1、CAS LX 502 Semantics,3a. Word meaning 3.1-3.6ish,Lexical semantics,As a first approximation: The meaning (and relations between the meanings) of words. Pat is a bachelor. Pat is a man. Pat has an unpleasant personality. My sister is a bachelor. Tracy fed my dog. My dog ate. My dog is no longer hungr
2、y.,Lexical semantics,What is it about bachelor that tells us (necessarily, inescapably) about maleness? What is it about feeding that tells us about eating?Bachelor and male share something in commonto be maleand to be unmarried. (And probably to be otherwise eligible to be married),Lexical semantic
3、s,Our knowledge about the words (and morphemes) of language can be thought of as a list, as a “mental dictionary”a lexicon.,Bachelors and men,If Pat is a bachelor, and to be a bachelor is to be a man and to be unmarried (and possibly to be eligible), then it follows that Pat is a man, that Pat is un
4、married but eligible to be married. So, we have learned something about the meaning of bachelor and its relation to the meaning of man. Pat is a bachelor entails that Pat is a man. Entailment: X entails Y if there can be no situation in which X is true but Y is not.,Entailment and other reasoning,Pa
5、t is a bachelor. Pat has an unpleasant personality.Pat has an unpleasant personality is not a necessary consequence of Pat is a bachelor. The first does not entail the second. It could be that Pat has joined a priesthood, it could be that Pat has unrealistically high standards, it could bewell, it c
6、ould be any of a number of things.,Meaning and lexemes (lexical items),Lexicon = repository of unpredictable information. Pronunciation Meaning Grammatical category (Linked to) encyclopedic knowledge, register, frequency. We may think of this in terms of lexemes, insofar as kick, kicked, kicks, kick
7、ing have a predictable part and an unpredictable part to their meaning. The dictionary/lexicon need list only (to) kick.,A lexeme is more abstract than a “word”,And what is a “word” anyway? We can come up with some more or less arbitrary definitions, but they dont seem to get us much closer to under
8、standing how the lexicon and semantic system is structured. A word has spaces written around it. (isnt vs. is not?) A word can stand alone (*the, *a) A word is pronounced separately (dyoowannaeet?) A word expresses a concept (again, *the, *although) ,What is a “word” anyway?,Inuktitut: qasuiirsarvig
9、ssarsingitluinarnarpuq Someone did not find a completely suitable resting place. tired cause.be suitable not someone qasu-iir-sar-vig-ssar-si-ngit-luinar-nar-puq not place.for find completely 3sg Kick the bucket, get the sack, hit the hay, Turn in, turn on, hand in, write off, Bigger vs. more expans
10、ive vs. *expansiver. “Im afraid shes gone and Michael Jacksoned herself to the point where she doesnt even appear human anymore” (some random comment on some random blog, referring to California gubernatorial candidate Angelyne. Google “michael jacksoned” if you wish.),One “word” several lexemes,ban
11、k1 : side of a river. bank2 : financial institution One word, (at least) two senses, two lexemes.The word bank is ambiguousit could mean bank1, it could mean bank2. This is different from vagueness, for example with large, small (Mickey is large, Willy is a small), or student (John, Mary) with respe
12、ct to gender.,Differentiating ambiguity and vagueness,One way is with verb phrase ellipsis:Tracy ate a sandwich and Pat did too. Tracy ate a sandwich and Pat ate a sandwich too. Pat visited a bank and Tracy did too. Pat visited a bank and Tracy visited a bank too. John is a student and Mary is too.
13、Mickey is large and Willy is too.,Dimensions of relatedness,Bank1 (the river-side) and bank2 (the financial institution) are homonyms. Two basically unrelated words that sound the same. And are written the same. And are pronounced the same. Subdivisions are possible: homographs are written the same,
14、 homophones are pronounced the same. They (very well) might vary by dialect (bury, berry, Barry; Mary, merry, marry). They might share a category (wring, ring) or not (knot).,Polysemy,Where different senses are judged to be related, we have polysemy rather than homonymy. Sometimes a tough call. Bat1
15、 : implement for striking in certain games Bat2 : furry mammal with membranous wings Sole1 : A sort of flat fish Sole2 : Bottom of a foot or shoe solea (Latin) via French.,Synonymy,A thesaurus provides synonymsdifferent words that share (nearly) the same meaning. True synonyms may not exist, there i
16、s pretty much always a difference in register, attitude, dialect, collocation, or lexical relations. Lawyer, attorney, counsel, Couch, sofa, futon, Little sister, small sister, Police, cop, pig, fuzz, ,Antonyms,Antonyms are in opposition, and come in a number of different flavors. An animal might be
17、 alive or dead, but not both. You might pass or fail a test, but not both. Though we can make sense of undead and half-dead in fanciful ways. Reversing the perspective: come/go, ascend/descend, up/down, in/out (reverses for motion, converses for more static relations) above/below, before/after/behin
18、d.,Antonyms,The opposition can be gradable as well. Something that is not hot is not necessarily cold, but they are still in opposition. Beautiful/ugly, fast/slow, tall/short, large/small. Or, they can be opposed in a non-binary way (taxonomic sisters): red/green/blue, January/September/November/Dec
19、ember.,Hyponymy,Some words are related in an inclusion relation. Couch, furniture. Capybara/mammal/animal.,Meronymy,Meronymy: Part-whole relations: Word/sentence/paragraph/page/chapter/bookMember-collection: boat/fleet, bird/flock,So where are we?,The meanings of words (ahem, lexemes) are related to
20、 each other in many different ways. Some relations are prominent enough to be classified (synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms, polysems, ). An empirical result of these connections can be seen in our inference patterns. Fido is a dog. Fido is a mammal. Fido is a cat.,What we know (about English, say),Part
21、of an English-speakers knowledge of language is the information in the lexicon: lexemes, their pronunciation, their syntactic category, their relationships to other lexemes, and whatever is left, that we might call their meaning.,Back to the question of “words”,We might imagine that we can come up w
22、ith some kind of “meaning” (definition, say) for tie or wrap. We might observe that the relation between untie to tie rather like the relation between unwrap and wrap. And we might observe that one is simply the other plus un-. Words themselves are composed of morphemes, some of which are meaningful
23、 in and of themselves (and would have lexical entries of their own).,Derivational morphemes,So, alongside the content words like likely we have derivational morphemes like un-, together combining to form a word (with a predictable meaning) unlikely. Recall: unrefaxeristically. Or: antidisestablishme
24、ntarianism (opposition to the disestablishment of the Church of England) These (anti-, dis-, -ment, -ary, -ian, -ism) are lexemes in their own right. Finding the morphemes isnt trivial (ally, prism, canary, cement, distant), but they do seem to exist.,Inflectional morphemes,Derivational morphemes li
25、ke iN- (impossible, irregular, incapable, intractable) are often distinguished from inflectional morphemes (walk, walks, walked) in that derivational morphemes carry a heavier semantic load. Inflectional morphemes are agreement (with, e.g., a 3sg subject). Practically, its a difficult line to draw p
26、recisely, but generally grammatically enforced morphology (agreement, tense/aspect marking) is in the “inflectional” category. Some linguists in fact argue that the distinction isnt a meaningful one, but that isnt the consensus view.,Derivational morphology,Derivational morphology is also capable of
27、 changing a words category. The road is wide. (adjective) The road widened. (verb) He refaxed the memo. (verb) He is a refaxer. (noun) He acted in a refaxeristic manner. (adjective) He acted refaxeristically. (adverb),Causatives/inchoatives,A reasonably large class of verbs seem to be able to altern
28、ate between inchoative (change of state) verbs and causative verbs. The door is open. (adjective) The door opened. (verb; inchoative) I opened the door. (verb; causative) I sank the boat, I melted the chocolate.,Kharia (Austro-Asiatic, Binar, India, Nepal),nogtem you eat gilte he beats udtem you dri
29、nk (invented) obnogtem you feed obgilte he causes to beat obudtem you cause to drink,Causatives,There are languages that have a causative morpheme that derives feed from eat. English has some too, which come out differently depending on the specific word: We enlarged the photograph. We modernized th
30、e house. We opened the door.,Open v. open,How does open in The door opened relate to open in I opened the door?Perhaps theres a “hidden causative” in I opened the door (like the “hidden plural” in I saw two deer). A prefix (or suffix) that has no pronunciation? I -opened the door.,Kill vs. die,Consi
31、der too the relation between kill and die. What do the semantic components of kill seem to be?The surface (pronounced) form of a word may not fully reveal its underlying semantic structure.,“Lexical decomposition”,We might think of kill as CAUSE-die, of enter as CAUSE-BE-in, of give as CAUSE-HAVE.So
32、 semantically, Tracy gave Mary a book might really be Tracy CAUSE Mary HAVE a book.,Kicking the bucket,Sometimes whole phrases (verb phrases) can have an idiomatic meaning: kick the bucket, buy the farm, They have a meaning that is not derivable from the component parts.Usually, this is tied to both
33、 the verb (tap the bucket, rent the farm) and the object (kick the pail, buy the house) together.,Something to ponder,Interestingly, there are some idioms that seems to allow a certain flexibility: Tracy gave Pat the boot. Pat got the boot. But it isnt unlimited: Tracy gave the boot to Pat. Pat has the boot. Pat took the boot. The boot ruined Pats Christmas. Well kick off next time with a somewhat involved argument from this that give, get, have (, take), all have HAVE as a “silent component.”, ,
