Very Excellent Syntax Semantics

8/11/2019 Very Excellent Syntax Semantics

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Syntax and Semantics

February 28, [email protected]


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Plan! Syntax:

! Recap

!Trees

!Trees

!Trees

! Semantics:

! Intro

! Semantic change


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Syntax trees! Syntactic trees help us the look at the hierarchy of constituency

within a sentence

! Its called a tree, as it looks like an upside-down tree (sort of!)

!

When drawing trees, we only ever usebinarybranching! We start from the top, and work our way down, keeping

constituency in mind

! We also keep in mind allowable sequences in Phrases


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Trees glorious trees! Once we are clear on constituency, we can start drawing trees

! We will be using X Bar structure (first proposed by Chomsky in

1970)

!This is the basic structure:


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Joining phrases! We can join phrases together to form larger phrases and sentences

! Remember our constituency rules!


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Practice!Try drawing trees for:

! Sat on the mat

! went to the shop

!The cat on the floor


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Answers - sat on the mat


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Went to the shop


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The cat on the floor


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IP structure! Weve seen that the basic structure is:

!This rings true for every phrase

! We need to consider an IP: Inflectional Phrase

!This phrase contains inflection - things liketense, agreement etc

! Well see later that auxilliaries (John will havevisited Mary) and

modals (she wouldhave done that) also go in this position


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Test sentence! The cat sat on the mat

! First work out constituency:

!The cat sat there - On the mat is a constituent of sat

!The cat sat on it - the mat is a constituent of on

! [NP] [VP[PP[NP]]]


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The cat sat on the mat! IP -> [NP] [VP[PP[NP]]]


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Are you still alive?! If so, well done. Keep it up, as we have some examples to do...

! Keelin ate a cake

! I like peanuts

! Cake is delicious

!The puppy found the child


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Answers


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Answers


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Answers


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What about new information?! What if we want to say: The fatcat sathappilyon the uglymat

!These words are called modifiers - they modify the head of a

phrase

!They are not necessary for the sentence to be grammatical, theyre

extra

! However, we can find a place to put them

! We create new positions for them to go, by adding new X levels


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Here


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Modifiers (Adjuncts)! If we need to put in modifiers, we make a new X

!This is where extra information goes


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The fat cat sat happily on the

ugly mat


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Exercises! Keelin sat daintily on the gilded chair

!The kind-hearted boy had many girlfriends

!The huge cat slowly chased the mouse


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Answers


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Answers


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Answers


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The fat cat sat on the ugly mat

with pleasure!Think about where with pleasure needs to fit in! What is it a constituent of?

! Remember: replacement and movement tests

!Also, what kind of Phrase is it? with?

! PP

! The fat cat sat happily (Replace PP with Adverb)

! [NP][VP[PP][PP]]


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With pleasure


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Exercise - Trees! The magician touched the child with the wand Whats unusual

about this sentence? How might you account for that?

!

!


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The magician touched the child

with the wand


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The magician touched the child

with the wand


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Auxilliaries and Modals!Auxilliaries are found in sentences such as He willbe drunk later

! Modals are conditionals - would,could, should, might etc

!Auxilliaries and Modals are the only overt words which go in the

spec I position

! Otherwise, as we saw, it is reserved for agreement and tense


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Auxilliary


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Modal


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Exercises! Draw the trees for:

! Keelin will eat the cake

!Annabel would go to the shop

! John has gone there


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Answers - Keelin will eat the cake


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Annabel would go to the shop


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John has gone there


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Embedded sentences! One of the key aspects of human language is that we can express

long dependencies of thought and action

!Think of: She said that he said that you thought that Mary had

cheated on Ben with John

! We need a way to syntactically express sentences within sentences

!Think of the sentence The teacher believes that the student knows

the answer

! The teacher believes thatthe student knows the answer

! the student knows the answer is a complement to the verb, itsinside the VP


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Embedding ! [NP] [VP[IP]]


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Syntax trees!Trees can get MUCH more complex than weve seen

! We havent touched on the more complex syntactic theories, but

hopefully you have an idea of how to approach syntactic analysis

! Crucially, syntax is about making sense of what is allowed,

grammatically, in a language

!This involves working out what phrases are governed by others,

and laying these observations out in rules

! We use trees as a visual way to immediately see whats going on in

the syntax of a language


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Break


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Semantics! Semantics is the study of the linguistic meaning of morphemes,

words, phrases and sentences

! Well be looking at lexical semantics - the meanings of words, and

the meaningful relationship between words

! Related to semantics is pragmatics, which is the study of howcontext can affect meaning

! Learning a language includes learning the meaning of individual

elements and how to combine these to make further meaningful

phrases and sentences

! We cant just make words mean whatever we want them to mean


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Book, dog, comb, run, eat!Theres nothing about these words that is matched to their meaning

!There is nothing about the word book thatmeanspaper, with

words...

! Its an arbitrary link, but a conventional arbitrary one

! We must know the conventions


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Principle of Compositionality! The meaning of a sentence is determined by the meaning of its

component parts and the manner in which they are arranged in

syntactic structure (OGrady, 284)

! So, the meaning of a sentence is over and above just the word

meanings

! Interface of syntax and semantics - syntax influences meaning

! Keelin killed John vs John killed Keelin: huge difference


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Metaphor!The use of an expression that usually expresses one concept - its

literal meaning - but is used to describe another concept, creating

an implicit comparison

! Metaphor is a hugely important part of language - we use it to

express abstract things etc! Often, the literal interpretation is so unlikely that people will use their

imagination to interpret any anomaly e.g. Walls have ears

! Here, the principle of compositionality becomes stretchy - listeners

stretch is to produce a likely meaning

! John is a snake in the grass Time is money


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Idioms!These are phrases which have a set meaning that must be learned

- the Principle of Compositionality doesnt help us in interpreting

them

!They cannot be broken down into composite meaningful parts, nor

re-worded or recombined! She put her foot in her mouth

! She threw her weight around

! Bite your tongue

! Ill give you a piece of my mind


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Semantic change/shift

! One of the most interesting aspects of semantics (in my opinion) is

tracking the changing meaning of words through time

! Even when a word is retained in a language, its meaning will often

change over time

! Often social change - people change how its used

! www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2011/04/

the_nonplussed_problem.html


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Semantic broadening! Here, words get a more general meaning than they once had


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Semantic narrowing!The opposite - where words now have a more narrow meaning

than before


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Amelioration!A word gets a more positive connotation than it had before


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Exercise(from Meyerhoff 2006)


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Exercise


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Exercise! What is the type of semantic change seen in the table above

(adapted from Meyerhoff (2006))?

! Can you think of any other terms for women which have similarly

shifted over time?

! Pejoration

! Mistress

! Buxom: kind and loving - big busted


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Exercise! Identify each of the semantic changes below


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Sense relations - Synonymy!This term refers to different words with the same meaning

(apathetic, phlegmatic, passive, sluggish, indifferent)

! So, if these terms really do mean exactly the same thing, they

should fit easily into the same environment

! An apathetic/phlegmatic/passive/sluggish/indifferent man

! Perhaps not.... Its actually very unusual to find two words which

mean precisely the same thing

!This is because true synonyms are disliked in language - if two

words have roughly equal meaning, they tend to have a distinct,

specialised use


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Synonymy!An example of perfect synonymy?

! Hes sitting on the sofa/ hes sitting on the couch

! Were very likely to be able to interpret either sentence if we know

both words

! Sofa and couch refer to the same type of concrete object, and have

many semantic properties in common

! When synonyms occur in otherwise identical sentences, the

sentences are known as lexical paraphrases (same meaning)


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Homonymy! Homonymy can be seen as the opposite of synonymy

! Here, one form is associated with more than one meaning

!This is also known as homophony (same-sound)

!

Cross (cross the street, she is cross, Jesus on the cross)! Bat (baseball, winged animal)

! Homonyms need not always be homographs (same spelling) e.g.

tale/tail


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Ambiguity! Homonymy can createlexicalambiguity (not structural)

! Prostitutes appeal to the Prime Minister

! Here, the ambiguity comes from the term appeal

!

Ill meet you by the bank! By the financial institution or the riverside?

! We must use additional information/context to decipher this

ambiguity


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Polysemy! Dont confuse this with homonymy

! Here, we have one form with different, butrelatedmeanings

!A dirty floor, a dirty trick/A dark room, a dark secret

!

Here, the relationship is one of semantic extension!The meaning of dirty (soiled, not clean) has been extended to suit

things that seem underhand, shady etc

! Bear is polysemous (to tolerate, to carry, to support), and is also

homonymous (animal, and the polysemous verb above)


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Antonymy

!This occurs when we have words which are opposite in meaning

! long-short/ young-old/male-female/small-large/dead-alive

!Two types: complementary and gradable

! Complementary antonyms: These are not gradable. There are only

two options, you cant have both at the same time

!Alive-dead, male-female, present-absent, awake-asleep


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Antonymy! Gradable antonyms: These allow us to use modified such as very,

rather, a little

! Gradable antonyms often come from sets of words on a

continuum: tiny, small, medium, large, huge, gargantuan

! big-small, hot-cold, fast-slow, happy-sad

!The meaning of adjectives here is related to the object modified:

A smallelephant is bigger than abigmouse

! Gradable antonyms: the negative of one is not synonymous with

the other e.g. not happy is not necessarily sad

! Usually, one is marked and one is unmarked: We ask how high is

the mountain, rather than how low. Here, high is unmarked


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Converses! Here, each word of a pair represents a different side of the same

relationship

!Above-below, buy-sell, husband-wife, teacher-pupil

! So, Iboughta car from someone who soldit

! Same relationship, different views

!Also sometimes known as Relational Opposites


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Hyponymy!A word is a hyponym of another word if it belongs to a general

class expressed by the other word

!Terrier, corgi, alsatian are all hyponyms of dog

! Lion, tiger, leopard are all hyponyms of cat/feline

! Seafoam, royal, turquoise are all hyponyms of blue

! Here, think of hypo - under. The hyponyms fall underthe general

class


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Hyperonymy! On the other hand, if a word expresses a more general category of

which another word is a member, then it is a hyperonym of the

other word

! Dog is hyperonym of terrier, corgi, alsatian

! Blue is hyperonym of seafoam, turquoise, royal

! Here, think of hyper over - Hyperonyms exist over the more

detailed distinctions


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Exercises! Explain the semantic ambiguity of these sentences by coming up

with two sentences which paraphrase them. Why are they

ambiguous?

(e.g. She cant bear children - she cant give birth to children/ she

cant tolerate children) - polysemy of bear

!The proprietor of the fish shop was the sole owner

!You should see her shop

! When he got the clear title to the land, it was a good deed

! It takes a good ruler to make a straight line

! He saw that gasoline can explode

! Every man loves a woman


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Answers!The proprietor of the fish shop was the sole owner(sole = fish/only

- homonymy)

!You should see her shop (shop = N/V - homonymy)

! When he got the clear title to the land, it was a good deed(deed =

action/ proof of ownership)! It takes a good ruler to make a straight line (ruler = ruler of country/

thing that helps draw straight lines - homonymy)

! He saw that gasoline can explode (can = N, modal verb -

homonymy, that = determiner/ complementiser - homonymy)

! Every man loves a woman(a woman = can be one woman, or each

man loves a different woman)


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Summary! Semantics aims to look at meaning in language

!This involves looking at word meanings and sentence meanings

! It also involves looking at how meanings can and do change over

time


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Reading for next week! http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2012/01/19/leave-los-

ninos-alone-the-mental-costs-of-linguistic-assimilation/

!This looks at bilingualism, which well be looking at next week (as

well as language acquisition, disruption etc)


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References! Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., and Hyams, N. (2003).An Introduction to

language. 7th edition. Massachusetts: Thomson Heinle

! Meyerhoff, M (2006). Introducing sociolinguistics. New York:

Routledge

! OGrady, W., Dobrovolshy, M., and Katamba, F. (1997)Contemporary linguistics: An introduction.Essex: Pearson

Education Ltd

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