polysemy As we have seen, for convenience we force a uniformity on the world around us. The word dag can denote quite different animals. The word lamb can denote an animal or a dish. A person’s body can similarly be alive or dead. The word play can denote the activity of a pianist and that of a child. Thus the question arises of how extensive the semantic range of a word or lexeme has to be before we feel that we are dealing with two separate words that have the same form rather than with one word that denotes a variety of things, In the case of lamb we can consider the animal and the dish to be different referents of the one lexeme. In the case of sound in the sense of something that one hears and soitnd in the sense of a narrow stretch of water, on the other hand, we are likely to consider that we are dealing with two distinct lexemes that happen to have the same form. In the case of one lexeme with a variety of referents we have an example of polysemy. Two or more lexemes with the same form are homonyms. Lexemes may be alike to the ear but not to the eye, as with meet and meat, in which case they may be referred to as homophones. Conversely they may look alike but sound different in which case they may be referred to as homographs; examples are wind denoting a current of air and wind denoting tortuous move- ment. Unlike polysemic items, texicographers will treat homonyms as different items, giving each one the status of a separate headword, As so often, however, the real world does not fall neatly into our categories, Introducing language in the medium of language, the linguist encounters the problem of defining semantic range when talking of semantics! There can be little doubt that in the case of the two referents of the word sowd that we referred to we are dealing with different lexemes; one is of Latin origin and the other is of Germanic origin. So, too, the word bill denoting an account or invoice and that denoting the beak of a bird must be deemed to be different lexemes, the former, a cognate of the French word billet, being of Latin origin and the latter being of Germanic origin. But we also have a word bili denoting a kind of axe, which may be related 32 An introduction to Linguisties we come to distinguish between a terrorist and a freedom fighter our distinctions are likely to be founded to a much greater extent on our attitudes towards the cause for which the people concerned are fighting; the same person may well be called a terrorist by an opponent and a freedont fighter by a sympathizer. Somebody's tenacious behaviour might be called stubborn or obstinate by those who are obstructed by this behaviour, while sympathizers might call it determined or resolute. As we considered with the word dbiend, do we attempt to account for the difference as a componential feature, in this case perhaps -good and +good, or does it constitute a different dimension? Our attitudes towards some things may be so strong thal we are reluctant to refer to them directly. A word that we are loathe to use may be called a taboo word and its more acceptable substitute may be called a euphemism. In this way Americans are reluctant to refer to a farmyard bird as a cock because of its association with the male genitals (note the inoffensive phrase used by the author!) and they use the word rooster instead. We can differentiate between Kill, murder and assassinate by tefer- ence to such components as +intentional and +political, but what components can we adduce to differentiate between kill and do in? Here again the difference might be seen to lie in another dimension, in this case on an axis of formality. When in the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw the flowergirl Liza Doolittle, her speech not yet perfected by the phonetician Henry Higgins, says ‘it’s my belief they done the old woman in’ it is not only what she says that arouses some consternation but also how she says it, the register that she uses. Words, then, do more than identify things in the world around us. Ogden and Richards gave what they referred to as a representative tist of the main definitions of meaning, that list ranging from ‘An Intrinsic property’ to That to which the Interpreter of a symbol (a) Refers (b) Believes himself to be referring (c) Believes the User to be referring’ (Ogden and Richards, 1985, pp. 186-7). Geotfrey Leech presents a simpler breakdown of meaning into seven aspects (Leech, 1974, pp. 10-23). The first is the fundamental denotative — or, as Leech refers to it, the conceptual - meaning, that which defines the meaning of a lexeme in terms of its constituent features, Thus, to use the componential analysis introduced in Semantics 33 section 3.4, the conceptual meaning of the lexeme woman can be defined in terms of such properties as +human, -male and +adult. Here, then, we are dealing with a direct link between word and thing. But, as we observed in section 3.2, the intermediary of the human mind often affects the nature of the semantic range of a lexeme. Different people, having been subjected to different experiences in life, have different mental images when they hear a lexeme. When different people hear the lexeme woman such qualities as beauty, compassion, practicality and emotion will feature with differing relative significance. Moreover, the relative significance of features will change as society changes; the association of housewife is much less prevalent in our society than it was fifty years ago. Such association is called connetative meaning by Leech. A lexeme may be more appropriate in a particular style. To draw from Leech’s examples again, cast is associated with literary style while chuck is colloquial. This is stylistic meaning. Shut up in the sense of being quiet similarly has stylistic meaning, being colloquial, but in so far as it is indicative of a disrespectful attitude on the part of the speaker it also has affective meaning. Our response to one sense of a lexeme may be affected by another sense of that lexeme. We can, for example, scarcely use the word gay in its older sense of merry as it now invokes homosexuality. This is reflected meaning. Lexemes may have a collocative meaning, requiring that they are used together with certain other lexemes but not with others. As we saw in section 3.5, collocation may be so restrictive that we can gue: which word will follow a given word, an example being blond. Finally Leech refers to thematic meaning, to the emphasis that attaches to a lexeme as the result of the speaker's choice of grammatical structure or his use of stress; if in saying the sentence John broke the vase the speaker stresses the name Jolin we understand that the question to ve resolved was who broke the vase, whereas if he stresses the word vase we understand that the question was what it was that John broke, 3.8 Pragmatics In section 2.1 we saw that a unit of meaning can be as small as a morpheme and as large as an idiom. Here we extend the range to include whole sentences. The speaker of the sentence The daughter of 4 Aut Inireduciion to Linguistics the terrorist has been caught might, for example, be simply conveying information, but he might also be suggesting that there is now an opportunity to exert some pressure on the terrorist, Like an idiom, then, @ sentence may have a meaning that is only conveyed by the whole. What did you say? may simply mean that the speaker did not heat, but it could also be a challenge to repeat something that will not find favour. Du you have @ spare biro? couid constitute an offer of a biro, a request for a biro or simply a request for information. Here, too, context clearly provides support, as may intonation. We have now entered the field of linguistic study that is called pragmatics. We communicate more than we say explicitly. This disparity between what we intend t» communicate and what we actually say is central to pragmatics. It is bridged by what the speaker implies and what the listener infers on the basis of shared knowledge, shared assumptions and the context of the utterance. If a man at a party has no easy means of getting home and a woman says that she has got a car, she may be offering him a lift. If so, making the offer entails a number of what may be called implicatares or presuppositions. She is implying that she is able and willing to drive the man home, that the car is nearby, that it is not broken down, that she has time to go by way of his place, and so on. The woman might, of course, be letting others know that she does not need a lift or even gloating about the fact that she is in a better situation than the man. But we tend to assume that other people are being helpful. As Paut Grice puts it, a co-operative principle tends to apply. He developed four maxims to take account of how we facilitate communication by being co-operative. A maxim of quality is based on the tendency for an utterance to be true; the man would assume thai the woman does indeed have a car A maxim of quantity reflects the tendency for the amount of information given to be appropriate; the offer of a lift would not be clear if the woman said that she has a ten-year-old red Volvo. A maxim of relevance reflects the inclination for the man to assume that what the woman said was relevant to his situation. And in accordance with a maxim of manner, information is usually presented in an orderly fashion. By allowing us to take certain things for granted, then, the assumption of co-operation allows us to say less than woutd otherwise be necessary. Context is a major source of supplementary information. Hearing wR Semantics 3% What did you say? from a frail old man, we are likely to infer that he has not heard what we said. Hearing it from a young man holding an iron bar we might infer that we are in a potentially violent situation, So, too, proximity between speaker and listener minimises what has to be explicitly said. An utterance like That shop over there is where I bought the pork yesterday only works if the speaker and listener are together. Without the common reference points of time and space more information would have to be given: something like Te butcher's shop in Richmond Street is where I bought the pork on Tuesday 25 April, Even this might leave one wondering which town and which year was being referred to. Proximity in this sense is generally a matter of shared knowledge. If the speaker and the listener have common acquaintances the speaker might be able to say I met Anne in the buicher’s; if not, he might need to use an expanded utterance like I met a friend of mine, Anne Richards, in the butcher’s. If a commu nication is between people with different cultural backgrounds, then much more might have to be explicitly stated if the communication is to succeed. We are likely to interpret in two very different ways notices on the door of a buicher’s shop which say Sorry, no rabbils and Sorry, no dogs. As we do not eat dogs we assume that the second of these two notices is telling us that, for reasons of hygiene, we are not allowed to take a dog into the shop. Somebody from a very different cultural background might, however, assume that the butcher was apologising for having run out of dog meat. Knowledge might, then, be shared by virtue of the immediate situation or common experience. Alternatively, it might have been introduced earlier in the discourse; just as you can refer to somebody by she if you can point to her, so, too, you can refer to somebody by she if that person has just been referred to more explicitly earlier in the conversation. The extent of the knowledge shared by speaker and listener determines the amount of explicit information required. If the listener does not know Anne Richards we might need to refer to her dog, by saying the dog of my friend Anne Richards. If the listener does know her, if he knows that she has a dog and if that dog has just been mentioned, the speaker can refer to her dog by saying nothing more than if. On a scale in between we have such forms as Anne Richards’ dog, Anne's dog and her dog. At the end of the scale where we find if we are dealing with items that are referentially so vague that they are useless without sub- 36 An Introduction to Linguistics stantial contextual information. Here we are in the field of deixis, a deictic item being an item which has very little referential force without the support of context. As we have seen, the amount of contextual support required by the items on the above scale varies; as a result, it is arguable what is to be considered deictic and what is not. Possessive adjectives like the her in ker dog are considered to be deictic. But then there are many Annes in the world. And presu- mably there is more than one Anne Richards, Pronouns like i and she are, then, highly deictic. Having similar teference to pronouns, possessive adjectives are, as we have just seen, also deictic. So, too, are demonstrative adjectives like this. The definite article is also considered to be deictic for we need the context to know which dog the phrase the dog refers to. Aiso highly deictic are adverbs or adverbial phrases like there and fast week; ina sentence like She went there last week we do not know where there is or when last week is without reference points, spatial and temporal respectively. T€ we are to investigate the intention and the context of utterances it is useful to attempt a categorisation of utterances by function, by speech act. One basic distinction is that between statements, often called declarative utterances, questions (interrogative utterances), and requests or commands (imperative or directive utterances). We may be able to distinguish these by their syntax. A statement typically has the word order subject-verb-object, as in He shuts the door, a question typically has the word order verb-subject-object, as in Cat you shut the door?, and a command typically has no explicit subject: Shut the doar. Form may, however, be misleading; social consider- ations, considerations of politeness may result, for example, in a command being expressed in the form of a question: Cam you shut the door? Thus we need context as well as form to draw the correct inference from such utterances as De you have 2 spare biro? He apologized could be classed as a declarative utterance. So could F apologize. But there is a significant difference between the two; whereas the former describes an action, the latter not only describes an action, declares it to others, but in fact is the action. By saying we are doing. Such utterances are called performative utterances. It follows from their nature that performative utterances are, like [ apologize, typically in the first person and the present tense. The use Semantics 7 or the potential use of the word hereby is also indicative of a performative utterance: I hereby sentence you fo three years in prison. An utterance is, however, only a performative utterance if the conditions necessary to make it an act prevail. I apologize only constitutes an apology if the speaker has done something wrong and if he acknowledges that he has done so. Nobody would end up behind bars if I said I hereby sentence you to three years in prison; to constitute an act this utterance requires such conditions as the listener having been found guilty of a crime and the speaker having the authority of a judge. As we saw in the case of the man and the woman at the party, an offer is only an offer if the speaker is able and willing to do what is said. Such conditions are called felicity conditions, Some linguists would claim that most utterances are performative utterances. By arguing that they can be preceded by performative verbs, with or without hereby, such linguists claim, for example, that commands and questions are performative utterances; Shut the door, they argue, is an abbreviated form of | (hereby) order you to shut the door, Do you know where the key is? is an abbreviated form of I (hereby) ask you where the key is. 3.9 Discourse Analysis Closely allied to pragmatics, perhaps part of it, is discourse analy: ‘or conversation analysis, this being the study of the organisation and the dynamics of conversation. We are more al ease when a conversation flows smoothly. We are less at ease if there ate pauses in the conversation or if, conversely, two people are speaking at the same time (overlap). We dislike people interrupting, beginning to speak at an inappropriate point. Discourse analysis investigates the mechanisms that facilitate smooth flow in conversations. One topic of study, for example, has been turn-taking, how the ‘floor’ passes from one person to another with a minimum of disruption. One technique for handing over the floor is the use of tag questions: It's going to be very difficult, isn’t it? Another is the use of a falling intonation contour. If the handover does not go smoothly, if for example there is overlap, the problem may be resolved by a 38 An Introduction to Linguistics struggle for domination whereby there is an increase in loudness and a slowing of the pace of speech. Another example of the topics investigated within discourse analysis is why some responses to a proposition reflect more unease than others. Reflecting Grice’s co-operative principle, we are happier going along with a proposition than going against it. Because going along with a proposition, such as an invilation to go to the cinema, is a preferred option, the related utterance exhibits no unease: Yeah, fine. Going against the proposal, on the other hand, exhibits unease, the speaker perhaps hesitating, softening the refusal, feeling obliged to justify the refusal: Unm, [don’t think so. I’ve got an essay fo finish Summary Words may be divided into content words, those which identify something in the world around us, and function words, those which serve to specify, link, and so on the content words. Semantics is principally concerned with content words. The set of objects, actions, and so on that such a word denotes is known as the semantic range of that word. ‘The semantic range of a word can be defined by such techniques as hyponymy and componential analysis, by reference to synonyms and antonyms. Context contributes to the defining of the range of a word. In some contexts the meaning of a word cannot be fully determined without reference to a wider phrase; in such a phrase where there is a conventional association between the constituent words we are dealing with collocation or, if the constitutent words give little, if any, indication of the meaning of the phrase, idiom. It is not always clear whether two words represent two different meanings of the one lexeme or are two different lexemes; in the case of the former we are dealing with polysemy, in the case of the latter with homonymy. We communicate more than we say explicitly. This can be so because we are generally co-operative, generally want to help the listener to understand. What we need to say is minimised by the support provided by the context in which the utterance takes place and by shared knowledge. Such factors fall within the study of Semantics 39 pragmatics. Related to pragmatics is discourse analysis, the study of the organisation and dynamics of conversations. Exercises 31 3.2 3.3 34 35 3.6 The titles of the books referred to in the bibliography of this work contain some wards which begin with a capital initial and some which do not. How might one account for when one uses a capital initial and when one does not in the title of a book? Complete the following diagram by (a) devising a category that distinguishes the word bus from the word car, and (>) giving the appropriate symbol against each component for the word motorcycle. Powered Carries. Fourwheeled people Bus + + + Car + + + Van + - + Bicycle - + - Motorcycle Arrange the vehicles in the above exercise, together with some appropriate superordinates and hyponyms, in a hyponymy diagram. How valid do you consider the concept of synonym to be? For each of the following pairs of words, state the principal reason why they may not be considered to be synonyms: man boy toilet 1oo determined stubbom pavement sidewalk walk ran Discuss the problem of distinguishing between homonyms and polysemic lexemes. Give an example of the practical relevance of this distinction. 40 Ani Introduction to Linguistics 3.7 What might somebody intend to convey by saying He's got a gun? 3.8 Somebody might say to a soldier Fire? What felicity conditions are likely to apply before the soldier responds by firing a gun? Account for the fact that a firefighter would react very differ- ently to this utterance. 3.9 Rewrite the following sentence, using information of your choice, so that it is less dependent on deixis: She will try to sell it here tomorrow.

You might also like