7 syntax semantics

8/20/2019 7 Syntax Semantics

1/70

Syntax and Semantics

February 28, [email protected]


2/70

Plan! Syntax:

! Recap

! Trees

! Trees

! Trees

! Semantics:

! Intro

! Semantic change


3/70

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


4/70

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:


5/70

Joining phrases! We can join phrases together to form larger phrases and sentences

! Remember our constituency rules!


6/70

Practice! Try drawing trees for:

! Sat on the mat

! went to the shop

! The cat on the floor


7/70

Answers - sat on the mat


8/70

Went to the shop


9/70

The cat on the floor


10/70

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


11/70

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]]]


12/70

The cat sat on the mat! IP -> [NP] [VP [PP [NP]]]


13/70

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


14/70

Answers


15/70

Answers


16/70

Answers


17/70

Answers


18/70

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


19/70

Here


20/70

Modifiers (Adjuncts)! If we need to put in modifiers, we make a new X’

! This is where extra information goes


21/70

The fat cat sat happily on the

ugly mat


22/70

Exercises! Keelin sat daintily on the gilded chair

! The kind-hearted boy had many girlfriends

! The huge cat slowly chased the mouse


23/70

Answers


24/70

Answers


25/70

Answers


26/70

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] ]


27/70

With pleasure


28/70

Exercise - Trees! “The magician touched the child with the wand” What’s unusual

about this sentence? How might you account for that?

!

!


29/70

The magician touched the child

with the wand


30/70

The magician touched the child

with the wand


31/70

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


32/70

Auxilliary


33/70

Modal


34/70

Exercises! Draw the trees for:

! Keelin will eat the cake

! Annabel would go to the shop

! John has gone there


35/70

Answers - Keelin will eat the cake


36/70

Annabel would go to the shop


37/70

John has gone there


38/70

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


39/70

Embedding ! [NP] [VP [IP]]


40/70

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


41/70

Break


42/70

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


43/70

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


44/70

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


45/70

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”


46/70

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”


47/70

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


48/70

Semantic broadening! Here, words get a more general meaning than they once had


49/70

Semantic narrowing! The opposite - where words now have a more narrow meaning

than before


50/70

Amelioration! A word gets a more positive connotation than it had before


51/70

Pejoration

! A word gets a more negative connotation than it had before


52/70

Exercise (from Meyerhoff 2006)


53/70

Exercise


54/70

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


55/70

Exercise! Identify each of the semantic changes below


56/70

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


57/70

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)


58/70

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


59/70

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


60/70

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)


61/70

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


62/70

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


63/70

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


64/70

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


65/70

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


66/70

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


67/70

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)


68/70

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


69/70

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)


70/70

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

7 syntax semantics

Documents