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Introduction to Linguistics II Ling 2-121C, group b

Lecture 7

Eleni Miltsakaki

AUTH

Spring 2006

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Review: Word meaning

• State the semantic properties that are common and different between the following groups of words

1. (a) bachelor, man, son, paperboy, pope, chief

2. (b) bull, rooster, drake, ram

3. (a) table, stone, pencil, cup, house, ship, car

4. (b) milk, alcohol, rice, soup, mud

5. (a) walk, run, skip, jump, hop, swim

6. (b) fly, skate, ski, ride, cycle, canoe, hang-glide

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Review: Word meaning• Explain why the following are retronyms:

– Straight razor, one-speed bike, conventional warfare, acoustic guitar, bar soap

• Classify the following antonyms as complementary, gradable or relational opposites– Good-bad, expensive-cheap, parent-offspring, beautiful-

ugly, false-true, pass-fail, hot-cold, legal-illegal

• Think of five or more heteronyms

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Review: Phrasal meaning

• What does the principle of compositionality state?

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Review: Meaning of nouns

• What is it important to identify the head of a phrase?

• What do you know of the meaning derived from adjective-noun combinations?

• What do you know about the meaning derived from noun-noun compounds?

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Review: Sense and reference

• What is sense and reference?

• Do all nouns have both sense and reference? Give examples.

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Review: Sense and reference

• In a conversation about Britain in 1982 can the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Conservative Party have the same referent?

• If we are talking about a situation in which John is standing in the corner, can John have the same referent as the person in the corner?

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Review: Sense and reference

• Do the following words refer to things in the world?– Almost, probable, and, if

• When you look up the meaning of the word in a dictionary what do you find?– Its referent?– An expression of the same sense?

• Sense is hard to define. It’s easier to talk about words that have the same sense in order to understand sense.

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• Video: What does ‘alike’ mean?

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Verb meaning

• The verb determines the number of objects

• It constrains the semantic properties of both the subject and the object(s)

• Examples?

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Thematic roles

Subjects and objects of verbs are semantically related to the verb.

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Thematic roles

• The boy found a red brick

• Agent: the boy

• Theme: a red brick

Part of the meaning of find is that the subject is an agent and the object a theme.

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Thematic roles

• John put the red brick on the wall.

• Agent: John

• Theme: the red brick

• Location: on the wall

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Thematic roles

• Mary received a gift from John

• Source: John

• Goal: Mary

• Theme: a gift

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Thematic roles

• John cut his hair with a razor.

• Agent: John

• Theme: his hair

• Instrument: with a razor

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Thematic roles

• John admires Mary

• Experiencer: John

• Stimulus: Mary

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Thematic roles in other languages

• German does not allow location to be the subject of a clause.– This hotel forbids dogs– In diesem Hotel sind Hunde verbotem– (in this hotel are dogs forbidden)

• Thematic roles are often referred to as ‘case’ of the noun– In Finnish, the morphological shape of the noun reflects its

thematic role

• Languages with a rich case system often put more constraints on the thematic role that’s permitted in subject position

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The theta-criterion

• The process of assigning thematic roles is called theta assignment.– E.g., The boy opened the door with the key

• Theta assignment:– Agent=the subject– Theme=the direct object– Instrument=the prepositional phrase

• Theta criterion: states that a particular thematic role may occur once in a sentence– *The boy opened the door with the key with a lock-pick

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The semantic relations between verbs and noun phrases are part of linguistic competence and account for much of meaning in language.

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Sentential meaning

• Like noun phrases sentences can have sense or intension

• Sentences can also have reference or extension

• Their extension is true if the sentence is true, false if the sentence is false

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Sentence meaning

• Truth conditions– The sense of a declarative sentence makes it

possible to know under what circumstances the sentence is true

– These circumstances are the truth conditions of the sentence

– The truth of falsehood of sentences is their reference/extension

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Sentence meaning

• Truth conditions– Knowing the truth conditions is not the same

as knowing the facts– The truth conditions let you examine the world

and learn the facts– You may not know the truth of ‘The

Mecklenburg Charter was signed in 1770’– But if you know its meaning you know how to

discover its truth

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Sentence meaning

• Truth conditionsE.g. Rufus believes that the Declaration of

Independence was sign in 1976– An entire sentence maybe true even if one or

more parts are false– The example is true if some individual named

Rufus believe the statement

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Paraphrase

• Two sentences are paraphrases if they have the same truth conditions, i.e. whenever one is true, the other is true too

1. The horse threw the rider.

2. The rider was thrown by the horse.

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Paraphrase

• Not all active-passive pairs are paraphrases– Every person in this room speaks two

languages– Two languages are spoken by every person in

this room– These two sentences do not have the same

truth conditions

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Entailment

• Sometimes knowing the truth of a sentence entails or necessarily implies the truth of another sentence– Corday assasinated Marat– Marat is dead

• Much of what we know about the world comes from knowing the entailments of true sentences

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Contradiction

• Contradiction is negative entailment– Scott is a baby– Scott is an adult

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Events and states

• Some sentences describe events such as – John kissed Mary– John ate oysters

• Other sentences describe states such as– John knows Mary– John likes oysters

• These differences have syntactic consequences

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Events and states

• Compare– Mary was kissed by John – John is kissing Mary– Kiss Mary!– John deliberately kissed Mary

• With– ? Mary is known by John – ? John is knowing Mary– Know Mary!– John deliberately knows Mary

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Pronouns and coreference

• Show the close interaction of sentence structure and semantics– Reflexive pronouns pick an antecedent from

the same S or phrase– Compare:

• Jane bit herself• * Jane said that herself slept

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Pronouns and coreference

• Sentence structure plays a role in the interpretation of pronouns

• Compare– John believes that he is a genius– He believes that John is a genius

• It’s not about linear order– The fact that he is considered a genius bothers John

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Anomaly

• Anomaly occurs in many ways– Contradictory semantic properties– Nonsense words– Violation of semantic rules…

• The fact that we are able to understand anomalous sentences and identify them as such is evidence of our knowledge of the semantic system of a language

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Anomaly

• Sometimes breaking semantic rules is done intentionally to create special effects, as in poetry

– …children building this rainman out of snow (e.e. cummings)

– … a grief ago (Dylan Thomas)

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Metaphor

• A metaphor is an expression that ordinarily designates one concept, used for another– The fall of the empire– Walls have ears– Dr. Jekyll is a butcher– Time is money

• To understand metaphors we need to understand both the literal meaning and facts about the world

• Metaphor can have a strong cultural component– My car is a lemon

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Idioms• The principle of compositionality is sometimes supeseded by

expressions that seem decomposable

• Idioms are similar in structure to ordinary phrases but have frozen meaning– Bite your tongue– Kick the bucket– Give a piece of your mind

• Paraphrases often do not retain the idiomatic meaning but there are exceptions– The FBI kept tabs on radicals– Tabs were kept on radical by the FBI