10 – 20.01.12

Semantic relations

Synonymy – words having the (near) same meaning:

help/assist

hard/difficult

buy/purchase

Antonymy - words having opposite meanings ( light/dark, heavy/light)

Binary & non-binary antonyms

Binary antonyms: on/off, open/shut, dead/alive

With non-gradable antonyms (complementary pairs), comparative constructions are not normally used (there is no middle ground). e..g. Alive/dead, male/female, married/single

Non-binary antonyms (polar antonyms): old/young, wide/narrow. They are opposite ends of a scale that includes various intermediate terms (gradable antonyms)

long short tall short high low

old young wide narrow deep shallow

In each of the pairs of measure adjectives, one member is marked and one unmarked (global member).

Semantic relations

binary antonyms non-binary antonyms

Converse antonyms (relational opposites)

Conversensess is a kind of antonymy between two terms.

For any two converse relational terms X and Y, if [a] is the X of [b], then [b] is the Y of [a]

Husband of /wife of

employer -of / employee of

Directional opposites:

above/below

in front of /behind

left-off/right of

Reversives:

enter/exit

pack/unpack

lengthen/shorten

raise/lower

tie/untie

Hyponymy describes what happens when we say Something is a kind of something (meaning inclusion)

hyponyms – words whose meaning are included in the meaning of a more general word.

The lexeme at the top is the superordinate term, or hypernym

e.g. apple → fruit => apple is the hyponym of fruit; fruit is the hypernym/superordinate of apple

dog → animal;

actress → woman; actress is hyponym of woman, woman is the hypernym of actress

daisy, rose, tulip are co-hyponyms of flower;

desk, table, sofa → furniture;

meronymy – the semantic relation that holds between a part and the whole.

Arm: body, (arm is a part of body and body is the holonym of fnger)

^it's not a kind of body, but its part

petal: flower – petal is meronym of flower, flower is holonym of petal

enginge: car

Prototypes

Among any group of co-hyponyms, certain words will be more prototypical than others. While the words canary, cormorant, dove, duck, flamingo, parrot, pelican and robin are all equally co-hyponyms of the superordinate bird, they are not all considered to be equally good examples of the category 'bird'. The most characteristic instance of the category 'bird' seems to be robin

What comes first to our mind when we hear a word “bird → sparrow' not penguin or dodo

The idea of 'the characteristic instance' of a category is known as the prototype, (resemblance to the clearest example)

A prototype is an object or referent that is considered typical of the whole set. Thus, if you encounter the lexeme door in isolation and immediately think of a door swinging on hinges rather than one that slides or rotates, that kind of door is for you the prototype of all doors.

Polysemy - one form (written or spoken) having multiple meanings that are all related by extension (conceptually and/or historically)

e.g.

• mouth

• part of a river

• entrance of a cave

• part of the body

but 'zamek' is not polysemy. All above are kind of entrance

Homonyms – two or more words that are pronounced the same and spelled the same but have different meanings

homophones – two or more words that are pronounced the same but have different spellings and different meanings

Homonymy

Two or more words are homonyms if they either sound the same (homophones), have the same spelling (homographs), or both, but do not have related meanings.

Homographs:

bank (river/finance)

bat (flying & baseball)

pupil (school & eye)

homophones:

bare/bear

meat/meet

flour/flower

right/write

to/too/two

Polyssemous words have single entry in a dictionary,

Homonyms will typically have two separate entries.

Heteronyms – homographs pronounced differently

dove (bird), dove (dive dove)

lead (guide), lead/led/ (metal)

bow (weapon), bow (bend)

Figures of speech

metaphor – two unlike notions are implicitly related to suggest an identity between them.

All the world's a stage (Shakespeare As you like it)

paradox -

metonymy – the use of an attribute in place of the whole

crown – attribute of a king

oxymoron

apostrophe

chiasmus – a balanced structure, in which the main elements are reversed ← not on exam

Love's fire heats water, water cools not love (W. Shakespeare, Sonnet 154)

Entailment

a. That animal is a collie.

b. That animal is a dog.

c. ! That animal is a collie, but it is not a dog.

Sentence (c) is a contradiction

The inference that (b) must be true whenever (a) is true – provided the animal referred to is the same one – is an example of entailment

'today I was late for work' – this sentence entails that I have a job

It's a sandal

entails:

• It's an item of footwear

• it's got a sole

• its upper part is ventilated

Entailments are the conclusions (inferences) which are guaranteed to be true given the truth of an initial proposition

A sentence S1) entails a sentence (S2) if and only if whenever S1 is true, S2 is also true

proposition – declarative sentence

Has Peter stopped smoking?

Would you like another apple cake? ← he's already had apple cake

^they introduce presupposition

Contradiction – negative entailment

Married bachelor

Ambiguity, context

Expressions that make crucial use of the location of entities relative to speaker are called deictic and the act of using them is called deixis.

There are expressions in language which can be referred to sth concrete situation

'I don't want to be here' – it may mean different things depending where it is spoken and who says so

Deixis comes in three major types:

a person deixis

(e.g. I, me, my, you, yours, verb endings in some languages)

a time deixis

(e.g. then, yesterday, now, in five minutes, verb tenses)

a place deixis

(e.g. this, that, here, there, above, behind, left, right, come, go)

I'll meet you here tomorrow at 3 o'clock and I'll give you one.

He's putting the ball on the green.

Put,/put/ - to place

put, /pAt/ - to hit a golf ball lightly

She cannot bear children.

Anaphora – the process of replacing a longer expression wppearing in a procedeing utterance with a shorter one.

(co-reference of one expression with its antecedent).

Coming back

My mother is sick, I have to visit her

Forward references = cataphora

Going forward

As he was unaccustomed to it, Jake found the pressure very hard to deal with

Speech act theory

When our words perform some action, we say that they are performing a speech act. A speech act as the action performed by a speaker with an utterance. These types of utterance are called performative.

Performative verbs:

baptising: I baptise you

marrying

sentencing

naming ships

The Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis

The structure of our language in large measure affects the way we perceive the world.

The theory of culturally based 'ways of speaking'

Eng. Ape, monkey – pol. Małpa

Pol – we have only one word for monkey

If language has no name for certain colour, ppl won't see this colour