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Description
Flashcards by Lisza Neumeier, updated more than 1 year ago
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Created by Lisza Neumeier
about 8 years ago
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| Question | Answer |
| Lexical ambiguity examples | Can cause misunderstandings Multiple possible meanings: • The priest married my sister (Did the priest conduct the ceremony? Or is he now the sister’s husband?) • “You know, somebody actually complimented me on my driving today. They left a little note on the windscreen; it said, ‘Parking Fine.’ So that was nice.” (Tim Vine) |
| lexical ambiguity in terms of meaning? | |
| Mismatches of meaning | Noun + Verb + Adverb -Tigers run quickly -*Advice drinks forgetfully. -*Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. |
| Semantic role? Also called ___ or ___ | --> The role that a noun phrase plays in the event described by a sentence Also called thematic role or Theta role |
| Semantic role example The woman at the apple. The man took the food from the kitchen to the dining room. | |
| Can we just say that the agent is the subject of the sentence and the theme is the object? | no!!! |
| Semantic roles | Agent, Theme, Experiencer, Instrument, Source, Goal, Location |
| Agent | the ‘doer’ of the action |
| Theme | the thing being described or affected by the action |
| Experiencer | the entity experiencing something (seeing, feeling...) |
| Instrument | the thing being used to carry out an action |
| Source | the starting point of a movement |
| Goal | the end point of a movement |
| Location | where the entity is located / where the action takes place |
| semantic roles how many roles per entity? | |
| What is a corpus? | -a large and principled collection of natural texts (written and/or spoken) -typically based on a specific type of text, aimed at being representative of the type under examination. |
| What is corpus linguistics? | linguistic description based on the extensive accumulation of actually occurring language data and its analysis by computer |
| Why are corpora relevant to semantics? | • Frequency of words • Frequency of different meanings for the same word • Collocations with other words • Associations with certain registers / dialects |
| Sentence meaning: What is a lexicon? finite or infinite? | -Essentially the vocabulary of a language. -Very large, but finite (i.e. there is a limited number of items of vocabulary per language) |
| Sentence meaning Sentences? | -There is an infinite number of possibilities -Meanings are compositional (i.e. put together using smaller parts, e.g. words) -Words have a meaning on their own, but in combination (and in different combinations) create new meanings: eg. Mike saw Susan. Susan saw Mike. |
| Syntactic/structural ambiguity | The relationship between the words can be misunderstood / interpreted in different ways |
| sentence meaning vs. speaker meaning | semantics vs. pragmatics |
| Semantics | -Sentenece/word meaning -What is coded in language -What you would find in a dictionary (intrinsic meaning of words) |
| Pragmatics | -speaker meaning -What is intended/implied -Not found in a dictionary -Speaker intention often contradicts word meaning |
| sb opens the window and it's really cold outside what do you say? | • Are you mad?! • I think it’s a bit cold for that... • What are you doing? • Do you have to do that? All you really mean is: CLOSE THE WINDOW |
| There is a conflict between sentence meaning (semantics) and speaker meaning (pragmatics) | A: Are you mad?! B: - No, I’m not, but thank you for your concern. B: - Oh, sorry, you’re right, I’ll shut the window. |
| representing sentence meaning proposition | Proposition: state of affairs described by the sentence -->What is said about something e.g. The small boy ate the delicious chocolate cake. The boy was small / The cake was delicious / It was a chocolate cake / The cake was eaten (...) |
| Truth value? | is the propositional content true or false? (truth-conditional semantics) |
| Semantic relations among sentences What is a paraphrase? | -The ‘same thing’ in ‘other words’ -Two sentences have the same proposition (and the same truth-value) -We can liken it to synonymy • Spain won against Croatia. / Croatia was beaten by Spain. • Mr Jones is Gary’s teacher. / Gary is Mr Jones’ pupil. • Many people attended the lecture. / The lecture was attended by many people. |
| Semantic relations among sentences What is entailment? | -The truth of one sentence necessarily implies that of the other -We can liken it to hyponymy • My sister drove me to work.My sister can drive. • Jenny quit smoking last year.Jenny used to smoke. • Paul’s partner doesn’t like fishing.Paul has a partner. |
| What conclusions can we draw from the following sentences? (i.e. what is entailed in these sentences?) • Sandra dropped her phone in the pond. • This is Wendy, she is Jacob’s wife. • Sorry, I can’t talk, I’m running late for work! | Sandra owned a phone. Jacob is married. Sorry, I can’t talk, I’m running late for work! |
| Semantic relations among sentences: What is contradiction? | If one sentence is true, the other is false We can liken it to antonymy • I am jobless. / I work at Billa. • Fred is single. / Paula is Fred’s girlfriend. • Sam’s legs are hurting. / Sam is a snake. |
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