LING 132 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Logical Consequence, Cooperative Principle, Lexical Semantics
Document Summary
Pragmatics msg. speaker intends to convey; includes how context contributes to meaning. Pragmatic meaning: reason john is so tired is because he has to take care of 3 kids: pragmatic meaning built on top of semantic (literal) meaning. Some words have no meaning; they simply refer to another word (i. e. he" to john) Theory: group words into natural classes, explain semantic in a sentence, have semantic relations among words (synonyms, antonyms, etc. , explain certain syntactic properties (count/mass nouns, eventive/stative verbs) Meaning of a word divisible into smaller units (semantic features: i. e. dog is a mammal, canine, domestic; girl = mammal, human, young, not male. Polysemy: same-sounding words w/ same (or related) meaning/features: i. e. face (of a person, of a building) Homonymy: same pronunciation, different features (lexical ambiguities: i. e. tale/tail, bat/bat, to/two. A response to a target word (e. g. dog) is faster when preceded by a semantically related prime (e. g. cat) compared to an unrelated prime (car)
