Semantics and Pragmatics

Question 1

What does infelicitous mean?

Answer 1

grammatical but meaning doesn’t make sense, marked with #

Question 2

what is the difference between semantics and pragmatics?

Answer 2

semantics (sentence meaning) vs pragmatics (speaker meaning)

Question 3

what does compositional mean?

Answer 3

meaning of sentence is compositional: derived from meaning of components (words)

Question 4

what is the difference between coded and interpreted meaning?

Answer 4

coded meaning (semantics): what is actually represented “can you pass the salt”- are you able to
interpreted meaning (pragmatics): “can you pass the salt” – a request

Question 5

what is the difference between the signifier and the signified?

Answer 5

letters d-o-g is signifier, provokes thought of canine mammal is signified

Question 6

what does conventional mean?

Answer 6

relationships between words and meanings, mutually agreed by people

Question 7

what is a referent/denotatum?

Answer 7

the real-world entity of a word that has reference, usually nominatives (pronouns/nouns/etc)

Question 8

explain the difference between constant and variable references

Answer 8

The Eiffel tower/constant, the prime minister/variable

Question 9

What is a universe of discourse?

Answer 9

particular world (real/imaginary/part-real) a speaker assumes they are talking about at a given time

Question 10

explain the idea of definiteness

Answer 10

NP is definite when speaker and hearer can identify referent, unique in the context of utterance, the cat vs a cat

Question 11

what is a generic reference

Answer 11

a dog eats bones/ a cat drinks milk – implying all dogs/cats, can test by pluralising

Question 12

what is a deictic reference (phenomenon of deixis)

Answer 12

set of words where meaning varies according to user and context, takes some meaning from the immediate situation of the utterance, examples – here/there/now/yesterday/I/you/this/that, classified with the noun that it modifies eg my is not deictic on its own but my house is, often demonstrative pronouns, tensed verbs are deictic

Question 13

What is homonymy?

Answer 13

unrelated senses of the same phonological word (Saeed 2016)
- homophones: sound the same, written differently.
- homographs: written the same, said differently.

Question 14

What is polysemy?

Answer 14

related senses of the same phonological word, listed under the same entry in a dictionary

Question 15

What is synonymy?

Answer 15

phonological words with same or similar meanings, words can belong to different registers/connotations, rarely have complete synonymy- would be redundant to have 2 words with identical meanings and connotations

Question 16

What is hyponymy?

Answer 16

specific words that encompass a more general category, a relationship of inclusion, ‘mother’ is a hyponym of woman, ‘aunt’ and ‘sister’ are cohyponyms/sisters with ‘woman’.

Question 17

When discussing hyponymy, what is the term for the general category?

Answer 17

the superordinate/hypernym/hyperonym,

Question 18

what is meronymy?

Answer 18

describing a part-whole relationship between lexical items, cover and page are meronyms of book (‘a book has a cover and pages’)

Question 19

what are the 5 kinds of antonymy?

Answer 19

• complementary/contradictory/binary/simple: negative of one implies positive of the other ‘dead/alive’.
• gradable: positive of one doesn’t always imply negative of the other, often has intermediate terms ‘hot/warm/cold’.
• reverse: between terms describing movement ‘push/pull’.
• converse/relational: describing a relationship between entities from different perspectives ‘own/belong to’, above/below.
• taxonomic sisters/multiple incompatibles: classification of words that are incompatible with each other ‘his car is red, not blue’ ‘today is Wednesday not Thursday’, in a set with more than two members.

Question 20

What does lexicalised mean?

Answer 20

concepts that correspond to a single word

Question 21

explain the idea of utility

Answer 21

not all words are lexicalised, some done with phrases ‘a device for cooking food’, but if used often enough it will often get shortened, ‘microwave’

Question 22

explain necessary and sufficient conditions

Answer 22

concept requires certain characteristics eg x is a bird only if x has wings, is an animal’

Question 23

what does prototype mean?

Answer 23

most common usage of a word, for example the prototype for bird for many uk residents would be robin or pigeon etc

Question 24

Explain entailment

Answer 24

has 0% context dependency, Peter gave Mary a rose -> Peter gave Mary a flower, the first sentence entails the second, the core meaning of a word entails something eg: the core meaning of cat is that it’s an animal

Question 25

What test can be used to check entailment?

Answer 25

can be checked using the contraction test - to see if one proposition truly entails another, entailments are lost when a statement is negated or made into a question,

Question 26

explain presupposition

Answer 26

lies somewhere in the middle, ie. some dependency on context, propositions are statements that can be evaluated for truth or falseness, they contain a predicate that which is proposed about the subject, presuppositions are often used as a way of communicating non-controversial information - “my cousin is visiting at the weekend” presupposed that I have at least one cousin

Question 27

how can presupposition be tested

Answer 27

survives negation, My cousin is NOT visiting this weekend still presupposes that i have at least 1 cousin

Question 28

what is back door communication?

Answer 28

because what is presupposed is generally not presented as the main message, clever communicators are able to sneak messages behind the main message

Question 29

explain implicature

Answer 29

has 100% context dependency, inferences that can’t be drawn from isolated utterances, they depend on context and shared knowledge between interlocutors, implicature is in the wording of the sentence

Question 30

what are factive verbs?

Answer 30

verbs that presuppose the truth of their complements: you say that he is good at riding, i assume that you will go home

Question 31

explain conversational implicature

Answer 31

allows us to make inferences, indirectly conveying a message, “do you like my new hat?” “it’s pink!” - she doesn’t really like the hat, BUT if the second person’s favourite colour is pink we can infer that she therefore likes the hat, context is very important in order to infer what the speaker is trying to say

Question 32

what is cooperative principle?

Answer 32

all speakers, regardless of their cultural background adhere to a basic principle governing conversation: make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purposes or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged

Question 33

what are institutional facts?

Answer 33

situations where words carry specific function, for example a priest saying, ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife’, only performed by the right person in the right situation with the social context to back it up - saeed

Question 34

what are performative utterances?

Answer 34

a sentence that is within itself an action, cannot be declared as true or false

Question 35

what is an abuse of a speech act?

Answer 35

giving a performative utterance that you do not intend to follow through with - “I promise to go home”

Question 36

How can a performative utterance be tested for?

Answer 36

hereby test

Question 37

what does felicitous/infelicitous mean?

Answer 37

whether a performative utterance is successful or not

Question 38

What is a misfire?

Answer 38

there are certain conditions that rely on social convention- I cannot walk up to a random boat and rename it

Question 39

what are constantive utterances?

Answer 39

left up to the hearer to infer what the speaker is trying to communicate, more implicit meaning such as “I admit I was foolish” is actually an apology

Question 40

what is a locutionary act?

Answer 40

speaker says something that makes sense in a language (following rules of pronunciation/grammar)

Question 41

hat is an illocutionary act?

Answer 41

speaker signals an associated speech act, the action intended by the speaker

Question 42

what is a perlocutionary act?

Answer 42

speech act causes an effect on listeners/participants

Question 43

what is compensatory behaviour?

Answer 43

triggered by failure to respond to a question for example a speaker may repeat the question - saeed

Question 44

what are conversational postulates?

Answer 44

linguistic shortcuts used by hearers when looking for the indirect speech act, for example knowing that ‘can you…’ usually is not asking about ability but is a request - saeed

Question 45

what is the difference between linguistic context and linguistics discourse?

Answer 45

Linguistic context (verbal): the sentence as a whole
Linguistic discourse: what context proceeds the speech?

Question 46

What are Searle’s 5 speech acts? (1975)

Answer 46

1. Representatives: statements. direct – the democrats won, indirect – have you heard that the democrats won?
2. Directives: attempts to get addressee to do something, direct – put a wash on, indirect – would you put a wash on?, pseudo – stay safe (can’t make it happen, a wish or an offer)
3. Commissives: commit speaker to do something, promising/offering/threatening
4. Expressives: express psychological state, thanking/apologising
5. Declarations: bringing a change in the world, baptise/declare war/pronounce

Question 47

What are the 4 felicity conditions for directives?

Answer 47

Preparatory Condition: Hearer is able to perform Action.
Sincerity Condition: Speaker wants Hearer to do Action.
Propositional Condition: Speaker predicates a future act A of Hearer.
Essential Condition: Counts as an attempt by Speaker to get Hearer to do Action.

Question 48

What is the 6th speech act (Leech 1983)?

Answer 48

6. Rogatives: seeking information, interrogative, where is the shop?

Question 49

Explain prototype theory

Question 50

Difference between metaphors and idioms

Answer 50

Metaphors can have words substituted (inferable meaning), if you change the words in idioms they no longer make sense

Question 51

Explain positive and negative face discussed by Brown and Levinson

Answer 51

individual’s desire to be seen as worthy/deserving of approval or autonomous/unimpeded by others