ENG508 Grand Quiz Preparation

Lesson-9

Lexical Semantics: Fields and Collocations

•  Many of the basic ideas in this topic are derived from de Saussure‘s notion of ‗value‘.
•  He pointed out that a knight on a chess board is a knight not because of any inherent quality (shape, size, etc.), but because of what it can do in relation to the other pieces on the board (Saussure, 1959:110).
•  He stressed this relational aspect of language, saying that there were ‗only differences and no positive terms‘.
•  As differences are in some way related. For instance, he argued that ‗sheep‘ in English has a different value from ‗mouton‘ in French because English has also the word ‗mutton‘.
•  Meanings of words have their association with other words which can be in the form of paradigmatic/ syntagmatic relations, sense relations, collocation and idiomatic relations.
•  Paradigmatic relations hold between concepts belonging to the same grammatical category.
•  These relations cover a wide variety of associations between words, including morphological and phonetic.
•  For instance, in a ‗red door‘ and ‗green door‘, ‗red‘ and ‗green‘ are in a paradigmatic relation to each other.
•  A paradigm is a set of linguistic or other units that can be substituted for each other in the same position within a sequence or structure.
•  In this sense, it may be constituted by all words sharing the same grammatical function, since the substitution of one for another does not disturb the syntax of a sentence.
•  Linguistics often refers to the paradigmatic dimension of language as the ‗vertical axis‘ of selection (Oxford Concise Dictionary),
•  Syntagmatic relations hold between two or more words co-present in a sequence. Combinations based on sequential relations are called syntagms.
•  The notion of a syntagm applies among others to a group of words and to complex units of every size and kind, for example, phrases, sentences.
•  Syntagm is a linguistic term designating any combination of units which are arranged in a significant sequence.
•  A sentence is a syntagm of words.
•  A meaning of a word is dependent partly on its relation to other words in the same conceptual area. The kinds of semantic fields vary from culture to culture.
•  Anthropologists use them to study belief systems and reasoning across cultural groups.
•  According to Brinton (2000), a semantic field denotes a segment of reality symbolized by a set of related words.
•  The words in a semantic field share a common semantic property.
•  Most often, fields are defined by subject matter, such as body parts, landforms, diseases, colors, foods, or kinship relations (Brinton, 2000).
•  The words in a particular semantic field are ―incompatible‖ (Palmer, 1996).
•  A creature cannot be denoted both as a lion and an elephant at the same time.
•  Words in a semantic field are not synonymous, but are all used to talk about the same general phenomenon.
•  The words anger, happiness, and sadness are not synonymous, but they are a part of the semantic field called ―emotional state‖.
•  A collocation is either a highly frequent co-occurrence of two or more words or a combination of words which represents a fully grammatical structure, e.g. a noun phrase (Sinclair 2003: 173).
•  Firth argued that "you shall know a word by the company it keeps" (1957: 11).
•  Collocation is a familiar grouping of words, especially words that habitually appear together and thereby convey meaning by association.
•  Collocations also define a sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. e.g., Strong tea is a correct expression and Powerful tea is considered as the wrong expression.
•  Idioms are expressions whose meaning cannot be inferred from the meaning of its parts.
•  Usually, these are translated with semantically and not necessarily lexically equivalents in the target language.
•  Majority of idioms are homophonous, such as ‗by and large‘ or ‗far and away‘ (Cruse, 1986: 37). They are grammatically well-formed and semantically transparent expressions.
•  We cannot replace its parts with other semantically or syntactically equivalent lexemes.
•  An idiom is a rigid word combination to which no generalities apply; neither can its meaning be determined from the meaning of its parts; nor can it participate in the usual word-order variations.
•  Idioms involve collocation of a special kind, for instance, ‗kick the bucket‘, fly off the handle‘ and ‗red herring‘.

Lesson-10

Sentence relations and Truth

•  Montague (1974) has hypothesized that the tools of logic can help us to represent sentence meaning.
•  The study of logic comes down from the Classical Greek world, famously from Aristotle.
•  The beginnings of logic lie in a search for the principles of valid argument and inference.
•  Mostly, the truth is said to be empirical as we need some facts of the world to know whether a statement is true or not.
•  Similarly, the empirical truth of ‗the earth revolves around the sun‘ depends upon the facts of the universe.
•  The term ‗propositional logic‘ is also known as ‗propositional calculus‘ and ‗sentential calculus‘.
•  Semanticists call a sentence‘s being true or false based on its truth value, and call the facts that would have to obtain in reality to make a sentence true or false, its truth conditions.
•  The study of the truth behavior of sentences with quantifiers e.g. ‗all, every, each, some, one‘ gave rise to predicate logic.
•  The propositional logic cannot account for inferences that depend upon relations within sentences and cannot deal with an example such as ‗All men are mortal‘, ‗Socrates is a man‘, ‗and therefore, Socrates is mortal‘.
•  Entailment defined by truth – ―A sentence p entails a sentence q when the truth of the first (p) guarantees the truth of the second (q), and the falsity of the second (q) guarantees the falsity of the first (p).
•  This is seen as a matter of meaning or semantics, since, it is claimed, to know the meaning of the sentence is to know the conditions under which it is true.
•  Tarski‘s (1956:155) definition is ‗a true sentence is one which states that the state of affairs is so and so, and the state of affairs is so and so‘.
•  The sentence that we are talking about (object language) and what we are saying about it(meta-language).
•  However, much of the work in truth-conditional semantics is of a highly technical nature, and it cannot be rightly evaluated without a detailed exposition.

Lesson-11

Presupposition

•  In an ordinary language, of course, to presuppose something means to assume it, and the narrower technical use in semantics is related to this. Presupposition refers to the assumptions implicitly made by the speakers and the listeners that are necessary for the correct interpretation of utterance (Leech).
•  It allows us the freedom not to state everything in our communication.
•  Speakers assume certain information which is already known by their listeners and that information is called presupposition.
•  Presupposition is treated as a relationship between two propositions.
•  In the first approach, sentences are viewed as external objects.
•  Meaning is seen as an attribute of sentences rather than something constructed by the participants.
•  Second approach views sentences as the utterances of individuals engaged in a communication act.
•  The aim is to develop the strategies that speakers and hearers use to communicate with one another.
•  Thus, we might look at communication from the speaker‘s viewpoint.
•  Presupposition is one of a number of inferences that the listener might make on the basis of what the speaker has just said.
•  The first approach is essentially semantic and the second pragmatic.
•  Presupposition failure is one phenomenon that caused problems for a truth relations approach.
•  It has been observed that using a name or a definite description to refer, presupposes the existence of the named or described entity.
•  It shows that if q is false, the status of p is dubious, possibly neither true nor false.
•  This problem for truth-based theories is known as a truth-value gap.
•  Presupposition triggers are the types of presupposition produced by particular words or constructions. Some of these triggers derive from syntactic structures.
•  Many presuppositions are produced by the presence of certain words (lexical triggers) mostly ‗verbs
•  One of the problems for a simple truth-based account is that the presuppositional behavior seems sensitive to context.
•  Levinson (1983) gives an example the type of presupposition usually triggered by time adverbial clauses.

Lesson-12

Sentence Semantics - I : Situations

•  Language allows the speaker to classify situations by using semantic distinctions of actions, states, processes, tenses and, aspects.
•  Classification of situations helps us to understand the meaning of a discourse deeply.
•  Two common situation types are Static and Dynamic which create different situations with the help of lexical categories in verbs.
•  Knows, thinks, loves, like, have, remains etc. are stative verbs and do not contain physical actions.
•  Dynamic type contains action verbs such as eat, drive, walk.
•  In events, the speaker views the situation as a whole, e.g. ‗the mine blew up.‘ While, in processes, the speaker views, as it were, the internal structure of a dynamic situation, e.g. ‗he ran to the forest. Processes can be divided into inchoatives and resultatives.
•  Tense is a category which allows a speaker to relate situations to time. For example, ‗they will cut the grass tomorrow‘ is future tense. Aspect System allows the speaker to relate situation and time, and to view an event in various ways: as complete or incomplete.
•  Aspects have to do not with the location of an event in time, but with its temporal distribution or contour (Saeed, 2004). For example: ‗She is coming.‘ (incomplete), ‗She has come.‘ (complete).
•  Modality is a linguistic category (like aspect or tense) that modifies the meaning of the event or action we talk about to include ways to ―influence‖ the event described.
•  Modality may express what the speaker wants to do (give permission, describe ability, suggest, request, offer, prohibit, express desires or necessity, etc.)
•  It also expresses whether the speaker believes, or is sure that what he or she is saying is true. There are two types of modality:
•  Epistemic Modality expresses the degree of knowledge how sure the speaker is in his communication and