3) Meaning

Question 1

What does the term “meaning” mean?

Answer 1

what a language user actually communicates through their choice of words in a particular context

Question 2

What are the two types of meaning?

Answer 2

grammatical and lexical

Question 3

Name two components of lexical meaning

Answer 3

denotative and connotative meaning

Question 4

What are the types of meaning according to G. Leech?

Answer 4

conceptual, connotative, social, affective, reflected, collocative, thematic

Question 5

What are the three main components of semantic meaning?

Answer 5

the context in which a sentence is used, the meanings of the words in the sentence, its morphological and syntactic structure

Question 6

What does semantics focus on?

Answer 6

focuses on the literal meaning of words, phrases or sentences

Question 7

What is pragmatics?

Answer 7

the study of language from the point of view of the users

Question 8

What are the fundamental semantic concepts?

Answer 8

synonymy-antonymy, hyponymy-hyperonymy, ambiguity, entailment, tautology, contradicts, contradiction

Question 9

What is the Principle of Compositionality?

Answer 9

the semantic meaning of any unit of language is determined by the semantic meaning of its parts along with the way they are put together (exception - idioms)

Question 10

What does Lexical Semantics study?

Answer 10

the study of basic building blocks of meaning (morphemes, words), often concerned with polysemy

Question 11

What are “arguments”?

Answer 11

elements which are needed in order to complete the meaning of a predicate

Question 12

What are “modifiers”?

Answer 12

they add meaning to a phrase, but are not needed to complete the meaning of that phrase

Question 13

What are “quantifiers”?

Answer 13

they can function syntactically as arguments but they do not refer to particular objects or individuals (e.g. nobody, some dogs, most Dutch people)

Question 14

When can occur a scope ambiguitiy?

Answer 14

if a sentence contains more than one scope-bearing element

Question 15

What are the two types of modality?

Answer 15

epistemic (reference to facts that we know) and deontic (more about rules, right and wrong, obligations)

Question 16

Name four key pragmatic concepts

Answer 16

indexicality, anaphora - cataphora, exophoric reference, presupposition

Question 17

What are “indexicals”?

Answer 17

words whose semantic meanings depend in a direct way on the context of use (e.g. demonstratives this, that, etc.)

Question 18

What is exophoric reference?

Answer 18

situational, outside text

Question 19

What is anaphora?

Answer 19

the process of a linguistic unit deriving its interpretation from some previously expressed unit or meaning

Question 20

Who came up with The Cooperative Principle?

Answer 20

H. P. Grice

Question 21

What does The Cooperative Principle claim?

Answer 21

that all speakers, regardless their cultural background, adhere to a basic principle governing conversation

Question 22

The Cooperative Principle is subdivided into _____________ classified into ____________

Answer 22

conversational maxims, four categories

Question 23

Name the four conversational maxims

Answer 23

quantity, quality, relevance, manner

Question 24

Who came up with the “speech acts”?

Answer 24

J. L. Austin

Question 25

What are performatives?

Answer 25

utterances that are used to do things or to perform acts

Question 26

What are constatives?

Answer 26

utterances used to make statements

Question 27

Name the three levels of speech act

Answer 27

locutionary acts, illocutionary acts, prelocutionary acts

Question 28

What are the two forms of Saphir-Whorf hypothesis? Which one is strong and which one is weak?

Answer 28

linguistic determinism - strong (language determines how individuals think and what they talk about), linguistic relativity - weak (language influences how individuals think and what they talk about but not that much)