WORD SEMANTICS 1DAY 26 – OCT 28, 2013

Brain & Language

LING 4110-4890-5110-7960

NSCI 4110-4891-6110

Harry Howard

Tulane University

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Course organization• The syllabus, these slides and my recordings are

available at http://www.tulane.edu/~howard/LING4110/.• If you want to learn more about EEG and neurolinguistics,

you are welcome to participate in my lab. This is also a good way to get started on an honor's thesis.

• The grades are posted to Blackboard.

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REVIEWI know, the quiz was the review, but let's review again.

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Linguistic model, Fig. 2.1 p. 37

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Discourse model

SyntaxSentence prosody

MorphologyWord prosody

Segmental phonologyperception

Acoustic phonetics Feature extraction

Segmental phonologyproduction

Articulatory phonetics Speech motor control

INPUT

SEMANTICS

Sentence level

Word level

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What causes the priming effect?Table 9.4

Conditions prime ~ probe Priming effect

1. [–sem, +morph] casualty ~ casual no

2. [+sem, +morph] punishment ~ punish yes

3. [–sem, +morph] successful ~ successor no

4. [+sem, +morph] confession ~ confessor no

5. [–sem, +morph] restrain ~ strain no

6. [+sem, +morph] insincere ~ sincere yes

7. [–sem, +morph] depress ~ express no

8. [+sem, +morph] unfasten ~ refasten yes

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A little too early• The previous experiment suggests that prefixes and

suffixes are processed differently.• I want to introduce a model of word semantics first, and then we

will return to this issue.

• Ingram has a good summary of a PET and a MEG experiment on morphological processing.• MEG is more informative, but to understand the results, we need to

wait until we have discussed Broca’s area.

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LEXICAL SEMANTICS 1Ingram: III. Lexical semantics, §10.

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Some semantic relations• synonymy

• words share the same meaning: violin ~ fiddle

• antonymy• words have opposite meanings: long ~ short

• hypernymy• one word ‘contains’ the meaning of another in a taxonomy: animal ~ horse

• hyponymy• one word is ‘contained’ in the meaning of another in a taxonomy: horse ~ animal

• holonymy• one word is a whole for the meaning of another: hand ~ finger

• meronymy• one word is a part for the meaning of another: finger ~ hand

• metonymy• a part of a concept stands for the whole concept: Hollywood ~ American movie

industry

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PolysemyWrite down all the meanings of “play” that you can think of.

1. Activity for amusement only, especially among the young.

2. The conduct, or course of a game.

3. An individual's performance in a sport or game.

4. An action carried out when it is one's turn to play.

5. A literary composition, intended to be represented by actors impersonating the characters and speaking the dialogue.

6. A theatrical performance featuring actors.

7. A major move by a business.

8. The extent to which a part of a mechanism can move freely.

9. A geological formation that contains an accumulation or prospect of hydrocarbons or other resources.

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Semantic anomalies

anomaly

1. a club for married bachelors

2. a vase of whiskey

3. colorless green ideas

4. your heart’s dissent

5. freeze structure

6. bang my hammer with a finger

intended expression

1. ?

2. a flask of whiskey

3. ?

4. your heart’s content

5. phrase structure

6. bang my finger with a

hammer

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Write down every word that you associate with this object

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Semantic networks

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Ingram goes into great detail on Quillian’s Teachable Language Comprehender (TLC); I could not find an image, but this illustrates the idea just as well.

NEXT TIMEContinue with word semantics

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