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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, causative

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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?

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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. (pro-sentence)

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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)