|
Student Presentations: Unlocking Understanding by Valery & Suzanne
Notes from Abbe:
CARLA's speech act site: www.carla.umn.edu/speechacts/
Sites about academic/social language skills:
www.everythingesl.net/inservices/bics_calp.php
www.iteachilearn.com/cummins/bicscalp/html
The site I put on the board where you can download software for drawing syntactic trees is:
www.ece.ubc.ca/~donaldd/treeform.htm
The DARE quiz we took is at www.pbs.org/speak
Student Exercises
Exercise 14 (p.228) on The
Jabberwocky
-
Subfields
- lexical
semantics:
concerned with the meanings of words
- phrasal or
sentential
semantics: concerned with larger syntactic units
- There are more types which the text doesn't cover
Pragmatics: The interpretation
of linguistic meaning in context. (according
to the text; my own definition is that it is the study of how we do things
with language. The Wiki definitions are:
The study of language as it is used in a social
context,
including its effect on the interlocutors.
The branch of semiotics that deals with the
relationship between
signs,
especially words and other elements of language, and their users.
Semantic Properties: pieces of
information associated with a word
-
semantic properties are part of the meaning of
all nouns, verbs,
adjectives, adverbs, and some function words
-
represented through a notation with positive or
negative semantic features (mare
= +female,
-human, -young, +equine)
-
language
teaching example:
count/noncount nouns (177) can only occur with a particular quantifier:
count nouns with many, noncount (mass) nouns with much.
-
nouns
in some languages are associated with specific classifiers
-nyms
(a bound morpheme, by the way!)
- Homonyms: words that are
pronounced the same, may or may not be spelled the same and have
different meanings. May lead to ambiguity
- A word with multiple meanings that are related
historically is polysemous
- heteronyms: words are
spelled the same but pronounced differently
- homographs: words
that are spelled the same but have different meanings (dove- the bird &
dove - past of dive)
- synonyms; words
that have the same or nearly the same meaning
- paraphrases: sentences
which use synonyms in identical constructions
- creates lexical
paraphrase
- hyponyms: a word that
represents the relationship between general terms and specific
instances of a class; color has the hyponym red
- metonym: substitutes
for
the object that is meant, the name of an attribute or concept
associated with that object; i.e., Hollywood for the film industry, Washington for the US government
- retronyns: redundant
words at an earlier time; whole milk, conventional warfare, acoustic guitar.
(see fun-with
-words)
See Student exercises for more fun
Proper names
Shortcuts for a specific object or entity
Phrase and Sentence Meaning
Principle of
Compositionality:
meaning of a phrase is composed of
meaning of words and how they are combined structurally
Visiting relatives can
be boring
Phrasal Meaning
Noun-Centered Meaning
-
reference: an object is
pointed to through a noun phrase
-
referent: the object
pointed to through a noun phrase
-
coreferential: phrases
that point to the same object - may not mean the sentences have the
same meaning
-
sense: additional meaning
Verb-Centered Meaning
-
agent, theme, and goal: thematic roles of the verb
-
Useful chart ( 192-193)
-
represented by case in
some languages
Sentential Meaning
- truth conditions: the
conditions under which the sentence is true
- paraphrases:
sentences
which have the same truth conditions
- entailment: truth of one
sentence entails (implies) the truth od another
- contradiction: ne gative
entailment
- eventives/statives: syntactic
consequences result from this characteristic of sentences
Pronouns and Coreferentiality
Meanings that are
Veiled or
Nonexistent
- anomaly: syntactically
correct expressions which are not interpretable semantically
- metaphor: nonliteral or indirect meaning (note George
Lakoff's book, and article on Metaphors of
Terror
- idioms: meaning
is not related
to meanings of parts of the phrase (a language teacher's dream (if what
you want is job security) or nightmare (if you are asked to explain
them a lot))
See exercise on compositional meaning. (supplemental worksheets)
Pragmatics
Interpretation of linguistic meaning in context.
- linguistic context
- situational
context, or
knowledge of the world
Discourse Analysis
- how speakers combine sentences into broader
speech units
- examines style, appropriateness, cohesiveness,
etc.
Situational Context
- Grice's cooperative principle
- Conversational maxims
Speech Acts
- What we get done with language
- Performatives
- illocutionary force
- presuppositions
- implication
- Deixis
The Linguistics War
Interview
with George Lakoff:
George Lakoff on the split with Chomsky:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/9956
In addition, the conceptual framework of generative semantics derives
much from outside of transformational grammar, for instance,
model-theoretical semantics in the tradition of Tarksi and Carnap, and
more recently Kripke, Montague, Scott and others, the concern for
language use that one finds in the writings of Wittgenstein, Austin,
Grice, and Searle, Zadeh's work on inexact concepts, recent
sociolinguistics as represented in the work of Labov, Hymes, Gumperz,
Bickerton, Bailey, and others, and trends in the sociology small-group
interactions as represented in the works of Goffman, Garfinkle, Sachs,
and Schegloff. What we are trying to do is develop a linguistic theory
that is rooted in the study of human thought and culture—the very
antithesis of transformational grammar as narrowly construed by Chomsky.
|
