The meaning of Language Chapter 5 Semantics and Pragmatics Week10 Nov.19 th -23 rd

1.Reviewing the Tree diagram (Sentences: Hierarchical Organization ) 2. What do you know about meaning, when you know a language? 3. What is Semantics? 4. What Speakers know about sentence meaning? 5.When Compositionality goes Awry. 6. Lexical Semantics (Word meanings) 1.Theories of Word meaning. 2.Lexical Relations 3. Semantic Features 7. Thematic Roles. Pragmatics: 1.Linguistic Context 2.Situational Context 3.Discourse Analysis Vs. Situational. Page Pronouns: Types of pronouns, reflexive and non reflexive. Pronouns and discourse 5. Deixis More about situational context Maxims of conversation Speech acts

Template vs. Tree Diagram TEMPLATE: The boy raced the girl. Det-N-V-Det-N This TEMPLATE says that a determiner is followed by a noun, which is followed be a verb, etc This TEMPLATE, however, suggests that words have no internal organization. Thus, we can use a TREE DIAGRAM to make it easier to see the parts and subparts of a sentence. As a result, the structure of the sentence can be recognized in the tree’s hierarchical organization.

Phrase Structure Tree (PS Trees) or Constituent Structure Tree: a tree diagram with syntactic category information The boy raced the girl.

Semantics The meaning of language Page 173

What do you know about meaning, when you know a language ? 1.Meaningful and meaningless words and sentences. 2.When a word is ambiguous. 3.When 2 words have the same meaning or the opposite. 4.When sentences are true or false. Page 173

What Speakers Know About Sentence Meaning? 1. Truth 2.Entailment and Related Notions. 3.Ambiguity. Page

When Compositionality Goes Awry a.Anomaly. b.Metaphor c.Idioms Page

Lexical Semantics Page Theories of word meaning 2.Lexical Relations 3.Semantic Features.

Theories of word meaning In this section we are going to answer the question, if the meaning of a word is not like a dictionary entry, then what is it? a. Reference definition + example. b. Sense definition + example. Page

Lexical Relations “Characterizing the meaning of words in terms of their relationship” –Yule- 1.Synonyms 2. Antonyms ( a. gradable b. relational opposites c. by adding prefixes ) 3. Homonyms; same spelling,homophones; same sound 4. Polysemy 5. Hyponym 6. Metonym Page

Semantic Features Semantic features such as “human”, “female"," young”, “cause”, or “go” can be treated as the basic elements involved in differentiating the meaning of each word in a language from every other word. We can characterize the feature that is crucially required in a noun in order for it to appear as the subject for a particular verb. The____N +human_____ is reading the newspaper.

Part of the meaning of words may be described by the semantic features Evidence of semantic features: Semantic properties are not directly observable. Their existence must be inferred from linguistic evidence. Page 193 Semantic Features of nouns page 194 Semantic Features of verbs page 195

Thematic Roles Page Consider the following sentence: The boy rolled a red ball. The NP subject and the VP are semantically related in many ways, and the meaning depends on the meaning of the particular verb. AgentTheme

1. Agent: who preforms the action of the verb, “doer” 2. Theme: involved or effected by the action, “undergoes” 3. Goal: Endpoint of a change in location, where it moves to. 4. Source: where the entry move from. 5. Instrument: if an agent uses another entry to preform an action. 6. Experiencer: who has feelings, perceptions, receiving sensory input. Semantic Roles