ACS 106 Study Guide - Final Guide: Lexical Semantics, Idiom, Principle Of Compositionality
3 May 2018
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ACS106 Introduction to Language Final Exam Study Guide Winter 2018
Key Terms
Semantics
-Helps to tease out the patterns of meaning that are embedded in words within a given natural
language.
-The meaning of morphemes, words, phrases and sentences.
Lexical Semantics
-The meaning of words and their relations.
-The meanings of a phrase or a sentence is in part predicated on the functions of the meanings
that the word/s contain.
-Refers directly to the word meaning; this is not to be confused with sentence meaning
(morpheme;wordl;idiom)
-The meanings of words as they are stored in a metal lexicon are relatively fixed and
conventionalized and are directly stored in one’s lexicon during language acquisition.
Lexical Relations
-Speakers have knowledge about the meaning relationships among different words.
-Words can be semantically related to one another in a series of ways,
•Synonyms
•Antonyms
•Polysemous relations
Phrasal/Sentential Semantics
-Concerned with the meanings of the syntactic units that are larger than the words themselves.
Anomaly
-Meaning may not always be completely obvious, even to native speakers.
-In some cases, compositionality completely breaks down, leading to semantic anomaly.
•These are cases where the meaning is not immediately or clearly obvious.
-Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
•Does this follow a predictable syntactic structure? YES
•Does this follow follow conventional semantic rules/patterns? NO
-Semantic Anomaly
•Uninterpretable based on rigid semantic roles, albeit interpretable based on creative or
metaphoric interpretation.
Metaphor
-Requires imagination to derive meaning in situ (contextually) [when anomaly is understood
as meaningful concept]
-The thing is we can understand these things, even if they are semantically anomalous or
apparently nonsensical.
-This is the domain or metaphor; which is by definition anomalous or parseable in many
different ways.
-These can also potentially have literal meaning as well.
-The principles of compositionality can be extremely elastic and meaning can be inferred.
•These provide some resemblance or comparison so that the thing makes sense.
•Entering into the realm of metaphor often allows us to make sense of things that would
otherwise be nonsensical.
Conceptual Metaphor
-Are conventional structures that take concepts from a source domain where concepts are
mapped between two domains: source and target.
-The use of metaphor in these domains are often below the level of conscious effort.
-Inferential information and structure comes from a source domain into the target domain.
-Lakoff’s model
•These ideas permeate so many aspects of our lives.
-Politics, family, scientific concepts, and social relations.
•They also are in non-linguistic realms, such as gesture and spatial orientation.
•EG. Father as head.
Idiom
-Fixed meaning determined at a previous time that needs to be committed directly to memory
within a speaking community.
-Within the primary formalist paradigm, words and morphemes are for the most part arbitrary
and must therefore be arranged in some sort of mental lexicon.
•Entails semantic properties of words and their associated meanings.
-The meaning of some words or phrases cannot be parsed by any conventional approach
because they have transformed from the status of metaphor to fixtures in the language.
•At the phrasal level, we know these are idiomatic phrases.
Idiomatic Phrases
-Compositionality is superseded by expressions that act like individual morphemes can cannot
be decomposed.
-These have fixed meaning and must be memorized and stored with individual referents.
•*at least this is the story!
Word Meaning: Sense
-Extends beyond reference i the domain of real-world referents.
-Eg. unicorns; Jabberwockies; colourless green ideas; unicorns; hobbits; Harry Potters.
Word Meaning: Reference
-The idea that the word or expression to which a word refers and its association with the object
is the product of “reference” ; these may differ in the context.
-Eg. “The Prime Minister”;”Justin Trudeau” (have the same reference; limited)
-“The Prime Minister”;”the most senior minister of the executive branch of government” (same
reference; enduring)
Synonym
-One of the best known examples of lexical relations.
-Words or expressions that have the same(ish) meaning in some or all contexts.
Antonym
-Those words which typically have the opposite general meaning.
-Can be divided into two general categories.
•Complimentary pairs (0 or 1)
-Alive/dead
-Present/
-Awake/
•Gradable pairs (1 2 3 4 4)
-Big/small
-Hot/
-Fast/
-Happy/
Homonym
-When a form (written or spoken) has two or more meanings, often with separate histories.
Semantic Features
-Are properties that are part of word meanings that reflect our knowledge about what words
mean.
-This allows us to break down words in various ways and put them into categories.
•Antonyms share all but one semantic feature and the fact of lexical difference.
•Synonyms share all but one lexical feature.
-Semantic features are among other conceptual elements that are part of meanings of words in
sentence.
-Various features, such as +animate or +human; -human can be treated as basic elements
involved in differentiating meaning at a categorical level.
-These form a foundation of “truth-based” semantics and are based on the set of features or
properties of words that reflect knowledge about the meaning of words.
-Eg. Big+Purple= Antonyms? Synonyms? Other?
•Nope! These things have too few semantic features in common to make a meaningful
comparison.
•Big = about size
•Purple = about colour
-Evidence
•Semantic properties of words should not be confused with nonlinguistic properties, such as
physical properties.
•Semantic features are often shared among words and can be invoked in context of
misspeaking, where accidental production takes place in the form of errors.
-Nouns
•Count nouns vs mass nouns.
-Twelve dogs > twelve rices.
-Count nouns can be enumerated and pluralized (dogs, babies, professors)
-Mass nouns cannot (French toast, rice, milk, water, hair, spaghetti, furniture)
-These can be different in different languages.
-Verbs
•May have syntactic consequences.
•Events: Janey kissed Paul; Jessa ate cheese.
•States: Jennifer knows She likes cheese.
-Aspects of the way that thing came about are also encoded in the words (manners)
•Darken
•Kill *to cause to*
•Beautify
Sociolinguistics
-The study of the relationship between language and society.
Document Summary
Acs106 introduction to language final exam study guide winter 2018. Helps to tease out the patterns of meaning that are embedded in words within a given natural language. The meaning of morphemes, words, phrases and sentences. The meaning of words and their relations. The meanings of a phrase or a sentence is in part predicated on the functions of the meanings that the word/s contain. Refers directly to the word meaning; this is not to be confused with sentence meaning (morpheme;wordl;idiom) The meanings of words as they are stored in a metal lexicon are relatively fixed and conventionalized and are directly stored in one"s lexicon during language acquisition. Speakers have knowledge about the meaning relationships among different words. Words can be semantically related to one another in a series of ways: synonyms, antonyms, polysemous relations. Concerned with the meanings of the syntactic units that are larger than the words themselves.
