ENGLISH
SEMANTIC
GRAMMATICAL
SEMANTICS
COGNITIVE
SEMANTICS
INTRODUCTION
GRAMMATICAL SEMANTIC
1.
COMPOSITIONALITY
2.
MODES OF COMBINATION
2.1 SOME ENDOCENTRIC COMBINATIONS
2.1.1 BOOLEAN COMBINATIONS
2.1.2 RELATIVE DESCRIPTORS
2.1.3 NEGATIONAL DESCRIPTORS
2.1.4 INDIRECT TYPES
2.2 EXOCENTRIC COMBINATIONS
3. RESTRICTIONS TO COMPISTIONALITY: CONVENTIONALITY
4. SEMANTIC CONTITUENTS AND THE
“RECURRENT CONTRAST TEST”
5. LIMITS TO COMPOSITONALITY
5.2 IDIOMS
5.3 FROZEN METAPHORS
5.4 COLLOCATIONS
5.5 CLICHÉS
6. PHONETIC ELLICTORS OF SEMATIC TRAITS
COGNITIVE SEMANTICS “EXTNSIONS
OF MEANING”
1.LITERAL AND FIGURATIVE MEANING
1.1 WORD LEVEL
1.1.1
ESTABLISHED
AND NON-ESTABLISHED MEANING EXTENSIONS
1.2SENTENCE AND UTTERANCE
LEVEL: METAPHOR AND METONYMY
METONYMY VERSUS METAPHOR
METAPHOR
METONYMY
2.
SEMANTIC CHANGE
PREFACE
The later half of the ninteenth
century saw the initiationof a process that has been instumental in the
evolution of today's world, dominated as it is by glbal communication and the
gradual erosion of ethnic and national boundaries. This process has given toil,
pleasureand employment to whole armies of linguists, pedagogues, philosphers
and psychologists, as well as generatinga worldwide industry centred on the
learning of languages. Today in everty devoped country and in many less
developed ones, lealrning one or more foreignlanguages is for most people as
natural a part of life as learning to drive a car or use a video machine. For
the maijority, the motivationis instrumentasl: being able to use other
languages makes it easier to survive in the world. This instrumental motivation
is taken as a given quantity in all approaches to language- and
language-teaching within national schol systems, private language school
courses and professional training establishments. Often it combines successfully
with a form of affective motivation via which learness feel more accepted or
integrated into the global village as they become more proficient in language
use. Within this motivational framework several revolutions have taken place
over the last hundred years or so, in teachers approaches to languge itself,
the methodlogies and sub-methodologies applied to the teaching of language in
general, language skills and lisguintic components. Widely-differing
psychological theories of language-learning have come and gone and left their
mark; tecnology has made language-learning easier, more effective and sometimes
more spectacular. Languages themselves have been analysed, atomised,
reconstructed and reorganised by structuralist, generativists, pragmaticists
and even neuroscientist, all anxious to improve in some way the application of
what has become an activity of the first order of importance, almost on a par
with learning to read and write.
GRAMMATICAL SEMANTICS
COMPOSITIONALITY
The principle of Semanctic
Compositionality is the principle that the meaning of a clomplex expression is
a function of its parts together with teh method by which those parts are
combined. Proponents of compositonally typically emphazise the productivity and
systimaticity of our linguistic understanding. Compositionality incorporates
separte claims such as the meaning of a clomplex expression is completely
determined by the meanings of its constituents or the meaning of a clomplex
explression is completely determinated by general rules from the meanings of
its contituents.
The principle of compositionality
derives mainly from two deeper
presuppositions. The first is that a language has an infinite number of
grammatical sentences; the second is that language has unlimited expresive
power. The infinte inventory of sentences arises from rulegoerned combinations
of elements from a finite list according to genrative rules al least some of which are recursive; the
only way such sentences could in their interity is if their meanings are
composed in rules governed ways out of the meanings of their part.
MODES OF COMBINATIONS
The principle of compostionality
does not take us very far in understanding how meaning to make a third. We may
combining a first division between additive modes of combination an interactive
mode. Combinations will be said to additive if the meaning of the constituents
are simply added together an both survive without radical change in the
combination.
In interactive we can distinguis two
types of interactive modification. The endocentric type where the resultant
meaning is of the same basic type to either of the constinents.
ENDOCENTRIC COMBINATIONS
Ever under the general heading of
endocentric comobinations there are differnt modes of interaction between
meanings. One of the most elementary type is “The Boolean
combinations” and is illustrated by “Red hats”. Red hats are
thing that are simultaneously hats and red. A red hats denotes is of the same
basic ontological type as whay a hat denotes an endocentric combination; second
the effect of red is to restrict the applicability of hat, this is an
interactive combination.
The relative descriptor exemplifies
a more complex interaction between meanings. It is a illustrative by a large
mouse. This cannot be glassed “something which is large and is a
mouse” because all mice, even large ones, are small animals. Large must
be interpreted relative to the norm of size for the class of mice and means
something more like “significantly larger than the average mouse”
Here we have a two-way interaction, because mouse determines how large is to be
interpreted and large limits the application of mouse. It is none less the case
that what mouse denotes.
The effect in negational modifier is
to negate the head, while at the same time giving indications as to where to
wher to look for the intended referent. These are examples of this type:
“a former president” and
“an ex-lover”. Notice that an imitation fur coat is not
something that is simultaneously a fur coat buy it is not strictly a fur coat. On
the other hand, there is no radical change in basic ontological type as a
result of combining the meanings.
Indirect combinations require a more
complex compositional process, but still can be held to be rule governed.
Consider the case of “bad cook” this phrase can ambiguosus. One of
the radings denoting someone who is bad an cook at the same time, this is
standard Boolean type. Other rading can be requires some semantic recontruction
of th phrase so that bad becames an adverbial modifier of the verbal root cook
an the phrase means “someone who cooks bad”.
RESTRICTIONS TO COMPOSITIONALITY:
CONVENTIONALITY AND CREATIVITY
In language there is a permanently
process of conventionalization, this process according to Hamain and O. Dahl,
rooted individual psychology, called routinization. We make them into a routine
when two or more actions are perfomed together. But conventionalization opens
the door for non-compositonal meaning. Conventionalization produces cases which
are not prdictible from the meanings of their constituent.
Conventionalization's effects are full of expressions which are compatible with
the compositional meaning but in this is much more specific. In conclusion of
this conventionalization is an expression comes to be used routinely such as
“you are welcome (to do or use that again)”.
Creativity is another restriction to
compositionality but with others characteristics. Linguistic communication always relies an extra knowledge.
Creativity provide information that is not strictly given the conventional
interpretation of the expression.
One example of creativity can be
“ there was no fish pudding left on the kitchen's table. The cat climbed
down from it licking it mouth. Finally creativity is when speakers try to find
new ways of saying things.
SEMANTIC CONSTITUENTS AND THE
“RESTURANT CONTRAST TEST”
Semantic constituents can be
recognized by the recurrent contrast test. Semantic constituents have some
characterics such as they can be substituted by something else giving a
different meaning.
“Meaning implies choice”
expresses that cannot have meaning unless it was chosen from a set of possible
alternatives. The corollary of this is that if an element is obligatory, it cannot
be said to have meaning.
Other charasterics is that al least
some of the contrasts of meaning produced by substitution in one context should
be reproducible using the same items in a different context. This sounds clumsy
and obscure. It attempts to state precisely the idea that a meaningful
linguistic item should be capable of carrying of content meaning from context
to context.
An example can be mat an box, which
produce the same semantic contrast in two different context. These two items
therefore pass the recurrent contrast test for semantic constituency. With this
notion of semantic constituent we can make non-tautlogus sense of the principle
of compositionality as expressed in the second characteristic. We can also
characterize a type of grammatically complex expression no all of whose grammatical constituents
are semantic constituents.
LIMITS TO COMOPOSITIONALIY
Many noun compounds can be compounds
can be condered to be idioms by our criteria. For instance, tea-towel. But there
are other example which show recurrent semantic constituents, buet which
display semantic propertiestaht are no predictable in any way except perhaps on
the basis of pragmatic world knowledge.
Active zone is Langacker's term for
the precise locus of a colour adjective and its head noun. Very often the
colour does not apply globally to the object denoted by the head noun. Some
examples can be a red hat, a yellow beach, blue eyes... These cases also seem
to be different from the noun-compound cases. But active zones need in some
sense to be learned and are not predictable by any sort of formal rule.
The point at issue in relation to
complex category. This is the known in prototype theorical circles as the guppy
effect. It is claimed that certain properties of a complex category cannot be
predicted from the corresponding properties of the constituent. When informants
are asked to say what they consider to be the best or most representative
example of the category “pet”, they tend to go for cats and dogs; when
asked to name the best examples of the category “fish” they choose
trout or salmon.
INDICATORS TALLIES AND CATEGORISERS
There are some semantic elements,
which have an important relevance in the context. That is the case of
“cran-, rasp-, goose-, pad-, gang-, and soon of the words cranberry, raspberry, gooseberry,
padlock, gangway etc. the biefixgdoe not have a complete meaning, therefore
they are called semantic talles and their partner words (-berries, -lod, .way)
indicate a general category, therefore they are semantic categorise.
But there are also semantic
indicators which have a semantic function, called semantic indicators some
examples are blackbird and greenhouse, from which black- and green- are
semantic indicators. Other prefixes are included in this category, that is, the
case of mi- oof impertinent, dis- of disgust. Here, the second segments
-pertinent, -disgust have no a concrete functions, so they do not need a lebel.
It has longo be cognised that
expressions such as to pull someone's leg, round the bend up the creek are
semantically peculiar. They are usually described as idioms. A traditional
definition of idiom, runs roughly as follow; as idiom is an expression whose
meaning cannot be inferred from the meanings of its parts.
The definition must be understood as
stating that an idiom is an expression whose meaning cannot be accounted for as
a compositional function of the meanings its parts have when they are not parts
of idioms.
Fortunately it is possible to define
an idiom precisely an non-circularly using the notion of a semantic
constituent.
Most idioms are homophonous whit
grammatically well formed transparent expressions which any expression which is
divisible into semantic constituents.
FROZEN METAPHORS
There is a class of idiom-like
expressions, which come out as non- compositional by the recurrent contrast
test and may show some of the features of syntactic frozenness typical of
idioms, such as resistance to modification, transformation and so forth by
which differ from idioms in an important respect. Some example can be: “A
cat can look at a queen”, “he drives me up the wall”.
In the examples in one can hardly
say that the substitution ha no effect, but non-literal meaning is still
recoverable. This seems to indicate that the connection between the meanings
which results from normal compositional processes in these expressions and
their non-compositional reading is not an arbitrary one. In the examples in
there is always an element of the global meaning of the complex expression which
is arbitrary with respect to the free meanings of constituents.
The degree of relatedness between
literal and non-literal meanings of idioms varies continuously from none at all
to such a big degree that the expression fall as into a shadowy border area between
idiomatically and full compositionally.
COLLOCATIONS
we have so far been thinking of
compositionally from the point of view
of the hearer. There is, however, another side to compositionality
namely the point of view of the speaker: given that a speaker wishes to
formulate a particular message and no single elements available. There are
idioms of encoding. Some of these are not idioms of decoding. To these we shall
we the name collocations. Like the more familiar kind of idioms, they have to
individually learned. Like the more familiar kind of idiom, they have to be
individually learned. Like the more familiar kind of idiom, they have to be
individually learned. As examples of collocations take the intensifiers great,
heavy, high, utter extreme and severe.
CLICHÉS
Some expressions are useful for
conveying ideas quickly, but clichés are uninspiring and boring writers
are speakers should use more imagination and creativity when crafting their
messages. We have briefly describe these clichés to help people create
more original expressions
PHONETIC ELICITORS OF SEMANTIC
TRAITS
In the vats majority of words, the
relationship between sounds and meaning is arbitrary. There is no reason why a
particular sound on group of sounds, should be used to represent a particular
word, with a particular meaning. Phonasthemes are certain sounds which do not
represent a specific enough meaning
to constitute morphs appear to be vaguely associated with some kind of meaning.
Onomatopeias refer to word in which
a direct association is made between the sounds of a word-form and the meaning
that it represent. We might say that the relation ship between sound and
meaning is to some extent iconic.
COGNITIVE SEMANTICS
EXTENSIONS OF MEANING
LITERAL AND NON-LITERAL MEANING
Most people are aware that if
someone says Jane's eyes nearly popped out of her head, a literal truth has not
been expressed. At the everyday level, the contrast between literal and
figurative use does not seem problematical. It is not so easy, however, to be
more precise about what “ literal meaning” really is. Dictionaries
often organize their entries historically, with the earliest first. It would be
a reasonable requirement of a dictionary that it should indicate which meaning
are literal an which figurative: most users would probably assume that the
literal meaning would be given first. The most obvious objection is that while
we might reasonably expect an in intelligible path of change from past meaning
to present meanings.
Frequency is another common
principle for organizing dictionary entries. At fist sight this seems more
promising as a rationable for intuitions of literalness. An example is the verb
see. Two of the readings of this verbs are “have a visual
experiencie” and “understand”. There can be little doubt that
it is the first of these readings which intuition point to us the literal
reading.
The default reading of a word is the
one which first come to mind when the word is encountered out of the context or
the reading which assume to be operative in the absence of contextual
indications to the contrary.
WORD LEVEL
The criterion for a lexical unit was
that it should be “at least one word”. We must now therefore
examine what this entails. It would not be appropriate o review their in detail
here. For our purposes it will be sufficient to draw attention to two fairly
general and constant characteristics of words across a wide range of languages.
The first is that a word is typically the smallest element of a sentence which
has positional mobility that is the smallest that can be moved around without
destroying the grammaticality of the sentence.
By no means all words are equally
mobile in this sense. The morphemes
constricting a singles word have a
rigidly fixed sequential order.
Other characteristics of words is
tat they are typically the largest units which resist
“interruption” by the insertion of new material between their
constituent parts. The possible in section points clearly represent
word-boundaries. In a language such as Turkish, in which word composed of a
relatively large number of basic grammatical units are common, this
charasterics words may seen less salient.
However, there is a marked
difference in the degree of interpretability between words and phrases. In the
Turkish example, although several grammatical elements can be inserted within
the word. We hall not pursue the matter any further here. It will be henceforth
assumed that the typical unit of lexicology is the word.
ESTABLISHED AND NON-ESTABLISHED
MEANING EXTENSIONS
What is historically no doubt and
extended meaning may be so entrenched and familiar part of a language that its
speakers no longer feel that figure of speech is involved at all: such readings
of a word will be said be naturalized. For example: the kettle's boiling
there are also readings which are
well established and presumably have entries in the mental lexicon, but are
none the less felt to be figures of speech. An example is “she swallowed
the story”.
Nonce readings are ones for which
there are no entries in the mental lexicon; they therefore cannot be
“looked up” but have to be generated and interpreted using
strategies of meaning extension such as metaphor and metonymy. For example:
“he had never told her his fantasies about being over powered by her.
SENTENCE AND UTTERANCE LEVEL:
METAPHOR AND METONYMY
A metaphor is a word or phrase that
means one thing used to referring to another thing to emphasize the same
characteristics. And metonymy is responsible for a great proportion of the
cases of so- called regular polysemy.
METONYMY VS METAPHOR
Metonymy and metaphor are quite
distinct processes of extension, in spite of the fact that there may exit
extensions that cannot be classified, because the end point could have been
reached by either route.
Jakobson's dictum captures some of
the diffences between metaphor and
metonymy but leaves and important point unhighlited. Metaphor involves the use
of one domain as an analogical model to structure our conception of another domain.
Metonymy on the other hand relies on an association between two components
within a single domain. In fact associated with the customer serves as a
convenient identifying device. There is no question of drawing any structural
parallels.
METAPHORS
So far we have examined what we will
call structural metaphors, cases
where one concept is metaphorically structured in terms of another. But their
is another kind metaphorical concept. We will call these orientation metaphors,
since most of them have to do with spatial orientation. Orientational metaphors
five a concept a spacial orientation; for example HAPPY IS UP.
Such metaphorical orientations are
not arbitrary. They have a basis in our physical and cultural experience. For
example, in some cultures the future is in front of us, whereas in others it is
in back. We will be looking at up-down spatialization metaphors, which have
been studied intensively by William Nagy, as an illustration. These accounts
are meant to be suggestive and plausible, not definitive.
Some of metaphorical concepts can be
that most of our fundamental concepts are organized in terms of one ore more
spatialization metaphors, there is an overall external systemacity among the
various specialization metaphors, which defines coherence among them and
specialization metaphors are rooted in physical and cultural experience; they
are not randomly.
The most fundamental values in a
culture will be coherent with the metaphorical structure of the most
fundamental in the culture.
We are not claiming that all
cultural values coherent with metaphorical system actually exist, only that
those that do exist and are deeply entrenched are consistent with the
metaphorical system.
In general, which values are given
priority is partly a matter of the subculture one lives in and partly a matter
of personal values.
Ontological metaphors serve various
purposes, and the various kinds of metaphors there are reflect the kinds of
purposes served. This gives us a way of referring to the experience. Some
examples can be: inflation is an entity, referring, quantifying, identifying
aspects, identifying causes, setting goals and motivating actions.
Ontological metaphors like these are
so natural and so pervasive in our thought that they are usually taken as
self-evident, direct descriptions of mental phenomena. The fact that they are
metaphorical never occurs to most of us. The reason is that metaphors like the
mind is a brittle object are an integral part of the model of the mind that we
have in this culture; it is the model most of us think and operate in terms of.
METONYMY
We are using one entity to refer to
another that is related to it. This is a casa of what we will call metonymy.
For example: he's a dance.
We are including as a special case
of metonymy what traditional rhetoricians have called synecdoche, where the
part stands for the whole. Metaphors and metonymy are different kinds of
processes. Metaphor is principally a way of conveying of one thing in terms of
another and its primary function, that is, it allows us to use one entity to
stand for another. But metonymy is not merely a referential device. It also
serves the function of providing understanding.
Thus metonymy saves some of the same
purpose that metaphor does, and in somewhat the same way, buy it allows us to
focus more specifically on certain aspects of what is being referred to.
This metonymy functions actively in
our culture. The tradition of portraits, in both painting and photography, is
based on it. Metonymies are not random or arbitrary occurrences, to be treated
as isolated instances. Metonymic concepts are also systematic, as can be seen
in the following representative examples that exist in our culture. Metonymic
concepts allow us to conceptualizes one thing by means of its relation to
something else.
Some examples of metonymies are: the
part for the whole (get your butt over here!), producer for product (he bought
a Ford), object used for user (the
sax has the flu today), controller for controlled (Nixon bombed
Symbolic metonymies are critical
links between everyday experience and the coherent metaphorical systems that
characterizes and the coherent metaphorical systems that characterize religions
and cultures.
Cultural and religious symbolism are
special cases of metonymy. Within Christianity, for example, their is metonymy
“cove for holy spirit”. As is typical with metonymies, this is not arbitrary.
SEMANTIC CHANGE
One can be read a chapter of without
becoming aware of the fact that words change their meaning through time.
This can be illustrate with English
expire. First before their were such things as tickets an licences with limited
periods of validity, this meant “die”. Then, it was metaphorically
extended to mean “come to the end of a period of validity” which
existed as a clear figurative use alongside the literal use. Nowadays, the
“die” sense is quite un
common, and classes of students will declare that for them, it is a metaphorical
extension of the “cease to be valid” sense. Stage is perhaps yet to
occur, but there is no doubt that the default reading has changed.
This example illustrates one way in
which synchronic meaning extension forms an essential part of diachronic change.
In principle, the meaning of a word may change along any of semantic
dimensions.
CONCLUSION
The semantic field, here shown, is
no less than the grammar of educed English current in the second in the second
half of the twentieth century in the world's major English- speaking communities. Only
where a feature belongs specifically to British usage or American usage, to
informal conversation or to the dignity of formal writing, are
“labels” introduced in the description to show that my longer is no
longer discussing the “common core” of educated English.
For this common core, as well as for
the special varieties surrounding it, I have augmented our own experience as
speakers and teachers of the language with research on corpora of
contemporany English and on data
from elicitation tests, in both cases making appropriate use of facilities
available in our generation for bringing spoken English fully within the
grammarian's scope. For reasons of simplicity and economic presentation,
however, illustrative examples from our basic material are seldom given without
being adapted and edited; and while informal and familiar styles of speech and
writing receive due consideration in our treatment, I put the main emphasis on describing the
English of serious exposition.
REFERENCES
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compositionality/
http://www.ucalgary.ca/~mcginnis/papers/Idioms.pdf
http://www.topskills.com/cliches.htm
Jakobson, R & Halle, M. 1956. Fundamentals of Language.
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M
1980 Metaphors we live by.
Cruse, A 2000 Meaning in
Language.
Cruse, D.A 1986 Lexical