Week 1

Question 1

What word best describes the association of form and meaning of words?

Answer 1

arbitrary

Question 2

What is the difference between syntactic ambiguity and semantic ambiguity?

Answer 2

syntactic- the structure of the sentence is ambiguous

semantic- the meaning of a particular word in the sentence is ambiguous

Question 3

“I saw the pirate with a telescope” is an example of what?

Answer 3

syntactic ambiguity

Question 4

Would the two syntactic interpretations of “the pink dress with white polka dots” return the same dresses in a store? What is the difference in the two syntactic interpretations?

Answer 4

-similar meaning but different focus

Question 5

What is the difference between semantic meaning and speakers/pragmatics meaning?

Answer 5

semantic- truth-conditions, if this is true then the sentence is true
speaker/pragmatics- context, implication, how are utterances used in a discourse and what inference speakers derive from them

Question 6

What is option 1 of determining meaning?

Answer 6

meanings are words

Question 7

What is option 2 of determining meaning?

Answer 7

A holistic approach – a relation between a word and the real world

Question 8

What is option 3 of determining meaning?

Answer 8

Meanings are mental concepts, thoughts and ideas

Question 9

What is option 4 of determining meaning?

Answer 9

Meanings of sentences as truth-conditions

Question 10

What is the problem with Option 1 and Option 2 of determining meaning?

Answer 10

They can’t explain structural ambiguity

Question 11

What is meant by the mapping problem?

Answer 11

Mental concepts and meanings don’t always match

Question 12

What is the proper schema for truth-conditions?

Answer 12

the sentence “__________” is true only if “___________”

Question 13

What is meant by intuition?

Answer 13

If presented with a situation we can determine whether the sentence is true