Transcript Introduction to Linguistics II Ling 2-121C, group b Lecture 8 Eleni Miltsakaki

Introduction to Linguistics II
Ling 2-121C, group b
Lecture 8
Eleni Miltsakaki
AUTH
Spring 2006
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Review: Verb meaning
• How do verb constrain the semantic
properties of the subject and the object(s)?
Give examples.
• What are thematic roles?
• What is the theta criterion?
• Discuss thematic roles crosslinguistically.
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• Identify the thematic role of each NP in the
following sentences:
– The boy took the books from the cupboard with a
handcart
– Mary found a ball in the house
– The children ran from the playground to the wading
pool
– One of the men unlocked all the doors with a paper
clip
– John melted the ice with a blowtorch
• Thematic roles: agent, theme, location,
instrument, source, goal, experiencer, causative3
Review: Sentential meaning
• What is the ‘sense’ and ‘extension’ of sentential
meaning?
• What does it mean to know the truth conditions
of a sentence?
• Is it possible for a sentence to be true when parts
of it are false?
• How can we tell if two sentences are
paraphrases? Give examples.
• Are active-passive pairs paraphrases?
4
Review: Sentential meaning
• What is entailment?
• What is contradiction?
• Why is the distinction between events and
states useful in linguistic description?
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• Which of the following sentences are
contradictory? Why?
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
My aunt is a man
Witches are wicked
My brother is an only child
Babies are adults
Babies can lift a ton
Puppies are human
My bachelor friends are all married
My bachelor friends are all lonely
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Review: Coreference
• Sentence structure affects the
interpretation of pronouns and reflexives.
Elaborate with examples.
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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
superseded 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
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Theories of meaning
• Denotational theory of meaning
– The meaning of each expression is the (actual) object it denotes
• Mentalist theories of meaning
– The meaning of each expression is an idea (or ideas) associated
with that expression in the mind of the speakers
• The use theory of meaning
– The meaning of an expression is determined by its use in the
language community
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Pragmatics
• Pragmatics is concerned with the interpretation
of linguistic meaning in context.
• Linguistic context: prior discourse
• Situational context: Knowledge of the world
– Amazingly, he already loves her
– John met Mary yesterday.
– Amazingly, he already loves her.
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What is discourse?
• Knowing a language permits combining
sentences to express complex thoughts
and ideas
• There larger linguistic units are called
discourse
• The study of discourse is concerned with
how speakers combine sentences into
bigger speech units
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Discourse
• The study of discourse involves questions
of
– Style
– Appropriateness
– Cohesiveness
– Rhetorical force
– Topic structure
– Genre differences
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Pronouns
• Pronouns may be used in place of noun phrases
or to entity known to the discourse participants
– John invited Mary to join us for lunch so she’s coming.
– (Looking at a guy passing by). He’s Mary’s husband
• Pronominalization occurs both in sentences and
across the sentences of the discourse.
– John met Mary. He liked her.
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Pronouns
• Prior linguistic context plays a primary role
in the interpretation of pronouns.
– It seems that the man loves the woman.
– Many people think he loves her.
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Pronouns
• Syntactically, pronouns occur in the same
positions where nouns occur
• Semantically, coreference is constrained
by a complex system of semantic rules
• At minimum, corefering expression must
agree in number and gender
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Pronouns
• When semantic rules and contextual
interpretation determine that a pronoun is
coreferential with a noun phrase, the pronoun is
bound.
• When a pronoun refers to an object not explicitly
mentioned in the discourse, it is free or unbound
• The reference of a free pronoun must be
determined by the situational context
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Other pro-forms
• Emily hugged Cassidy and Zachary did too
(pro-verb phrase)
• I am sick, which depresses me. (prosentence)
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Gapping and sluicing
• Gapping
– Jil washed the grapes and Bill the cherries
• Sluicing (omitted material after a wh-)
– Your ex-husband is dancing with someone, but
I don’t know who.
– My cat ate something, and I wish I knew what.
– She said she was coming over, bust she didn’t
say when
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The articles
• Discourse rules determine the use of the articles
the and a.
• The article the is used to indicate that the
referent of a noun phrase is known to the
speaker and the listener
– I saw the boy
• This constraint does not hold for the case of the
indefinite article
– I saw a boy
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Discourse “rules”
-- I saw a boy and a girl holding hands and kissing.
-- Oh, it sounds lovely.
-- Yes, the boy was quite tall and handsome, and he seemed to like
the girl a lot.
• Often discourses begin with indefinite articles and then when the
referents are established the definite articles may be used
• It would be weird to have the following as the last sentence of this
discourse
– Yes, a boy was quite tall and handsome and he seemed to like a
girl a lot.
• Speakers make acceptability/felicity judgments for discourse, often
denoted by # in sentences. (Compare with grammaticality judgments)
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