Lecture 7: Semantics & Pragmatics
SENTENCE PARTS
We have a lot of time.
subject verb a main phrase (dopełnienie)
Semantics:
sentence meaning
knowing the meaning of sentence is knowing its truth conditions
tautologies are sentences which are always true (e.g. circles are round)
contradictions are sentences that are always false (e.g. circles are aquare)
paradoxes are sentences without a truth value (e.g. “This sentence is false” – it can’t be true, else it’s false, and it can’t be false, else it’s true) [jeśli powiemy, że to zdanie jest prawdziwe to tak naprawdę jest fałszywe]
Ambiguity – sense of words
humour:
The police came to my house earlier and said my dog had chased someone on the bike. I said: you must be joking officer. My dog hasn’t got a car.
Anomaly
a situation in which semantic words cannot be combined together as a semantic structure
Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
struktura zdania jest dobra, ale znaczenie nie pasuje = anomaly coś nie może być jednocześnie colourless i green
Metaphor
Walls have ears /Cervantes/
Idioms
collocation of words we can’t understand word by word
bite your tongue, sell down the river, have a blast
Theories of word meaning:
REFERENCE (meaning refers to for example a person) The director of the school Ms Monika Madej-Cetnarowska
SENSE Highest executive office in the Institute of Foreign Languages.
Lexical relations
synonyms (sofa-couch)
antonyms (present-absent)
homonyms/homophones (flour-flower)
polysemy (I’ll meet you by the bank) institution or river bank
hyponyms – examples of more general group (red, blue, grey colour)
metonym – a word that substitutes for an object; the name of an attribute or concept associated with that object (crown – king, Scotland Yard – Criminal Investigation Department, Washington – government)
Semantic features
slips of the tongue helps us understand semantic properties
weźmy sałatkę, żeby nie jechać z pustymi nogami
she came too early (instead of „late”)
Semantic features of nouns
female (hen, waitress, actress, girl, woman, widow)
human (child, teenager, parent, dean, teacher)
Grammatical features
mass (uncountable) nouns
count nouns
In other languages, nouns occur with classifiers i.e. grammatical morphemes that mark their semantic class.
Semantic features of verbs
“cause” (kill-cause to die, darken cause to become dark)
go (=change location: swim, fly, give, buy)
Verbs can either describe events (eventives) or states (statives). Eventives sound natural when passivized and when expressed progressively.
Megan bought Stewart a bottle of wine. (eventive)
Megan knows Stewart (stative)