ENG508 Midterm Solved Papers Set 2 by VUBuddy

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Objectives:

8. Necessary and sufficient conditions are one traditional approach to describe concepts
9. The process of creating and interpreting symbols is Semiotics.
10. Hyponymy is always transitive but meronymy may or may not be
11. A sentence is a syntagm of words..
12. Exophora is dependent on the context outside the text, e.g. proper nouns,
13. Relevance theory emerged in 1980s in the collaborative work of Wilson and Sperber
14. Conversion is a change in the syntactic function (and usually the meaning) of an item

Without a corresponding change in morphological form

7. Proper names denote individuals,
8. thinks, loves, like, have, remains etc. are stative verbs and do not contain physical

Actions

2. Meaningful utterances may b the products of incomplete utterances
3. Charles J.Filmore suggested the six cases of grammar case.
4. Linguistic meaning is a special subset of the more general human ability to use signs to convey meanings.
5. Utterance is a natural unit of speech bounded in articulation.

Subjective:

Q. Connotative meanings are peripheral.

Connotative meanings are peripheral. These are relatively unstable as it varies according to culture, historical periods and experience of the individual. Connotative meanings, compared with conceptual meanings, are indeterminate and open-ended that may belong to any characteristics of the referent, real or imaginary.

Q. Factitive is object resulting from the action or state

Factitive is object resulting from the action or state. Locative is location or spatial orientation. The Oobjective is the semantically most neutral case.

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Q. Maxim of quantity – says that speaker should be as informative as is required

Maxim of quantity – says that speaker should be as informative as is required. They should give neither too little information nor too much. Maxim of Quality – information provided in conversation to be genuine and justified. Maxim of relation – says that speakers are assumed to be saying something that is relevant to what has been said before. Maxim of manner – says that we should be brief and orderly, and avoid obscurity and ambiguity. Grice said that hearers assume that speakers observe the cooperative principle and that it is the knowledge of the maxims that allows hearers to draw inferences about the speakers‘ intentions and applied meaning.

Q. Polysemy is existence of several meaning for a single word

Polysemy is identified using the criteria of ―relatedness‖; when the senses are judged to be related under the same lexical entry, e.g. hook n. 1. a piece of material, usually metal, curved or bent and used to suspend, catch, hold, or pull something. 2. short for fish-hook. 3. a trap or snare. These are the various senses of hook that are treated as polysemy and therefore listed under one lexical entity. However, there is a distinction made in lexicology between homonymy and polysemy; both deal with multiple senses of the same phonological words.

Q. how cognitive theory relates to relevance theory?

In cognitively oriented work, including relevance theory, there has been interest in the structure of the mind and in how pragmatic inference is performed. Work in psychology on mind reading (or ‗theory of mind‘), the ability humans have to infer other‘s mental states from observation of their actions, has direct relevance to pragmatics.

This theory says that the meaning of a piece of language is based solely on the meaning of its parts, and the way they are put together. With this theory we come to know that semantics has a very strong relation with syntax. To understand the structure of a sentence we need to have enough knowledge about its components such as noun, verb, adjective etc.

Q. Define Lexical Cohesion.

Lexical devices help to maintain cohesion in the text; i.e. Repetition, Synonyms, Subordinates, and General words. Consider an example, ‗I met a person who believes in Allah, Prophets, Holy Books, Angels and the Day of Judgement.‘ The alternate sentence can be ‗I met a Muslim.‘ Of all the lexical cohesion devices, the most common form is repetition; repeated words or wordphrases, threading through the text. Substitution and Ellipsis avoid repetition; lexical repetition exploits it for stylistic effect. Synonym is; instead of repeating the same exact words, a speaker or writer can use another word that means the same or almost the same.

Q. Define Explicit and the Implicit meanings

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Explicit concern obvious meaning and Implicit concern unobvious meaning. So if something was explicit in a text, it means that the information is clearly stated for you. E.g. Josh was wearing a blue, woolly hat yesterday morning. The colour of his hat is explicit information that we have learnt. However, implicit information is what we are not told but we can guess. E.g. Josh was wearing a blue, woolly hat yesterday morning. We could guess that it was cold yesterday morning because Josh is wearing a blue, woolly hat. The sentence doesn't tell us this information directly, but we know that when it's cold, people often wear warm, woolly hats. So explicit is something we KNOW, implicit is something that is SUGGESTED. Pragmatists are interested in cases where what the speaker intends to convey is different from the words one chooses literally mean. The former is generally known as the implicit meaning and the latter as the explicit meaning.

Q.What are the types of Sign? Expalin briefly

• Distinction, highlighted by C. S. Peirce, between Icon, Index and Symbol.
• Iconic signs: Signs where the signifier resembles the signified.
• Similarity between a sign and what it represents. e.g., between a picture and its real-life subject.
• Indexical Signs: Signs where the signifier is caused by the signified.

Q. Hina raised the car with a jack. Enlist the entities which are related to the action verb "raise"

Hina , Car and Jack

Semantic theory has to provide an account of the knowledge of meaning which language users have and which allows for their ability to quickly and easily understand novel pieces of language (Portner, 2005, p. 34).

Q. why we cannot ignore the co textual context in pragmatics. Explain with one example.

Consider a complicated example to understand co-textual context. ‗She met (her) school teacher.‘ We get two situations here: First, ‗She‘ may have been used for a mother who met school teacher of ‗her‘ (her daughter). Secondly, ‗She‘ may have been used for a lady who met