Experiencer, location, source, goal

SEMINARS 3-4 (2d Term) OUTLINE

Linguistic Schools of the XX-th century

1. Semantics

1.1 conceptual and associative meaning,

1.2 semantic features, semantic roles,

1.3 lexical relations of synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, homophony, homonymy, polysemy, metonymy, collocation,

1.4 semantic prototypes

2. Discourse analysis

2.1 cohesion, coherence,

2.2 conversational interaction

Part 2

Study questions

Tasks for independent study

Projects

Discourse Theories

Communication variables and registers

Recommended reading:

1. Donnelly, Colleen. Linguistics for Writers. – NY: State University of New York Press, 2004

2. Huddleston, R. English Grammar: An Outline. – Cambridge: CUP, 1988

3. Iofik L, Chakhoyan L. Readings in the Theory of English Grammar. – L.: Prosveshchenije, 1967.

4. Lehman, Winfred. Language: An Introduction. – NY: Random House, 1993

5. Todd, L. An Introduction to Linguistics. – Longman: York Press, 1997

6. Yule, G. The Study of Language. – CUP, 1996

Semantics

Semantics is the study of the meaning of words, phrases and sentences. In semantic analysis, there is always an attempt to focus on what the words conventionally mean, rather than on what a speaker might want the words to mean on a particular occasion. This technical approach to meaning emphasizes the objective and the general. It avoids the subjective and the local. Linguistic semantics deals with the conventional meaning conveyed by the use of words and sentences of a language.

Conceptual versus associative meaning

When linguists investigate the meaning of words in a language, they are normally interested in characterizing the conceptual meaning and less con­cerned with the associative or stylistic meaning of words. Conceptual mean­ing covers those basic, essential components of meaning which are conveyed by the literal use of a word. Some of the basic components of a word like needle in English might include ’thin, sharp, steel, instrument’. These components would be part of the conceptual meaning of needle. However, you may have ‘associations', or 'connotations', attached to a word like needle which lead you to think of 'painful' whenever you encounter the word. This 'association' is not treated as part of the conceptual meaning of needle. In a similar way, you may associate the expression low-calory, when used to describe a product, with 'good for you', but we would not want to include this association within the basic conceptual meaning of the expres­sion. Poets and advertisers are, of course, very interested in using terms in such a way that their associative meanings are evoked, and some linguists do investigate this aspect of language use.

Semantic features

So, how would a semantic approach help us to understand something about the nature of language? One way it might be helpful would be as a means of accounting for the ’oddness' we experience when we read English sentences such as the following:

The hamburger ate the man

My cat studied linguistics

A table was listening to some music

Notice that the oddness of these sentences does not derive from their syn­tactic structure as these are well-structured sentences:

The hamburger ate the man

NP V NP

This sentence is syntactically good, but semantically odd. Since the sentence The man ate the hamburger is perfectly acceptable, what is the source of the oddness we experience? One answer may relate to the components of the conceptual meaning of the noun hamburger which differ significantly from those of the noun man, especially when those nouns are used as subjects of the verb ate. The kinds of nouns which can be subjects of the verb ate must denote entities which are capable of eating. The noun hamburger does not have this properly (and man does), hence the oddness of the first sentence above.

We can, in fact, make this observation more generally applicable by trying to determine the crucial component of meaning which a noun must have in order to be used as the subject of the verb ate. Such a component may be as general as ’animate being’. We can then take this component and use it to describe part of the meaning of words as either plus (+) or minus (-) feature. So, the feature becomes +animate (=denotes an animate being) or -animate (= does not denote an animate being).

This procedure is a way of analyzing meaning in terms of semantic fea­tures. Features such as +animate, -animate; +human, -human; + male, -male, for example, can be treated as the basic features involved in differentiating the meanings of each word in the language from every other word. If you were asked to give the crucial distinguishing features of the meanings of this set of English words (table, cow, girl, woman, boy, man), you could do so by means of the following diagram:

table cow girt woman boy man

animate - + + + + +

human - - + + + +

male - - - - + +

adult - - - + - +

From a feature analysis like this, you can say that at least part of the basic meaning of the word boy in English involves the components (+human, +male, -adult). You can also characterize that feature which is crucially required in a noun in order for it to appear as the subject of a verb, supple­menting the syntactic analysis with semantic features:

The________________ is reading a book.

N (+human)

This approach then gives us the ability to predict what nouns would make the above sentence semantically odd. Examples would be table, or tree, or dog, because they all have the feature (-human). The approach which has just been outlined is not without problems, as for many words in a language it may not be so easy to come up with neat components of meaning. If you try to think of which components or features you would use to distinguish the nouns advice, threat and warning, for example, you will have some idea of the scope of the problem. Part of the problem seems to be that the approach involves a view of words in a language as some sort of 'containers', carrying meaning components.

Semantic roles

Instead of thinking of the words as ’containers’ of meaning, we can look at the 'roles' they fulfill within the situation described by a sentence. If the situation is a simple event, such as The boy kicked the ball, then the verb describes an action (kick). The noun phrases describe the roles of entities, such as people and things, involved in the action. We can identify a small number of semantic roles for these noun phrases.

Agent, theme, instrument

In the sentence above, one role is taken by the boy as 'the entity that per­forms the action', technically known as the agent. Another role is taken by the ball, as 'the entity that is involved in or affected by the action', technically known as the theme. The theme can also be an entity (the ball) that is simply being described, as in The ball was red. Identifying entities denoted by noun phrases as the agent or the theme is a way of recognizing the semantic rotes of those noun phrases in a sentence.

Although agents are typically human, they can also be non-human forces (the wind blew the ball away), machines (the car ran over the ball), or creatures (the dog caught the ball). If an agent uses another entity in performing an action, that other entity fills the role of instrument. In writing with a pen or eating with a spoon, the noun phrases a pen and a spoon have the seman­tic role of instrument.

The theme can also be human. Indeed, the same physical entity can appear in two different semantic roles, as in The boy kicked himself. Here the boy is agent and himself is theme.

Experiencer, location, source, goal

/compare these roles with the roles worked out in the frame of case grammar theory/

When a noun phrase designates an entity as the person who has a feeling, a perception or a state, it tills the role of experiencer. If you see, know or enjoy something, you do not really have to perform any action (hence you are not an agent). You are in the role of experiencer. If someone asks, Did you hear that noise?, the experiencer is you and the theme is that noise.

A number of other semantic roles designate where an entity is in the description of the event. Where an entity is (on the table, in the room) fills the role of location. Where an entity moves from is the source and where it moves to is the goal. When we talk about transferring money from savings to checking, the source is saving and the goal is checking. All these semantic roles are illustrated in the following scenario.

Mary saw a mosquito on the wall.

EXPERIENCER THEME LOCATION

She borrowed a magazine from George

AGENT THEME SOURCE

and she hit the bug with the magazine.

AGENT THEME INSTRUMENT

She handed the magazine back to George.

AGENT THEME GOAL

Lexical relations

Not only can words be treated as 'containers' or as fulfilling 'roles', they can also have 'relationships'. In everyday talk, we frequently give the meanings of words in terms of their relationships. If you were asked to give the mean­ing of the word conceal, for example, you might simply reply "it's the same as hide", or give the meaning of shallow as "the opposite of deep", or the meaning of daffodil as "it's a kind of flower". In doing so, you are character­izing the meaning of a word not in terms of its component features, but in terms of its relationship to other words. This procedure has also been used in the semantic description of languages and is treated as the analysis of lexical relations. The types of lexical relations which are usually analyzed are synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, homophony, homonymy, polysemy.

Synonymy

Synonyms are two or more forms with very closely related meanings, which Lire often, hut not always, intersubstitutable in sentences. Examples of syn­onyms are the pairs broad - wide, hide-conceal, almost-nearly, cab -taxi, liberty - freedom, answer-reply.

It should be noted that the idea of 'sameness of meaning' used in dis­cussing synonymy is not necessarily 'total sameness'. There are many occa­sions when one word is appropriate in a sentence, but its synonym would he odd. For example, whereas the word answer tits in this sentence: Cathy - had only one answer correct on the test, its near-synonym, reply, would sound odd. Synonymous forms may also differ in terms of formality. The sentence My father purchased a large automobile seems much more serious than the following casual version, with four synonymous replacements: My dad bought a big car.

Antonymy

Two forms with opposite meanings are called antonyms, and commonly used examples are the pairs quick - slow, big - small, long – short, rich –poor, happy - sad, hot – cold, old – young, male-female, true-false, alive - dead.

Antonyms are usually divided into two main types, those which are 'gradable', and those which are 'non-gradable'. Gradable antonyms, such as the pair big – small, can be used in comparative constructions like bigger than – smaller than. Also, the negative of one member of the gradable pair does not necessarily imply the other. For example, if you say that dog is not old, you do not have to mean that that dog is young. With non-gradable antonyms, also called 'complementary pairs', comparative constructions are not normally used (the expressions deader or more dead sound strange), and the negative of one member does imply the other. For example, that person is not dead does indeed mean that person is alive. So, the pairs male-female and true-false must also be non-gradable antonyms, whereas the others in the list above are gradable.

Although it works for the small number of non-gradable antonyms in a language, it is important to avoid describing most antonym pairs as one word meaning the negative of another. Consider the opposites tie - untie. The word untie doesn't mean 'not tie'. It actually means 'do the reverse of tie'. Such pairs are called reversives. Other common examples are enter -exit, pack - unpack, lengthen-shorten, raise - lower, and dress - undress.

Hyponymy

When the meaning of one form is included in the meaning of another, the relationship is described as hyponymy, and some typical example pairs are daffodil - flower, dog - animal, poodle – dog, carrot - vegetable, banyan - tree. The concept of 'inclusion' involved here is the idea that if any object is a daffodil, then it is necessarily a flower, so the meaning of flower is 'included' in the meaning of daffodil. Or, daffodil is a hyponym of flower.

When we consider hyponymous relations, we are essentially looking at the meaning of words in some type of hierarchical relationship. You could, in fact, represent the relationships between a set of words such as animal, ant, asp, banyan, carrot, cockroach, creature, daffodil, dog, flower, horse, insect, living tiling, pine, plant, snake, tree and vegetable as a hierarchical diagram in the following way:

Living things

creature plant

animal insect vegetable flower tree

horse dog snake cockroach ant carrot daffodil banyan pine

From this diagram, we can say that "horse is a hyponym of animal" or that 'ant is a hyponym of insect'. We can also say that two or more terms which share the same superordinate (higher-up) term are co-hyponyms. So, horse and dog are co-hyponyms, and the superordinate term is animal.

The relation of hyponymy captures the idea of ’is a kind of’, as when you give the meaning of a word by saying "an asp is a kind of snake". It is often the case that the only thing some people know about the meaning of a word in their language is that it is a hyponym of another term. That is, you may know nothing more about the meaning of asp other than that it is a kind of snake.

It is worth emphasizing that it is not only words for 'things' that are hyponyms. Terms for actions, such as cut, punch, shoot and stab, can all be found as co-hyponyms of the superordinate term injure.

Semantic prototypes

While the words canary, dove, duck, flamingo, parrot, pelican, robin, swal­low and thrush are all equally co-hyponyms of the superordinate bird, they are not all considered to be equally good exemplars of the category 'bird'. For many American English speakers, the best exemplar, or the prototype, of 'bird' is the robin. The concept of a prototype helps explain the meaning of certain words, like bird, not in terms of component features (e.g. 'has feathers', 'has wings'), but in terms of resemblance to the clearest exemplar. Thus, even native speakers of English might wonder if ostrich and penguin should be hyponyms of bird (technically, they are), but have no trouble deciding about sparrow or pigeon. The last two are much closer to the proto­type.

Given the category label furniture, we are quicker to recognize chair as an exemplar than bench or stool. Given clothing, people recognize shirts quicker than shoes, and given vegetable, they accept carrot before potato or tomato. It is obvious that there is some general pattern to the categorization process involved in prototypes and that it determines our interpretation of word meaning. However, this is one area where individual experience results in variation in interpretation, as when people disagree about whether tomato is a fruit or a vegetable.