7 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
! It’s called a tree, as it looks like an upside-down tree (sort of!)
!
When drawing trees, we only ever use binary branching! 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! We’ve 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
! We’ll see later that auxilliaries (John will have visited Mary) and
modals (she would have 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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Answers
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What about new information?! What if we want to say: “The fat cat sat happily on the ugly mat”
! These words are called modifiers - they modify the head of a
phrase
! They are not necessary for the sentence to be grammatical, they’re
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” What’s 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 will be 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 that the student knows the answer”
! “the student knows the answer” is a complement to the verb, it’sinside the VP
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Embedding ! [NP] [VP [IP]]
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Syntax trees! Trees can get MUCH more complex than we’ve seen
! We haven’t 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 what’s 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
! We’ll 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 can’t just make words mean whatever we want them to mean
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Book, dog, comb, run, eat! There’s nothing about these words that is matched to their meaning
! There is nothing about the word “book” that means “paper, with
words...”
! It’s 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” (O’Grady, 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 doesn’t 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”
! “I’ll 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 it’s 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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Pejoration
! A word gets a more negative 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.... It’s 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?
! He’s sitting on the sofa/ he’s sitting on the couch
! We’re 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 create lexical ambiguity (not structural)
! “Prostitutes appeal to the Prime Minister”
! Here, the ambiguity comes from the term “appeal”
!
“I’ll 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! Don’t confuse this with homonymy
! Here, we have one form with different, but related meanings
! 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 can’t 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 small elephant is bigger than a big mouse
! 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, I bought a car from someone who sold it
! 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 under the 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 can’t bear children” - she can’t give birth to children/ she
can’t 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 we’ll 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
! O’Grady, W., Dobrovolshy, M., and Katamba, F. (1997)Contemporary linguistics: An introduction. Essex: Pearson
Education Ltd