Synonymy

- Same meaning in some or all contexts

o Filbert/hazelnut
o Youth/adolescent
o Automobile/car
o …
- Perfect synonymy is rare, if not impossible. Ex. Youth and adolescent both
refer to people about the same age, but latter word can be used to imply
immaturity.
Antonymy
- Opposites with respect to some component of their meaning
o dark light
o boy girl
o hot cold
o up down
o in out
o come go
- the words contrast with respect to at least one aspect of their meaning. Ex.
Boy and girl are opposites with respect to gender, although they are alike
in other respects (both are human).

Hypernym
- word for general class (ex. Dog)
Hyponyms
- words for the members of that class (Ex. Spaniel, collie, beagle, etc)
- Dog can also be hyponym as it’s hypernym is animal.

Meronym
- Designates parts of a whole, (Ex, head, nose, paws, tail)
Holonym
- Whole to which parts belong.
- Dog is the Holonym for parts.
Polysemy
- occurs where a word has two or more related meanings
-

Homophony
- exists where a single phonetic form has two or more entirely distinct
meanings
- assumed as two separate words with the same pronunciation rather than a
single word with different meanings.
-

- Homophones do not need identical spelling. Ex. Write and right are
homophones, piece and peace.
Lexical ambiguity
- Polysemy and homophony create lexical ambiguity, sentence can mean
different thing.
- Ex. Liz bought a pen (homophone).
- In actual speech, the surrounding words and sentences make the intended
meaning clear.
- Ex. He got a loan from the bank. / She sat on the bank of the river.

Different words with same spelling are called homographs. Ex. Bow. Both
homograph and homophone = homonyms

Paraphrase
 - Two sentences that have essentially same meaning.
o The police chased the burglar. The burglar was chased by the
police.
- Have same truth conditions – they are true under the same
circumstances.

- Active and passive sentences are not always paraphrase

o Everyone admires his parents
o His parents are admired by everyone
- Many linguistics feel that languages do not permit two or more structures
to have absolutely identical meanings and that paraphrases are therefore
never perfect.

Entailment
- When the truth of one sentence guarantees the truth of another sentence,
we say that there is a relation of entailment.
- Asymmetrical entailment
o The park wardens killed the bear
o The bear is dead
- The bear could be dead without the park wardens having killed it
o Prince is a dog
o Prince is an animal.
- Even if we know prince is an animal, we cant know if it is a dog.

Contradiction
- If one sentence is true, another sentence must be false.
o Charles is a bachelor
o Charles is married

Connotation
- Set of associations that a word’s use can evoke.
o Ex. For minnesotans, word winter evokes snow, cold, short days, etc
- Associations but not meaning.
Denotation
- Denotation is what a word refers to, i.e. its referent.
o Ex. Denotation of word dog corresponds to the set of canines.
- Connected to meaning but cannot be one and the same thing.
o Ex. Unicorn have no referents in the real world even though the
mean something.
Extension and Intension
- Extension: set of entities that it picks out in the world (referents)
o Ex. President of US. – Donald trump (extension)
- Intension: its inherent sense, the concepts that it evokes
o Ex. President of US – elected head of US (intension)
o

Componential analysis (semantic decomposition)

- Tries to represent a word’s intention by breaking it down into smaller
semantic components.

-
- Advantage is that it allows us to group entities into natural classes.
Verb meaning
- The concept of go
o Positional change
 Present in meaning of fly, walk, crawl
 Ex. The bird flew to its nest
o Possessional change
 Manifested in the meaning of give, buy, inherit
 Ex. The coach gave a new ball to the children
o Identification change
 Shows up in become and turn into
 Ex. The caterpillar turned into a butterfly
Verb meaning and C-selection

Chapter 2
The conceptual system
Fuzzy concepts
- Rich
o How much does a person need to be called rich.
- Words that do not have clear-cut boundaries
o Tall, old, heavy smoker, strong, gray-haired, genius, clean, bargain
- Members can be graded in terms of their typicality.
 o Football star, Premier than community division
- Graded membership
o Ex. Birds. Sparrows are better examples than penguins.
o Have best prototypical exemplars
o

Metaphor
- Understanding of one concept in terms of another
o Ex. Time as money
o Due to our perception that time is valuable commodity that can be
gained and lost.
 You are wasting my time
 This gadget will save you hours
 How do you spend your time these days?
 I have invested a lot of time.
- Another is use of words that are primarily associated with spatial
orientation to talk about physical and psychological states. (up and down)
 o

The lexicalization of concepts

- Languages can differ from each other in terms of how they organize and
express particular concepts
o Ex. Word for snow in Inuktitut.
-

- Process whereby concepts are encoded in the words of a language

o Lexicalizes falling and snow in a single word while English uses two
separate words
- NOT ALWAYS CORRELATE WITH CULTURAL FACTORS. Many vocab
related to light in English.
 -

Motion verbs
- English lexicalization includes a conflation pattern that combines manner
and motion into a single verb meaning.
-

- Different among countries

-

Grammatical concepts
- Encoded as affixes and nonlexical categories that express grammatical
contrasts of various sorts.
 -

Syntax and Sentence Interpretation

- Principle of Compositionality
o 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.
Compositional meaning
- Expletives: it and there (unnecessary word or phrase used to fill space in a sentence
for grammar or rhythm purposes)
o That he is crazy is certain
o It is certain that he is crazy
o Three pens are on the table
o There are three pens on the table
Constructional meaning
- Caused motion construction (PP represents a PP in which the preposition
denotes a direction)
- NP V NP PP
- X causes Y to go somewhere
o Ex.
o Seymour pushed the toy off the table
o Mabel moved the car into the garage
 o Perry pulled the dog into the swimming pool
- Evidence that NP V NP PP pattern cause motion pattern
o Boris sneezed the handkerchief right across the room
o While sneeze have no motion meaning, the structure has X causes
Y to go somewhere.
Ditransitive construction
- Two NP complements
- NP V NP NP
- NP causes NP to have NP
o Jerry sent lou a present
o Jerry baked Lou a cake
 Bake does not imply one person causes another person to
have something. This part comes from the structure itself.

Structural Ambiguity
- Component words can be combined in more than one way.
o Wealthy man and women
o {Wealthy man} and women or Wealthy {men and women}
- Nicole saw people with binoculars
Thematic roles θ
- Use thematic roles to categorize the relation between sentence’s parts and
the event that it describes.
- Arguments play semantic roles as opposed to adjuncts

- Agent: the entity that performs an action

o Usually subject
- Experiencer: entity that experiences an action
o Usually subject
 Roger loves spicy food
 Brain hates sugar
- Theme : the entity undergoing an action or a movement
o Usually object
  Freddie read a book
 David called me
- Patient: receiver that changes state
o Usually object
 Jim devoured an apple
 Lee broke my bike
- Source: the starting point for a movement
- Goal: the end point for a movement
- Location: the place where an action occurs
- State (STATE)
o My house is small
- Proposition (Prp)
o I think that the professor is crazy
- Question (Q)
o I asked what the time was
o I asked the time

The courier (agent) carried the document (Theme) from Boston (source) to Los
Angeles(goal)

Thematic role assignment

Semantic selection
- John eats natto
- S-selection of eat:
o Agent and Patient
 o Study
 Agent and Theme
o Send
 Agent Goal Theme
 John sent Mary a package
 Mary plays role of GOL, she is also said to be REC
(recipient)
o Ignore
 Agent theme
o Smile
 EXP
 When she saw the letter, she smiled.
 When she saw the letter is an adjunct the thematic roles
of it has nothing to do with smile.
o Hope
 Agent Proposition
 Since we can control hope, it is agent not experiencer
o Wonder
 Experiencer, question
 Can’t control wondering, if u can then it is agent
 What he will eat is a non-direct question
o Go
 Theme or agent, goal’

Selection(al) restrictions
- Arguments must each meet certain semantic conditions
o My sunglasses assassinated a stray cat.
 Grammatical but semantically anomalous
o To play role of AGT by assassinate
 Argument must be [+human]
o To play role of PAT by assassinate
 Argument must be [+human] [+VIP]

Internal / external theta roles

- Campers boiled the water
- Internal theta roles
 o Assigned to complements
- External theta roles
o Assigned to subject
- THM for the water
o Internal
- AGT for campers
o External

He studies syntax in the library

- In the library is an adjunct but within this adjunct, it assigns theta role to the
library
- Studies and in is theta assigners

Takashi went to LA
- Takashi went is not a full sentence
- Went assigns both Agent and Location
- BUT to is a theta assigner too.
o Therefore there is two step of theta assignment

-
D- structure and S-structure
- Jimi ate a burger

o
- What did Jimi eat?

-
- English is spoken in America

Other Factors in Sentence Interpretation

- Syntactic structure provides only some of the information needed to
interpret a sentence.
- Other info comes from pragmatics, the strategies that guide the way
speakers use and interpret language
 o Pragmatic strategies are sensitive to the background attitudes and
beliefs of the speaker and addressee, their understanding of the
context in which a sentence is uttered, and their knowledge of how
language can be used to inform, to persuade, to mislead, and so
forth.
The role of beliefs and attitudes
o The judge denied the prisoner’s request because he was cautious
o The judge denied the prisoner’s request because he was dangerous
- Have identical syntactic structures, differing only in the choice of the
adjective in the second clause.
- Why can we differentiate?
o Because of our belief about people
 Judges are cautious
 Prisoners are dangerous
o This is not linguistic knowledge
o Non-linguistic knowledge affects the way we use and interpret
language, and this is what pragmatics is all about
 Study of how people use language.

Presupposition
o Have you stopped exercising regularly?
o Have you tried exercising regularly?
- Stop implies that listener has been exercising regularly, while tried doesn’t.
- The assumption implied by the use of a particular word or structure is
called a presupposition.
o Nick admitted that the team had lost.
o Nick said that the team had lost.
 Speaker is presupposing the truth of the claim that the team
lost
o Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.
o Abraham Lincoln was murdered in 1865.
 Verb assassinate involves assumption that Lincoln is an
important person.
Setting
- Spatial deictics
 o The difference between this and that in English is what is in point
here
 This = close to them
 That = away from the,
o So when we hear what is this? We know that the speaker is talking
about something close.
- Deictic verbs
o Come vs Go
 The bear is coming into the tent
 Speaker is in the tent
 The bearing is going into the tent
 Speaker is outside the tent
o Same difference is observed between bring and take

Discourse
- The connected series of utterances produced during a conversation, a
lecture, a story, or other speech act.
- Important as individual sentences commonly include elements whose
interpretation can only be determined with the help of information in
preceding utteranes.
o A little girl went for a walk in the park. While there, she saw a rabbit.
Since it was injured, she took it home
- Old information
o The knowledge that the speaker assumes is available to the
addressee at the time of the utterance, either because it is
obvious or because it has been previously mentioned in the
discourse.
 Ex. The man is at the front door. (THE) man is mentioned
before.
 The front door. (THE) is because the setting for the
conversation is likely to include only one front door.
 It is presumably known to both speaker and the
addressee (old info)
- New information
o Knowledge that is introduced into the discourse for the first time
 A man is at the front door. (A) man is introduced for the first
time.
Topics
- Once upon a time there was a merchant with two sons. The older son
wanted to be a scholar. He spent his time reading and studying. As for the
younger son, he preferred to travel and see the world.
o The first sentence introduces a merchant and his two sons. (new
info)
o A topic (older son) is selected in the second sentence and
maintained in the third, in which he refers back to the older son.
o The final sentence then switches to a new topic (the younger son)
providing some info about him
o Facilitated by as for, commonly used to mark new topics
Active and Passive sentences
- Who chased the burglar?
- The burglar was chased by the police.
o Structurally, who is a subject but the answer ignores the topic and
uses the burglar as subject. Awkward and wrong.
- Active and passive sentences are NOT semantically identical, so NOT
interchangeable; they have different topics.

Japanese have special affix to identify the topic. (NOM = nominative, the subject
marker; TOP = topic market; QUES = question market)
- John ga(TOP) kimashita. John wa(nom) dare to kimasita ka(QUES)?

Grice’s conversational maxims

- Our understanding of how language is used in particular situations to
convey a message
o Ex. Do you know what time it is? Yes. (leaves)
o This is fine in syntax.
o In terms of semantics/pragmatics it is not a question, but a request.
- Conversational implicature
o Information conveyed by drawing inferences about what is meant
but not actually said.
o Computers are hard with this
 - Cooperative principle
o H. Paul Grice
o General overarching guideline for conversational interactions.
o Consists of four conversational maxims

Relevance
- Want to go to movies tonight? I have to study for exam
o Relevant as we know exam takes time. Implying that he will be too
busy.
- Have you finished your paper? It’s been raining a lot, hasn’t it?
o Completely irrelevant. Perhaps, signaling changing the subject.

Quality
- Did you like my presentation? Yes it was great!
o If B truly thought it was good, obeyed maxim of quality. BUT if he
thought it was bad and said to be polite, violated maxim of quality
- Truth only
Quantity
- Where are you from? From planet earth./ from 1-6-1 Nishi Waseda,
Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan
- Too much or too less information. Be brief
Manner
- What is this? It’s an oblong frame with rows of wires or grooves along
which……
 o Violates maxim of manner, not straightforward.
- Be straightforward, not obscure