Syntax and Semantics February 28, 2012
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Plan !
Syntax: !
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Recap
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Trees Trees
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Trees Trees
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Trees Trees
Semantics: !
Intro
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Semantic change
Syntax trees !
Syntactic trees help us the look at the hierarchy of constituency within a sentence
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It’s called a tree, as it looks like an upside-down tree (sort of!)
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When drawing trees, we only ever use binary use binary branching branching
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We start from the top, and work our way down, keeping constituency in mind We also keep in mind allowable sequences in Phrases
Trees glorious trees !
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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:
Joining phrases !
We can join phrases together to form larger phrases and sentences
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Remember our constituency rules!
Practice !
Try drawing trees for:
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Sat on the mat
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went to the shop
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The cat on the floor
Answers - sat on the mat
Went to the shop
The cat on the floor
IP structure !
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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 like tense, 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
Test sentence !
“The cat sat on the mat”
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First work out constituency:
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The cat sat there - “On the mat” is a constituent of “sat”
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The cat sat on it - “the mat” is a constituent of “on”
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[NP] [VP [PP [NP]]]
The cat sat on the mat !
IP -> [NP] [VP [PP [NP]]]
Are you still alive? !
If so, well done. Keep it up, as we have some examples to do...
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Keelin ate a cake
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I like peanuts
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Cake is delicious
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The puppy found the child
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What about new information? !
What if we want to say: “The fat cat cat sat happily sat happily on on the ugly mat” mat”
These words are called modifiers modifiers - they modify the the head of a phrase
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They are not necessary for the sentence sentence to be grammatical, grammatical, they’re extra
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However, we can find a place to put them
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We create new positions for them to go, by adding new X’ levels
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Modifiers (Adjuncts) !
If we need to put in modifiers, we make a new X’
This is where extra information goes goes
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The fat cat sat happily on the ugly mat
Exercises !
Keelin sat daintily on the gilded chair
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The kind-hearted boy had many girlfriends
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The huge cat slowly chased the mouse
Answers
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The fat cat sat on the ugly mat with pleasure !
Think about where “with pleasure” needs to fit in
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What is it a constituent of?
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Remember: replacement and movement tests
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Also, what kind of Phrase is it? “with”?
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PP
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“The fat cat sat happily” (Replace PP with Adverb)
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[NP] [VP [PP] [PP] ]
With pleasure
Exercise - Trees !
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“The magician touched the child with the wand” What’s unusual about this sentence? How might you account for that?
The magician touched the child with the wand
The magician touched the child with the wand
Auxilliaries and Modals !
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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
Auxilliary
Modal
Exercises !
Draw the trees for:
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Keelin will eat the cake
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Annabel would go to the shop John has gone there
Answers - Keelin will eat the cake
Annabel would go to the shop
John has gone there
Embedded sentences !
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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’s inside the VP
Embedding
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[NP] [VP [IP]]
Syntax trees !
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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
Break
Semantics !
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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 how context 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
Book, dog, comb, run, eat !
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There’s nothing about these words that is matched to their meaning There is nothing about the word “book” that means “paper, with words...”
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It’s an arbitrary link, but a conventional arbitrary one
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We must know the conventions
Principle of Compositionality !
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“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
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Interface of syntax and semantics - syntax influences meaning
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“Keelin killed John” vs “John killed Keelin”: huge difference
Metaphor !
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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”
Idioms !
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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
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“She put her foot in her mouth”
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“She threw her weight around”
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“Bite your tongue”
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“I’ll give you a piece of my mind”
Semantic change/shift !
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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
Semantic broadening !
Here, words get a more general meaning than they once had
Semantic narrowing !
The opposite - where words now have a more narrow meaning than before
Amelioration !
A word gets a more positive connotation than it had before
Pejoration !
A word gets a more negative connotation than it had before
Exercise (from Meyerhoff 2006)
Exercise
Exercise !
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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?
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Pejoration
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Mistress
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Buxom: kind and loving - big busted
Exercise !
Identify each of the semantic changes below
Sense relations - Synonymy !
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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
Synonymy !
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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)
Homonymy !
Homonymy can be seen as the opposite of synonymy
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Here, one form is associated with more than one meaning
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This is also known as homophony (same-sound)
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Cross (cross the street, she is cross, Jesus on the cross)
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Bat (baseball, winged animal)
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Homonyms need not always be homographs (same spelling) e.g. tale/tail
Ambiguity !
Homonymy can create lexical ambiguity (not structural)
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“Prostitutes appeal to the Prime Minister”
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Here, the ambiguity comes from the term “appeal”
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“I’ll meet you by the bank”
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By the financial institution or the riverside?
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We must use additional information/context to decipher this ambiguity
Polysemy !
Don’t confuse this with homonymy
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Here, we have one form with different, but related meanings
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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)
Antonymy !
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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
Antonymy !
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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
Converses !
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Here, each word of a pair represents a different side of the same relationship Above-below, buy-sell, husband-wife, teacher-pupil
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So, I bought a car from someone who sold it
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Same relationship, different views
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Also sometimes known as Relational Opposites
Hyponymy !
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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”
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Lion, tiger, leopard are all hyponyms of “cat/feline”
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Seafoam, royal, turquoise are all hyponyms of “blue”
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Here, think of “hypo” - under. The hyponyms fall under the general class
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
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Dog is hyperonym of terrier, corgi, alsatian
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Blue is hyperonym of seafoam, turquoise, royal
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Here, think of “hyper” over - Hyperonyms exist over the more detailed distinctions
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”
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The proprietor of the fish shop was the sole owner
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You should see her shop
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When he got the clear title to the land, it was a good deed
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It takes a good ruler to make a straight line
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He saw that gasoline can explode
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Every man loves a woman
Answers !
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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)
Summary !
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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
Reading for next week !
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http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2012/01/19/leave-losninos-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)
