Linguistics For Everyone - Chapter 9 - Semantics

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Semantics

Back 1

System of rules underlying our knowledge of word and sentence meaning.

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Anomaly

Back 2

Deviation from expected meaning. Example (Chomsky): "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously." While the sentence does not violate syntactic or morphological rules, it clearly violates meaning rules, which seem to be separate from other rule systems.

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Onomatopoeic words

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Words for which the connection between sound and meaning is non-arbitrary - i.e. these words sound like their meanings. Eg: buzz, clang, purr, boom, moo, oink. Note that there is cross-cultural variation in onomatopoeia

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Cognates

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Words that have common ancestors: hound in English, hund in German.

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Lexical semantics

Back 5

Formal study of the conventions of word meaning.

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Semantic features

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Classifications of meaning that can be expressed in terms of binary features [+/-] such as [+/- human], [+/- animate], [+/- count], Eg: bachelor = [- married], baby = [+ young] or [- adult],

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Concrete nouns

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Names for things in the physical world, or things we can point at. Eg: dog, car, rice, the Empire State Building.

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Abstract nouns

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Are not physical objects. Eg: love, attitude, terrorism, indignation.

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Count nouns

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Nouns we can count. Count nouns can be pluralized, preceded by numerals and certain quantifers such as each, both every, fewer, several. Eg: dog, car, puppy, country.

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Non-count nouns

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Cannot be pluralized, cannot occur with numerals or the quantifiers used with count nouns. They can be used with quantifiers such as much, most, all, less. Eg: rice, jewelry, furniture, fruit, love, terrorism, mud, indignation.

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Common nouns

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Nouns that have more than one referent, or entity to which the noun refers. Eg: tulip, baseball, brother, horseradish, language, school, anger.

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Proper nouns

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Have only one referent; proper nouns are the names of unique entities. Eg: Harry Potter, the Kentucky Derby, Hallowe'en, Lake Victoria, Susan, the Kremlin. By definition, proper nouns have a single referent and therefore are count nouns and cannot be plural

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Entailment

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Inclusion of one aspect of a word's or sentence's meaning in the meaning of another word or sentence. Eg: Man = [+ human], [+ male], [+ adult]. Bachelor = [+ human], [+ male], [+ adult], [- married]. The meaning of bachelor overlaps or 'entails' the meaning of man.

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Markedness

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Opposition in meaning that differentiates between the typical meaning of a word and its 'marked' meaning or opposite. Eg: 'Right' is unmarked, and 'left' is marked.

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Semantic fields

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Basic classifications of meaning under which words are stored in our mental lexicons (great deal of evidence for this - but fields may differ across speakers, and words may belong to > 1 category). Eg: 'Friends', 'Clothing', 'Parts of the body'.

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Nyms

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Meaning relationships among words: antonyms, synonyms, homonyms, etc

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Antonyms

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Words that we think of as opposites, though oppositions may be relational (eg: doctor/patient), complementary (eg: alive/dead) or gradable (hot/cold)

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Synonyms

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Words that have similar meanings. Eg: purse/handbag. Synonyms can both cross dialectical boundaries (eg: doctor/physician is familiar in most dialects) and result from dialectical variation (eg: use of one of the words couch/sofa/chesterfield tends to be regionally-specific. Can also be variation across generations (frock/dress) and register (nice ride/nice car). English has more synonyms than other languages.

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Euphemism

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Word or phrase used to avoid offending or to purposely obscure (eg: collateral damage is used by military/government to mean civilian deaths).

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Hyponym

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Word whose meaning is included, or entailed, in the meaning of a more general word (eg: tulip is a hyponym of flower, thoroughbred is a hyponym of horse, house is a hyponym of building)

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Polysemy

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Refers to words with two or more rleated meanings (eg: lip = of a cliff, or part of the mouth). From the Greek: poly = many, semy = meanings. Other examples: mole, foot, leg, arm, eye. By nature, polysemes are ambiguous.

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Homonyms

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Words with the same sound and spelling but different, unrelated meanings (saw, bear). By nature, homonyms are ambiguous.

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Homophones

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Words that do not share the same spellings or meanings, but sound the same (sole/soul, gorilla/guerilla, to/too/two).

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Homographs

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Words that have the same spelling, different meanings, and different pronunciations.(eg: bow of a ship, bow and arrow; wound in a leg, tightly-wound watch)

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Distinction between ambiguity and vagueness

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An ambiguous word (such as 'mouth') has more than one possible meaning, but the meaning is quite obvious given a context. Vague words are not so easily clarified by context, as in "Mary contacted him (by phone, e-mail, post,telepathy?), so that the following sentence is possible: "Mary contacted him (Δ = by phone), and Sue did (Δ = contact him by e-mail) too."

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Semantic shift

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Change in the meaning of words over time.

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Shift in connotation

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Change in words' general meanings over time.

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Narrowing

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Change in words' meaning over time to more specific meanings.

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Broadening

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Change in words' meanings over time to more general inclusive meanings.

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Amelioration

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Shift in words' meanings over time from neutral or negative to positive.

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Pejoration

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Shift in words' meanings over time from neutral or positive to negative.

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Shift in denotation

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Complete change in words' meanings over time.

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Computational linguistics

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The study of language and computers. Computational linguistics includes the fields of: natural language processing, machine translation, speech generation, speech recognition, corpus linguistics.