DOCSLIB.ORG

Semantics 126.134: Test #1 22 February 2006

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Semantics 126.134: Test #1 22 February 2006 Semantics 126.134: Test #1 22 February 2006 Answers Name: Student Number: 4 sections; 22 questions; 50 marks total Fill in the Blanks Fill in the following blanks with the most appropriate term (1 mark each blank, 15 total). phonetics 1. The branch of linguistics called is the study of sounds in language and how they are produced. 2. de Saussure said that language is a communication system with an arbitrary signifier / sign signified relationship between the and the . utterance 3. meaning can be defined as the meaning that results from using an expression in a given context (such as a particular speaker, time, or place). referent 4. A reference is associated with a real-world entity called a(n) . Compositionality 5. According to the Principle of meaning is determined by a combination of lexical meanings, grammatical meanings, and syntactic structure. 6. A word like hiss that imitates the sound it represents is an example of onomatopoeia . 7. While hyponymy describes a linguistic relationship, the corresponding real-world taxonomy relationship between categories and subtypes is called a . head 8. A compound word is generally a hyponym of its . euphemisms 9. Good or indirect terms for bad or tabooed things are called . orthographic 10. The same (or written) word with two different meanings are known as homographs. 11. The concept associated with a sentence (for declarative sentences, the statement it proposition asserts) is know as its . opaque 12. A semantically combination of words is not predictable from the meanings of the individual words. lexicon 13. A dictionary is also known as a (basically, a list of lexemes). 14. The use of a word to stand in for its meronym or hyponym – or the reverse – is known synecdoche as . Test #1 22 February 2006 1 of 4 Recognition and Analysis Answer each of these questions in the space provided; include brief justification for your answer where required (15 marks total). 15. (6 marks) Name the exact lexical relations that exist between the following italicized pairs of words, choosing from these possibilities: synonym, complementary pair, gradable antonym, reverse, converse, heteronym, hyponym, meronym, metonym (the last three are direction specific; if appropriate, make sure you indicate which word is a hyponym/meronym/metonym of the other). For each pair of words, briefly (in a sentence or two) justify your answer. (a) All that sweat finally paid off. / All that work finally paid off. sweat is a metonym of work sweat is a (possible) characteristic of work, used to stand in for it (b) I hit the target. / I missed the target. complementary pair “missed” implies “not hit” (c) chair / bookshelf (both nouns) heteronyms both are types of furniture (they are both hyponyms of it) 16. (4 marks) Given their historical origins, indicate whether or not the following pairs of words are cognates. Then, using that as part of the evidence indicate whether you think they are homonyms or polysemes. Briefly (in a sentence or two) justify your conclusion. (a) stall (noun, “stable for animals”) from P.Gmc. *stallaz “altar” stall (noun, “an avoidance or excuse”) from Ger. stellvogel “decoy bird” not cognates definitely homonyms no historical connection, meanings are very different (b) medium (noun, “middle ground”) from Latin root medius “middle” medium (noun, “person who conveys spiritual messages”) from same origin cognates strong suggestion of polysemy a medium (person) is a messenger between sender and recipient 17. (5 marks) For each of the following sentences, indicate whether the underlined portion is an example of a compound, idiom, phrasal verb, metaphor, or irreversible binomial (there is one of each). You do not need to justify your answer. (a) Somebody messed up my jellybean collection! phrasal verb (b) What time’s the party? Beats me! idiom (c) Don’t go quail hunting with the vice-president. compound (d) Your answer may throw some light on the subject. metaphor (e) The tide came in fast and furious. irreversible binomial Test #1 22 February 2006 2 of 4 Short Answer Answer each of these questions in the space provided (10 marks total). 18. (3 marks) Lexical relations can be classified as either syntagmatic or paradigmatic. What is the difference between them? Give one example of each (just name the relations, you do not need to give words that illustrate the relation, nor define those relations). paradigmatic: between words used in alternation (choices) e.g. synonym, antonym, hyponym, metonym, meronym, homonym, … syntagmatic: between words used together (within a phrase) e.g. idiom, phrasal verb, collocation, metaphor, irreversible binomial, … 19. (2 marks) Language change is one source of new meanings for words in language. Name (using appropriate technical terms) and briefly describe two processes of language change that affect meaning over time. functional shift folk etymology narrowing, extension, bleaching amelioration, pejoration metaphor, metonymy 20. (2 marks) Unlike synonyms, which vary largely only in degree (how synonymous two words are), there are many different types of antonyms. Name two types of antonyms (using the appropriate technical terms) and briefly describe how pairs of words related differ from each other. Examples are not necessary, but you may want to provide some to help your discussion. complementary pairs gradable antonyms reverses, directional opposites converses heteronyms 21. (3 marks) In class, we discussed four important characteristics of all languages. Name three of these characteristics, and give a brief description of each (a sentence or two long). You do not need to give any examples. 1. arbitrariness: an arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified 2. productivity: the ability to create novel messages that can be understood 3. discreteness: the ability to divide the elements of language into one of a number of limited categories 4. systematicity: languages have rules Test #1 22 February 2006 3 of 4 Longer Answer Answer this question in the space provided (10 marks total). 22. (10 marks) Semantics is the study of meaning, but meaning is too vague a term to adequately identify what we have been studying; for example, the “meaning” of a word cannot always be completely expressed by a dictionary definition alone. Discuss how different levels and types of meaning contribute to the semantics of linguistic communication. You should describe five different components of meaning, and mention their role in understanding language (write five short paragraphs). These are not the only answers, nor are they complete, but they may give you some ideas… expression – introduces referents, compositional utterance – same utterance has different meanings in different contexts communicative – conveys the message descriptive (words) – concepts, denotations descriptive (sentences) – propositions, truth conditions social – politeness or rudeness expressive – attitude connotation – conveys emotions connected to ideas Test #1 22 February 2006 4 of 4 .
Load more

Recommended publications
  • 3.0. the Meaning of Idioms
    JIHOČESKÁ UNIVERZITA V ČESKÝCH BUDĚJOVICÍCH Pedagogická fakulta Katedra anglistiky Diplomová práce English and Czech Colour Idioms. A Comparative Study. Anglické a české idiomy obsahující barvy. Komparativní studie. Vypracovala: Jana Cuchá Vedoucí práce: Mgr. Jana Kozubíková Šandová, Ph.D. 2012 Prohlášení Prohlašuji, ţe jsem diplomovou práci na téma English and Czech Colour Idioms. A Comparative Study vypracovala samostatně pouze s pouţitím pramenů a literatury uvedených v seznamu citované literatury. Prohlašuji, ţe v souladu s §47b zákona č.111/1998 Sb., v platném znění, souhlasím se zveřejněním své diplomové práce, a to v nezkrácené podobě elektronickou cestou ve veřejně přístupné části databáze STAG provozované Jihočeskou univerzitou v Českých Budějovicích na jejích internetových stránkách. V Českých Budějovicích 27. prosince 2012 ......................................... podpis studenta Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor Mgr. Jana Kozubíková Šandová, Ph.D., for her support, invaluable assistance, and important suggestions. I appreciate the encouragement, patience, and time she has sacrificed for this thesis. Abstract This thesis deals with English and Czech colour idioms. The theoretical part focuses on a detailed description of idioms, their meaning, structure, and functions. Furthermore, various classifications of idioms are discussed. The practical part analysis a corpus of English colour idioms and compares them in terms of the degree of equivalence with suitable Czech counterparts. Finally, a group of English colour idioms is researched in order to determine whether the particular idioms are recognized and used by English and Czech speakers. Anotace Tato diplomová práce se zabývá anglickými a českými idiomy obsahující barvy. Teoretická část se zaměřuje na podrobný popis idiomů, jejich významu, struktury a funkce.
    [Show full text]
  • Descriptive Translation Studies – and Beyond Benjamins Translation Library (BTL)
    Descriptive Translation Studies – and beyond Benjamins Translation Library (BTL) The Benjamins Translation Library (BTL) aims to stimulate research and training in Translation & Interpreting Studies – taken very broadly to encompass the many different forms and manifestations of translational phenomena, among them cultural translation, localization, adaptation, literary translation, specialized translation, audiovisual translation, audio-description, transcreation, transediting, conference interpreting, and interpreting in community settings in the spoken and signed modalities. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/btl EST Subseries The European Society for Translation Studies (EST) Subseries is a publication channel within the Library to optimize EST’s function as a forum for the translation and interpreting research community. It promotes new trends in research, gives more visibility to young scholars’ work, publicizes new research methods, makes available documents from EST, and reissues classical works in translation studies which do not exist in English or which are now out of print. General Editor Associate Editor Honorary Editor Yves Gambier Miriam Shlesinger Gideon Toury University of Turku Bar-Ilan University Israel Tel Aviv University Advisory Board Rosemary Arrojo Zuzana Jettmarová Sherry Simon Binghamton University Charles University of Prague Concordia University Michael Cronin Alet Kruger Şehnaz Tahir Gürçaglar Dublin City University UNISA, South Africa Bogaziçi University Dirk Delabastita John Milton Maria Tymoczko FUNDP (University of Namur) University of São Paulo University of Massachusetts Daniel Gile Franz Pöchhacker Amherst Université Paris 3 - Sorbonne University of Vienna Lawrence Venuti Nouvelle Anthony Pym Temple University Amparo Hurtado Albir Universitat Rovira i Virgili Michaela Wolf Universitat Autònoma de Rosa Rabadán University of Graz Barcelona University of León Volume 100 Descriptive Translation Studies – and beyond.
    [Show full text]
  • A Study of Idiom Translation Strategies Between English and Chinese
    ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 3, No. 9, pp. 1691-1697, September 2013 © 2013 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland. doi:10.4304/tpls.3.9.1691-1697 A Study of Idiom Translation Strategies between English and Chinese Lanchun Wang School of Foreign Languages, Qiongzhou University, Sanya 572022, China Shuo Wang School of Foreign Languages, Qiongzhou University, Sanya 572022, China Abstract—This paper, focusing on idiom translation methods and principles between English and Chinese, with the statement of different idiom definitions and the analysis of idiom characteristics and culture differences, studies the strategies on idiom translation, what kind of method should be used and what kind of principle should be followed as to get better idiom translations. Index Terms— idiom, translation, strategy, principle I. DEFINITIONS OF IDIOMS AND THEIR FUNCTIONS Idiom is a language in the formation of the unique and fixed expressions in the using process. As a language form, idioms has its own characteristic and patterns and used in high frequency whether in written language or oral language because idioms can convey a host of language and cultural information when people chat to each other. In some senses, idioms are the reflection of the environment, life, historical culture of the native speakers and are closely associated with their inner most spirit and feelings. They are commonly used in all types of languages, informal and formal. That is why the extent to which a person familiarizes himself with idioms is a mark of his or her command of language. Both English and Chinese are abundant in idioms.
    [Show full text]
  • Experiments in Idiom Recognition
    Experiments in Idiom Recognition Jing Peng and Anna Feldman Department of Computer Science Department of Linguistics Montclair State University Montclair, New Jersey, USA 07043 Abstract Some expressions can be ambiguous between idiomatic and literal interpretations depending on the context they occur in, e.g., sales hit the roof vs. hit the roof of the car. We present a novel method of classifying whether a given instance is literal or idiomatic, focusing on verb-noun constructions. We report state-of-the-art results on this task using an approach based on the hypothesis that the distributions of the contexts of the idiomatic phrases will be different from the contexts of the literal usages. We measure contexts by using projections of the words into vector space. For comparison, we implement Fazly et al. (2009)’s, Sporleder and Li (2009)’s, and Li and Sporleder (2010b)’s methods and apply them to our data. We provide experimental results validating the proposed techniques. 1 Introduction Researchers have been investigating idioms and their properties for many years. According to traditional approaches, an idiom is — in its simplest form— a string of two or more words for which meaning is not derived from the meanings of the individual words comprising that string (Swinney and Cutler, 1979). As such, the meaning of kick the bucket (‘die’) cannot be obtained by breaking down the idiom and an- alyzing the meanings of its constituent parts, to kick and the bucket. In addition to being influenced by the principle of compositionality, the traditional approaches are also influenced by theories of generative grammar (Flores, 1993; Langlotz, 2006) The properties that traditional approaches attribute to idiomatic expressions are also the properties that make them difficult for generative grammars to describe.
    [Show full text]
  • Idioms-And-Expressions.Pdf
    Idioms and Expressions by David Holmes A method for learning and remembering idioms and expressions I wrote this model as a teaching device during the time I was working in Bangkok, Thai- land, as a legal editor and language consultant, with one of the Big Four Legal and Tax companies, KPMG (during my afternoon job) after teaching at the university. When I had no legal documents to edit and no individual advising to do (which was quite frequently) I would sit at my desk, (like some old character out of a Charles Dickens’ novel) and prepare language materials to be used for helping professionals who had learned English as a second language—for even up to fifteen years in school—but who were still unable to follow a movie in English, understand the World News on TV, or converse in a colloquial style, because they’d never had a chance to hear and learn com- mon, everyday expressions such as, “It’s a done deal!” or “Drop whatever you’re doing.” Because misunderstandings of such idioms and expressions frequently caused miscom- munication between our management teams and foreign clients, I was asked to try to as- sist. I am happy to be able to share the materials that follow, such as they are, in the hope that they may be of some use and benefit to others. The simple teaching device I used was three-fold: 1. Make a note of an idiom/expression 2. Define and explain it in understandable words (including synonyms.) 3. Give at least three sample sentences to illustrate how the expression is used in context.
    [Show full text]
  • Draft 5 for Printing
    Jan Milí č of Kroměř íž and Emperor Charles IV: Preaching, Power, and the Church of Prague Eleanor Janega UCL Thesis Submitted for the degree of PhD in History 1 I, Eleanor Janega, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in my thesis. 2 Abstract During the second half of the fourteenth century Jan Milí č of Krom ěř íž became an active and popular preacher in Prague. The sermons which he delivered focused primarily on themes of reform, and called for a renewal within the church. Despite a sustained popularity with the lay populace of Prague, Milí č faced opposition to his practice from many individual members of the city’s clergy. Eventually he was the subject of twelve articles of accusation sent to the papal court of Avignon. Because of the hostility which Milí č faced, historians have most often written of him as a precursor to the Hussites. As a result he has been identified as an anti-establishment rabble-rouser and it has been assumed that he conducted his career in opposition to the court of the Emperor Charles IV. This thesis, over four body chapters, examines the careers of both Milí č and Charles and argues that instead of being enemies, the two men shared an amicable relationship. The first chapter examines Milí č’s career and will prove that he was well-connected to Charles and several members of his court. It will also examine the most common reasons given to argue that Charles and Milí č were at odds, and disprove them.
    [Show full text]
  • The Denotative Meaning
    ================================================================== Language in India www.languageinindia.com ISSN 1930-2940 Vol. 16:11 November 2016 ================================================================== Evaluating the Distinct Use of Meaning Relationship At Semantic Level Md. Rizwan, Ph.D. (JNU), MADE, CTE ================================================================== Abstract Semantics is a branch of linguistics which studies about the relationships between words and how the meanings are constructed and how we understand each other. It means the meaning and interpretation of words, signs, and sentence structure. In a broader term, the semantics study the meaning in a language as well as anything created with language, and often make a distinction between meaning and concept. Meaning is a category of language and concept is the totality of real world knowledge about an item. It is possible to know the meaning of the word without knowing everything about the concept referred to by that meaning. Further, the meaning relationships are relations between concepts and meanings. The concept ‘school’ may, for example, be expressed by the terms or expressions ‘school’, ‘schoolhouse’ and ‘place for teaching’. The relation between ‘school’ and ‘schoolhouse’ is a (synonym) relation between two words, while the relation between ‘school’ and ‘place for teaching’ is a relation between a word and an expression or phrase. These relations between words are termed lexical relations. 'School' also means ‘a group of people who share common characteristics of outlook’, ‘a school of thought’. This is a homonym relation where two senses share the same word or expression as ‘school’. Synonyms and homonyms are not only relations between concepts, but are about concepts expressed with identical or with different signs. In this article some of the important dimensions of meaning relationships have been discussed and the examples have been drawn from English and also from Urdu, Hindi or Persian, in order to clear the distinctive use among the languages.
    [Show full text]
  • From Idiom Variants to Open-Slot Idioms: Close-Ended and Open-Ended Variational Paradigms Ramon Marti Solano
    From Idiom Variants to Open-Slot Idioms: Close-Ended and Open-Ended Variational Paradigms Ramon Marti Solano To cite this version: Ramon Marti Solano. From Idiom Variants to Open-Slot Idioms: Close-Ended and Open-Ended Variational Paradigms. Research on Phraseology across Continents, Vol. II, University of Bialystok Publishing House, pp.167-180, 2013. hal-00933011 HAL Id: hal-00933011 https://hal-unilim.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00933011 Submitted on 20 Nov 2017 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. From idiom variants to open-slot idioms: close-ended and open-ended variational paradigms Ramón, MARTÍ SOLANO Université de Limoges France Abstract There is a cline between idiom variants and open-slot idioms in English: from blow a fuse/gasket in which the nominal constituent admits only a single substitution to wear your heart on your sleeve in which the noun group your heart is actually instantiated by a plethora of other nouns or noun groups making of this multi-word unit an open-slot idiom with an open-ended variational paradigm. Variation is regularly signalled in general dictionaries and in dictionaries of idioms by means of different typographical marks such as oblique strokes or commas or by including a note in the body of the article.
    [Show full text]
  • Studies in Irreversible Binomials
    STUDIES IN IRREVERSIBLE BINOMIALS I. PRELIMINARIES In the typical newspaper headline Cold and snow grip the nation it is proper to set off the segment cold and snow as a binomial, if one agrees so to label the sequence of two words pertaining to the same form-class, placed on an identical level of syntactic hierarchy, and ordinarily connected by some kind of lexical link. There is nothing unchangeable or formulaic about this particular binomial" speakers are at liberty to invert the succession of its members (snow and cold ... ) and may ~dth impunity replace either snow or cold by some semantically related word (say, wind or ice). HoweveL/u ~ binomial s~ch a~ odds-an-d ends the situation is different : the succession of its constituents has hardened to such an extent that an inversion of the two kernels-* ends and odds- would be barely understandable to listeners caught by surprise. Odds and ends, then, represents the special case of an irreversible binomiall). l) There wouhl be little point in surveying here microscopically the termi- nological imbroglio. Most deplorable is not the fact thal different labels have been used by linguists and folklorists for the same neatly delimited phenomenon, but that the delimitation itself has been rarely efiected. Thus, one finds in Lean's Collectanea: Collections by V. S. Lean [1820-99], 1I (Bristol, 1903), 899-940, a fine annotated list of such groups as bale and bless, bacon and beez, bag and baggage, classed with bear away the bell, bear the badge {the blame, t:~e brunt), etc. under "Alliteratives": the author, inattentive to the principle of cottcot~/- t~,'k~q ~ocused his interest oil one side of a complex situation to the extent of losing sight of the other.
    [Show full text]
  • SLIDE – a Sentiment Lexicon of Common Idioms
    SLIDE – a Sentiment Lexicon of Common Idioms Charles Jochim, Francesca Bonin, Roy Bar-Haim, Noam Slonim IBM Research fcharlesj,[email protected], froybar,[email protected] Abstract Idiomatic expressions are problematic for most sentiment analysis approaches, which rely on words as the basic linguistic unit. Compositional solutions for phrase sentiment are not able to handle idioms correctly because their sentiment is not derived from the sentiment of the individual words. Previous work has explored the importance of idioms for sentiment analysis, but has not addressed the breadth of idiomatic expressions in English. In this paper we present an approach for collecting sentiment annotation of idiomatic multiword expressions using crowdsourcing. We collect 10 annotations for each idiom and the aggregated label is shown to have good agreement with expert annotations. We describe the resulting publicly available lexicon and how it captures sentiment strength and ambiguity. The Sentiment Lexicon of IDiomatic Expressions (SLIDE) is much larger than previous idiom lexicons. The lexicon includes 5,000 frequently occurring idioms, as estimated from a large English corpus. The idioms were selected from Wiktionary, and over 40% of them were labeled as sentiment-bearing. Keywords: Idiom, Lexicon, Sentiment Analysis 1. Introduction of magnitude larger than previous idiom sentiment lexi- cons and focuses specifically on the most frequently used Multiword expressions (MWE) are a key challenge in Natu- idioms.1 In creating this resource, we are somewhat ag- ral Language Processing (Sag et al., 2002). Among MWEs, nostic to the exact definition of idiom. We are more gener- idioms are often defined as non-compositional multiword ally interested in sentiment analysis that can handle MWEs.
    [Show full text]
  • Research Report on Phonetics and Phonology of Sinhala
    Research Report on Phonetics and Phonology of Sinhala Asanka Wasala and Kumudu Gamage Language Technology Research Laboratory, University of Colombo School of Computing, Sri Lanka. [email protected],[email protected] Abstract phonetics and phonology for improving the naturalness and intelligibility for our Sinhala TTS system. This report examines the major characteristics of Many researches have been carried out in the linguistic Sinhala language related to Phonetics and Phonology. domain regarding Sinhala phonetics and phonology. The main topics under study are Segmental and These researches cover both aspects of segmental and Supra-segmental sounds in Spoken Sinhala. The first suprasegmental features of spoken Sinhala. Some of part presents Sinhala Phonemic Inventory, which the themes elaborated in these researches are; Sinhala describes phonemes with their associated features and sound change-rules, Sinhala Prosody, Duration and phonotactics of Sinhala. Supra-segmental features like Stress, and Syllabification. Syllabification, Stress, Pitch and Intonation, followed In the domain of Sinhala Speech Processing, a by the procedure for letter to sound conversion are very little number of researches were reported and described in the latter part. most of them were carried out by undergraduates for The research on Syllabification leads to the their final year projects. Some restricted domain identification of set of rules for syllabifying a given Sinhala TTS systems developed by undergraduates are word. The syllabication algorithm achieved an already working in a number of domains. The study of accuracy of 99.95%. Due to the phonetic nature of the such projects laid the foundation for our project. Sinhala alphabet, the letter-to-phoneme mapping was However, an extensive research was done in all- easily done, however to produce the correct aspects of Sinhala Phonetics and Phonology; in order phonetized version of a word, some modifications identify the areas to be deeply concerned in developing were needed to be done.
    [Show full text]
  • A CMB Framework to Semantic Features of Opposite-Localizer-Superposition-Idioms
    Frontiers in Educational Research ISSN 2522-6398 Vol. 2, Issue 9: 126-136, DOI: 10.25236/FER.2019.020918 A CMB Framework to Semantic Features of Opposite-Localizer-Superposition-Idioms LI Linlin1, Jing Jia2 1 The College of Literature and Journalism of Sichuan University, 610065, China 2 Sichuan International Studies University, 400000, China ABSTRACT. OLSI (opposite-localizer-superposition-idioms), consists of one pair of antonymous localizers and other two components in one idiom, possesses distinctive word formation characteristics and semantic structure types. This paper attempts to explain the OLSI of Chinese idioms'reduplicated words through CMB theory. KEYWORDS: CMB; Semantic Features; Opposite-Localizer-Superposition-Idioms The CMB framework is AabstracTed from the cognitive reference point, metonymy view and conceptual integration theory in cognitive linguistics in order to discuss the cognitive mechanism of OLSI constructions. Concerning CMB theory, related articles have been discussed in detail. Under the guidance of CMB, the author constructs the related closed corpus and the idioms analyzed in the thesis are selected from it. This thesis compiles an exhaustive list of OLSI and gets 320 items from the electronic format of popular version of Chinese Dictionary to discuss the semantic of OLSI constructions. Therefore, this section will focus on the related data statistics and induction analyses on OLSI constructions from semantic. 1. Data Description and Distribution According to the general structure of OLSI, which consists of one pair antonymous localizer and other components in one idiom, we collect OLSI one by one from the electronic format of popular version of Chinese Dictionary with the total number of 47200.
    [Show full text]