Rawan Younis 220142788

Homonyms: pronunciation and spelling are identical but meanings are unrelated. e.g. (bank) a financial institution The edge of a stream Homographs: two words that have different pronunciations but the same spelling.

Example: (Bow) Bow rhyming with go and referring to an instrument for shooting arrows. Bow rhyming with cow and indicating a bending of the body as a form of respectful greeting

Polysemy: several related meanings (head) The head of a person The head of a company Head of a table or bed Head of lettuce or cabbage

Dictionaries recognize the distinction between polysemy and homonymy by making a polesymous item a single dictionary entry and making homophnous lexemes two or more separate entries. Head (one entry) Bank (twice)

Pupil has two different senses: Part of the eye School child Historically ,they have a common origin but at present they are semantically unrelated

Flower and flour were originally “the same word” and so were the verbs to poach (a way of cooking in water)and to poach (to hunt{animals} on another persons land) but the meanings are now far apart and all dictionaries treat them as homonyms with separate listing.

Different occurrences of the verb ask in the following sentences: Fred asked Betty where his golf clubs were. Fred asked Donna if she had seen his clubs. Fred asked Charles to help him to find his clubs

Needle knitting Sewing Crocheting Tattoo

Injection Burning in woods groove of record

the slender tapered top of spire Compass the slender tapered top of spire rock

To differentiate between homonymy and polysemy if you hear (or read) two words that sound (or are written) the same but are not identical in meaning, you need to decide if it’s really two words (homonyms), or if it is one word used in two different ways (polysemy).

Lexical ambiguity It occurs when homonyms are in the same position in utterances .e.g. I was on my way to the bank Carrying information about depositing or withdrawing money Fishing or boating

Homonyms belong to different lexical category and therefore do not give rise to ambiguity For instance, seen is a form of the verb see while scene is an unrelated noun

Ambiguity occurs also because a longer linguistic form has a literal sense and a figurative sense. There is a skeleton in our closet skeleton in the closet can mean {an unfortunate event that is kept a family secret} with this meaning skeleton in the closet is a single lexeme and with its literal meaning it is a phrase composed of several lexemes

How can we explain what sentence meaning is? The meaning of a sentence derives from the meaning of its constituent lexemes and from the grammatical meaning it contains If you know the meaning of the sentence, you know what conditions are necessary in the world for that sentence to be true

Albert Thompson opened the first flour mill in Waterton Albert Thompson did not open the first flour mill in Waterton (contradiction)

Truth-conditional semantics is the study of meaning through a consideration of the conditions that must exist for a sentence to be true, and how the truth of one sentence relates to the truth or falsity of other sentences.

In semantics we are not interested in intuition or hints but we are interested in the instances when the language of the message implicates some additional meaning that accounts for our inference .

One team consisted of six students from Felman College. One team consisted of the six students from Felman College. Sentences1 and 2 tell the same thing about the composition of the team but 2 is more informative –has more meaning- about students from Felman College From 1 we can infer that there were at least six students from Felman College Sentence2 says that there were only six students from Felman College