WESTERN UNIVERSITY

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

APPLIED LINGUISTICS

PART II- CHAPTER 12 LECTURED :DR. GLORIA

GROUP 10: 1.DA VUTHY 2. HUSEYIN KIRIK

ACADEMIC YEAR: 2016 - 2017

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Word meaning

• Consider the sentences in (134)

Entailment and hyponymy

• (134) a. Max managed to finish infinite jest. b. Max finished infinite jest.

• Entailment means to involve something that cannot be avoided. (Oxford Dictionary)

• Hyponymy is A word whose meaning is included in the meaning of another• more general word ( Google)

• In these circumstances, we say that (134a) Entails 134b), and a general definition of entailment appears (135)

• (135) A sentence (S1) Entails a sentence (S2) if and only if whenever S1 is true, S2 is also true.

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• It is important to be clear that this year relation of entailment does not obtain between sentences that just happen to be true in the current or any state of affairs.EX. (136) a. The dodo is extinct

b. Berlin is the capital of Germany.• Both sentences are true at the time of writing, but it is not the case that (136a) and entails (136b). • Consider some simpler examples of entailment relations,

which will help us to build up a picture of how the lexicon might be structured.

(137) a. The thing in the cage is a lion. b. The thing in the cage is an animal.(139) a. The thing in the grass is a snake. b. The thing in the grass is a reptile.(140) a. The thing in the tree is a sparrow. b. The thing in the tree is a bird.

• What we have is a relationship of entailment between pairs of sentences that is due to the presence of particular pairs of words

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• Form: (141) “X” is a lion entails “X” is an animal.When we find this situation, we say that Lion is a Hyponym of animal.

• A very straightforward test for many example of hyponymy is to use here.• An X is a king / Type of Y. • A lion is a type of animal, a snake is a type of reptile, etc.

• Recognition of hyponymy as a semantic relation which holds between some words raises a numbers of issue.

• Firstly, we must recognize that, as well as animal being a superordinate of lion, it is also itself a hyponym of creature. Creature

animal bird fish reptile

lion Dog cowSparrow eagle ostrich

Trout eel shark Snake lizard newt

• (144) here:

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• lion, dog, cow, etc. are co-hyponyms of the superordinate animal, which, along with bird, fish and reptile, is a co hyponym of creature.

• All the words appearing in the taxonomy in (144) are nouns.

Do members of other word classes enter into hyponymy relationship?

• For Verbs: consider the pairs of examples in here (145) and (146).

(145) a. X borrowed/stole/found/bought Y b. X got Y (146) a. X walked/ran/staggered/crawled to Z b. X moved to Z

In both of these cases, the various sentences in (a) entail the sentence in (b).

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(147)Get

Borrow steal find buy

Move

Walk run stagger crawl

(148)

• It is easy enough to come up with a formulation which produces a simple test for whether a verb X is a hyponym of another verb Y.

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(150) a. Body, armb. Arm, elbowc. House, roofd. Engine, carburetor

• This relationship is meronym

• We also say that arm is a meronym of body and that arm, leg, etc.

body

arm leg

Elbow wrist Knee ankle

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Synonymy or identity of meaning is a semantic relation with which most readers will be familiar.

• To illustrate, consider the pair of lexemes HORSE and STEED.

a. The old lame horse gamely pulled the plough.b. The old lame steed gamely pulled the plough.(157)

• Obviously, synonymous lexemes exhibit considerable over of meaning. • Interestingly, the same is true or pairs of words opposite in meaning to which we now turn.

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Meaning opposite Opposite of meaning is a pervasive semantic relation in

the lexicons of human language and it comes in several varieties.• Tall – short, high – low, wide – narrow, fat – thin, old – young, old – new

• We have the entailments here (159) which make explicit that these are indeed semantic opposites.

(159) a. ‘X is tall´ entails ‘X is not short’b. ‘X is short’ entails ‘X is not tall´

• Here, the entailments in (160) do not obtain.

(159) a. ‘X is not short’ entails ‘X is tall’ b. ‘X is not tall’ entails ‘X is short’

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• Pairs of opposites which behave like tall and short with respect to entailments are known as antonyms and they exhibit the semantic relation of antonym.

(161): Open – closed (of s store); married – single; dead – alive; broken - unbroken

• Here we find analogous entailments to those in(159):(162) a. The store is open’ entails ‘The store is not closed’. b. The store is closed’ entails ‘The store is not open’.

• For this case, however, the converse entailments do obtain: (163) a. ‘The store is not closed’ entails The store is open.’ b. ‘The store is not open’ entails The store is closed’.

• Opposite like those in (161) are referred to as complementariness and the corresponding semantic relation is complementary

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What is “Semantics” ?

Semantics is the study of the meaning that is

used to understand human expression through language.

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Semantics is a perhaps the most difficult part of the grammar

of a language to learn.

The reason is because, basically meanings in a language are indefinite/undetermined.

Remember that language is arbitrary. It is arbitrary because the relationship between forms and their meanings are sometimes cannot logically proved.

Language is arbitrary in the sense that there is no inherent relation between the words of a language and their meanings.

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Semantic Extending

WORDS OLD MEANING NEW MEANING

Aunt Father’s sister Parent’s sister, wife of parent’s sister.

Manage Handle a horse Handle anything

Holiday Holy day Any day off

- Even when a word is retained in a language, its meaning will often change over time. Often social change- people change how it’s used. Here, words get a more general meaning than they once had.

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Semantic Features One way in which the study of basic conceptual meaning might be helpful would be

as a means of accounting for the ‘’oddness’’ we experience when we read sentences such as the following:

The hamburger ate the boy.

We should first note that the oddness of these sentences does not derive from their syntactic structure. According to the syntactic rules for forming English sentences we have well-performed structure. NP V NP The hamburger ate the boy

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Semantic Features (cont.…)

This sentences is syntactically good, but semantically odd.

Since the sentence The boy ate the hamburger is perfectly acceptable, we may be able to identify the source of the problem.

The components of the conceptual meaning of the noun hamburger must be significantly different from those of the noun boy, thereby preventing one, and not the other, from being used as the subject of the verb ate.

The kind of noun that can be the subject of the verb ate must denote an entity that is capable of “eating.” The noun hamburger does not have this property and the noun boy does.

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Semantic Features (cont.…) This simple example is an illustration of a procedure for

analyzing meaning in terms of semantic features.

Features such as “+animate,−animate,” “+human, −human,” “+female, −female,”

If we had to provide the crucial distinguishing features of the meanings of a set of English words such as boy, man, girl, woman, we could begin with the following diagram.

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boy man girl woman

animate + + + + human + + + +female __ __ + +adult __ + __ +

• The word girl involves the elements [+human, female, -adult ]

• Syntactic analysis + semantic features• The _________________ ate the hamburger. N [+ human ]

17• The important features of meaning that any nouns must have in

order to be used as the subject of the verb ate.• Feature = animate being. boy: + animate (+ = has the features) hamburger: - animate (- = doesn’t have the feature)

Prototype Theory Prototype theory, in linguistics, provides an explanation for the

way word meanings are organized in the mind.

It is argued that words are categorized on the basis of a whole range of typical features.

For example, a prototypical bird has feathers, wings, a beak, the ability to fly and so on.

Decisions about category membership are then made by matching the features of a given concept against a prototype.

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Prototype Theory ( cont.…) Given the category label furniture, we are quick to recognize

chair as a better example than bench or stool.

Given clothing, people recognize shirts quicker than shoes, and given vegetable, they accept carrot before potato or tomato.

However, this is one area where individual experience can lead to substantial variation in interpretation and people may disagree over the categorization of a word like avocado or tomato as fruit or vegetable.

These words seem to be treated as co-hyponyms of both fruit and vegetable in different contexts.

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