representational.docx

1、representationalSemantics5.1 Semantics in linguistics (Q1 Q2)Q1. What is semantics?Semantics is the study of meaning communicated through language. The basic task in semantics is to show how people communicate meanings with pieces of language. Q2. How many kinds of meaning did linguists find and stu

2、dy? C. C. Fries (1952) makes a traditional distinction between lexical meaning and structural meaning. According to him, “the total linguistic meaning of any utterance consists of the lexical meaning of the separate words plus such structural meaning.” G. Leech (1981), from a functional approach, ca

3、tegorizes seven kinds of meaning, five of which are brought under the “associative meaning” (see the following Table 5.1 ).Table 5.1Conceptual meaning Logical, cognitive, or denotative Associative meaningConnotative meaning Social meaning Affective meaningReflected meaning Collocative meaning What i

4、s communicated by virtue of what language refers to.What is communicated of the social circumstances of language use.What is communicated of the feelings and attitudes of the speaker/writerWhat is communicated through association with another sense of the same expression.What is communicated through

5、 association with words which tend to occur in the environment of another word.Thematic meaningWhat is communicated by the way in which the message is organized in terms of order and emphasis. Different from the traditional and the functional approach, F. R. Palmer (1981) and J. Lyons (1977) propose

6、 a pragmatic approach which draws a distinction between sentence meaning and utterance meaning. The former is directly predictable from the grammatical and lexical features of the sentence, while the latter includes all the various types of meaning not necessarily associated thereto.5.2 Semantic Uni

7、ts (Q3)Q3. What are the semantic units? What are the naming units and communication units? Semantic traits are morpheme, word, phrase and idiom, sentence and text. The basic naming unit in language is notional word and phrase made up of notional words. Communication unit is the unit with which peopl

8、e express their thoughts, feelings and intentions. Sentence is the basic unit of this kind.5.3 Meaning of the word (Q4 Q7) Q4. How many views are there towards the meaning of the word? What are they?There are three. Referential theory or denotational theory is a theory which relates the meaning of a

9、 word to the thing it refers to, or stands for.Mentalist theories of meaning (representational approach) hold that the meaning of each word is the idea associated with that word in the minds of speakers. There are three views in this line: ( 1 ) meaning as images, (2) meaning as concepts, and (3) me

10、aning as sense. The use theory of meaning advocates that the meaning of a word is determined by its use in the language community, and to specify that use is to specify its meaning. Q5. What is sense and what is reference? How are they related?Sense refers to the inherent meaning of a linguistic for

11、m, which is a collection of semantic meanings, abstract and decontextualized, while reference is what a linguistic form refers to in the real world. It is a matter of the relationship between the form and the reality. Q6. What is the semantic triangle? It is a theory, manifested in the following dia

12、gram, proposed by Ogden and Richards which explicitly employs the notion of “concept” to interpret the meaning of a word-the relation between a word and a thing it refers to is through the mediation of concept. ConceptWord ThingQ7.What is the difference between meaning, concept, connotation, and den

13、otation? Meaning refers to the association of language symbols with the real world. There are many types of meanings according to different approaches. Concept is the impression of objects in peoples mind; connotation is the implied meaning, similar to implication and implicature; denotation, like s

14、ense, is not directly related with objects, but makes the abstract assumption of the real word. 5.4 Meaning of the sentence (Q8 Q11 ) Q8. What is the relationship between sentence meaning and word meaning? Give examples. The meaning of sentence is supposed to be the combination of word meaning and s

15、entence structure. Sentences using the same words may mean quite differently in that the words are arranged in different Orders. For example, (a) The man chased the dog. (b) The dog chased the man. Even when two sentences mean similarly as (c) and (d), there is still difference in thematic meaning:

16、(c) Ive already seen that film. (d) That film Ive already seen. With sentences like (e), we need not only know the linear order of a sentence, but also the hierarchical structure: (e) The son of Pharaohs daughter is the daughter of Pharaohs son.The hierarchical structure may be analyzed as the follo

17、wing: The son of Pharaoh s daughter is the daughter of Pharaohs son Sentences also exhibit meaning properties and relations that words and phrases may lack. Communicative potential is one point in ease. A diagram for this may be as follows: (f) Declarative sentence: Used to constate (assert, state,

18、claim, etc.) (g) Imperative: Used to direct (order, request, command, etc.(h) Interrogative: Used to question.Q9. Are utterances, sentences, and propositions the same?No. These three terms are used to describe different levels of language. The most concrete is utterance which is created by speaking

19、(or writing) a piece of language. Sentences, on the other hand, are abstract grammatical elements obtained from utterances. For example, an utterance has a tone, or perhaps some accent due to regional or social variation and phonetic details which identify individual speakers, etc. But at the level

20、of sentence, these kinds of information are ignored. Propositions are the result of a further abstraction of sentences, which are descriptions of states of affairs and which some writers see as a basic element of sentence meaning. For example, the two sentences “Caesar invaded Gaul” and “Gaul was in

21、vaded by Caesar” hold the same proposition. Q 10. What is the truth value of proposition, and what is the truth condition?Truth value is the very important property of proposition. It describes whether a proposition is true or false. The truth condition is the facts that would have to obtain in real

22、ity to make a proposition true or false. Q11. How are the truth values of the sentences “Either it is raining here or it isnt raining here” and “Some boys that are sick are not boys” different from those of the sentences The earth is round” and “ PRC was founded in 1950”? The former sentences are re

23、spectively linguistically true (also called analytically true) and linguistically false (contradictory). The latter two sentences are respectively empirically true and empirically false. The truth condition of a sentence which is linguistically true is determined solely by the semantics of the langu

24、age and it is not necessary to check if any facts about the nonlinguistic world in order to determine their truth or falsehood. While the knowledge of the language alone does not determine the truth condition of an empirically true sentence, and it is necessary to check the world in order to verify

25、or falsify it.5.5 Meanings of phrases and idioms (Q12 Q13)Q12. How is a phrase different from an idiom and a proverb?Phrase is not a sentence. It is the naming unit instead of communication unit, and its meaning is the result of the combination of the meanings of its individual words and the meaning

26、 of its structure. While an idiom is the fossilized phrase whose meaning, generally speaking, can not be inferred directly from the meanings of its component words. Proverbs are fossilized sentences. Q13. What is collocation? Collocation is a term used in lexicology by some linguists to refer to the

27、 habitual co-occurrences of individual lexical items. For example, we can “correct” a “mistake”, “read” a “book”, and “watch TV”. No one can “correct” a television or “read”a mistake.We can find out the meaning of a word by the company it keeps, according to H. Firth, an English semanticist.5.6 Sema

28、ntic relations (Q14 Q31 )Q14. What is a semantic field? Can you illustrate it? It is an organizational principle that the lexicon and groups of words in the lexicon can be semantically related, rather than a listing of words as in a published dictionary. On a very general and intuitive level, we can

29、 say that the words in a semantic field, though not synonymous, are all used to talk about the same general phenomenon, and there is a meaning inclusion relation between the items in the field and the field category itself. Classical examples of semantic fields include color terms(red, green, blue,

30、yellow), kinship terms (mother, father, sister, brother), and cooking terms (boil, fry, broil, steam) as semantic fields.Q15. Illustrate how the semantic field differs from one culture to another? Lets take kinship terms for example. Every language has its kin terms, but they are used in different w

31、ays. For instance, the kin terms for the people of the same parents in English are brother and sister; while in Chinese 哥哥(elder brother),弟弟(younger brother), 姐姐(elder sister), 妹妹(younger sister). English makes only one distinction-sex; however, in addition to sex, Chinese gives another-being younge

32、r or older.Q16. What are the major types of synonyms in English? They are dialectal synonyms, stylistic synonyms, emotive synonyms, collocational synonyms, and semantic synonyms. Examples are as follows: fond of, keen on (collocational) autumn, fall (dialectal) dad, father (stylistic) thrifty, miserly, economical (emotional)escape, flee (semantic)17. In what way do the following pairs offer contrast? (a) earth/:/ n. 1. our planet. 2. the soil on the surface of our planet. Bank l /b