3) Contextualism: Representatively proposed by the British linguist J. R. Firth
who had been influenced by the Polish anthropologist Malinowski and the German philosopher Wittgenstein.It holds that meaning should be studied in terms of situation, use, context – elements closely linked with language behavior. ? the meaning of a word is its use in the language.
4) Behaviourism: Based on contextualist view by Bloomfield who drew on
behaviorist psychology in defining “meaning”. Behaviorists attempted to define the meaning of a language from as the “ situation in which the speaker utters it and the response it calls forth in the hearer.” This theory, somewhat close to contextualism, is linked with psychological interest.
2. What are the major types of synonyms in English?
1) dialectal synonyms-----synonyms used in different regional 2) Stylistic synonyms: synonyms differing in style
3) Synonyms that differ in their emotive or evaluative meaning 4) Collocational synonyms: what words they go together with
5) Semantically different synonyms: differ from the words themselves
3. Explain with examples “homonymy”, “polysemy”, and “hyponymy”.
1) Homonymy: Homonymy refers to the phenomenon that words having
different meanings have the same form, i.e., different words are identical in sound or spelling, or in both. When two words are identical in sound, they are homophones. When two words are identical in spelling, they are homographs. When tow words are identical in both sound and spelling, they are complete homonyms. The examples are as followed:
Homophones: rain/reign night/knight piece/peace Homographs: bow v./bow n. tear v./tear n. Complete homonyms: fast adj./fast v.
2) Polysemy: while different words may have the same or similar meaning, the
same one word may have more than one meaning. This is what we call polysemy, and such a word is called a polysemic word. The more commonly used a word is, the more likely it has acquired more than one meaning. For example, the word table has at least six meanings when we look it up in the dictionary:
1. a piece of furniture
2. all the people seated at a table 3. the food that is put on a table
4. a thin flat piece of stone, mental, wood, etc 5. orderly arrangement of facts, figures, etc
6. part of a machine-tool on which the work is put to be operated on
3) Hyponymy refers to the sense relation between a more general, more
inclusive word and a more specific word. The word which is more general in meaning is called the superordinate, and the more specific words are called
its hyponyms. Hyponyms of the same superordinate are co-hyponyms to each other. For example,
Superordiante: flower
Hyponyms: rose, tulip, carnation, lily, morning golory
4. How can words opposite in meaning be classified? To which category does each
of the following pairs of antonyms belong?
①north/south ②vacant/occupied ③literate/illiterate ④above/below ⑤doctor/patient ⑥wide/narrow ⑦poor/rich ⑧father/daughter Gradable antonyms: literate/illiterate wide/ poor/rich Complementary antonyms: vacant/occupied
Relational opposite: north/south dotor/patient father/daughter
5. Identify the relations between the following pairs of sentences:
①Tom’s wife is pregnant. Tom has a wife.
②My sister will soon be divorced. My sister is a married woman. ③He likes seafood. He likes crabs.
④They are going to have another baby. They have a child. X presupposes Y(Y is a prerequisite of X): ①②④ X entails Y(Y is an entailment of X): ③
6. In what way is componential analysis similar to the analysis of phonemes into
distinctive features?
Componential analysis is a way proposed by the structural semanticists to analyze word meaning. The approach is based on the belief that the meaning of a word can be dissected into meaning components, called semantic features. And that is similar to the analysis of phonemes into distinctive features.
7. What is grammaticality? What might make a grammatically meaningful sentence
semantically meaningless?
The grammatical meaning of a sentence refers to its grammaticality, especially its grammatical well-formedness. Selectional restrictions, which means the constraints on what lexical items can go with what others, might make a grammatically meaningful sentence semantically meaningless.
8. Try to analyze the following sentences in terms of predication analysis:
①The man sells ice-cream. ②Is the baby sleeping? ③It is snowing. ④The tree grows well. 1.MAN, ICE-CREAM(SELL) 2.BABY(SLEEP) 3.(BE SNOW) 4.TREE(GROW)
Chapter 6 PRAGMATICS
1. What does pragmatics study? How does it differ from traditional semantics?
答： Generally speaking, pragmatics is the study of meaning in the context. It studies meaning in a dynamic way and as a process. In order to have a successful communication, the speaker and hearer must take the context into their consideration so as to effect the right meaning and intention. The development and establishment pragmatics in 1960s and 1970s resulted mainly from the expansion of the study semantics. However, it is different from the traditional semantics. The major difference between them lies in that pragmatics studies meaning in a dynamic way, while semantics studies meaning in a static way. Pragmatics takes context into consideration while semantics does not. Pragmatics takes care of the aspect of meaning that is not accounted for by semantics.
2. Why is the notion of context essential in the pragmatic study of linguistic communication?
答： The notion of context is essential to the pragmatic study of language. It is generally considered as constituted by the knowledge shared by the speaker and the hearer. Various continents of shared knowledge have been identified, e.g. knowledge of the language they use, knowledge of what has been said before, knowledge about the world in general, knowledge about the specific situation in which linguistic communication is taking place, and knowledge about each other. Context determines the speaker's use of language and also the heater's interpretation of what is said to him. Without such knowledge, linguistic communication would not be possible, and without considering such knowledge, linguistic communication cannot be satisfactorily accounted for in a pragmatic sense. Look at the following sentences:
(1) How did it go? (2) It is cold in hem.
(3) It was a hot Christmas day so we went down to the beach in the afternoon and had a good time swimming and surfing.
Sentence (1) might be used in a conversation between two students talking about an examination, or two surgeons talking about an operation, or in some other contexts; (2) might be said by the speaker to ask the hearer to turn on the heater, or leave the place, or to put on more clothes, or to apologize for the poor condition of the room, depending on the situation of context; (3) makes sense only ii the hearer has the knowledge that Christmas falls in summer in the southern hemisphere.
3. How are sentence meaning and utterance meaning related, and how do they differ?
答： A sentence is a grammatical concept, and the meaning of a sentence is often studied as the abstract, intrinsic property of the sentence itself in terms of predication. But if we think of a sentence as what people actually
utter in the course of communication, it becomes an utterance, and it should be considered in the situation in which it is actually uttered (or used). So it is impossible to tell if “The dog is barking” is a sentence or an utterance. It can be either. It all depends on how we look at it and how we are going to analyze it. If we take it as a grammatical unit and consider it as a self-contained unit in isolation from context, then we are treating it as a sentence. If we take it as something a speaker utters in a certain situation with a certain purpose, then we are treating it as an utterance.
Therefore, while the meaning of a sentence is abstract, and decontextualized, that of an utterance is concrete, and context-dependent. The meaning of an utterance is based on sentence meaning; it is the realization of the abstract meaning of a sentence in a real situation of communication, or simply in a context. Now, take the sentence \analysis of the meaning of the sentence results in the one-place predication BAG (BEING HEAVY). Then a pragmatic analysis of the utterance meaning of the .sentence varies with the context in which it is uttered. For example, it could be uttered by a speaker as a straightforward statement, telling the hearer that his bag is heavy. It could also be intended by the speaker as an indirect, polite request, asking the hearer to help him carry the bag. Another possibility is that the speaker is declining someone's request for help. All these are possible interpretations of the same utterance “My bag is heavy”. How it is to be understood depends on the context in which it is uttered and the purpose for which the speaker utters it.
While most utterances take the form of grammatically complete sentences, some utterances do not, and some cannot even be restored to complete sentences.
4. Try to think of contexts in which the following sentences can be used for other purposes than just stating facts: a) The room is messy. b) Oh, it is raining!
c) The music of the movie is good.
d) You have been keeping my notes for a whole week now. 答：a) A father entered his son’s room and found it is very messy. Then when he said, “The room is messy,” he was blaming his son for not tidying it up. b) A son asked his father to play with him outside. So when the father said, “Oh, it?s raining”, he meant they couldn?t play outside.
c) Two persons just watched a movie and had a discussion of it. One person said, “The story of the movie is very moving”, so when the other person said, “The music of the movie is good”, he meant he didn't think the story of the movie was good.
d) A person wanted his notes back, so when he said, “you have been keeping my notes for a whole week now”, he was demanding the return of his notes.
5. According to Austin, what are the three acts a person is possibly
performing while making an utterance. Give an example.
答： According to Austin's new model, a speaker might be performing three acts simultaneously when speaking: locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act.
A locutionary act is the act of uttering words, phrases, clauses. It is the act of conveying literal meaning by means of syntax, lexicon and phonology. An illocutionary act is the act of expressing the speaker?s intention; it is the act performed in saying something. A perlocutionary act is the act performed by or resulting from saying something; it is the consequence of, or the change brought about by the utterance; it is the act performed by saying something. Let's look at an example: You have left the door wide open.
The locutionary act performed by the speaker is his utterance of the words “you”, “have”, “door”, “open”, etc. thus expressing what the words literally mean.
The illocutionary act performed by the speaker is that by making such an utterance he has expressed his intention of speaking, i.e. asking someone to close the door, or making a complaint, depending on the context.
The perlocutionary act refers to the effect of the utterance. If the hearer gets the speaker's message and sees that the speaker means to tell him to close the door, the speaker has successfully brought about the change in the real world he has intended to; then the perlocutionary act is successfully performed.
6. What are the five types of illocutionary speech acts Searle has specified? What is the illocutionary point of each type?
答：(1) representatives: stating or describing, saying what the speaker believes to be true
(2) directives: trying to get the hearer to do something
(3) commissives: committing the speaker himself to some future course of action
(4) expressives: expressing feelings or attitude towards an existing
(5) declarations: bringing about immediate changes by saying something
The illocutionary point of the representatives is to commit the speaker to something's being the case, to the truth of what has been said, in other words, when performing an illocutionary act of representative, the speaker is making a statement or giving a description which he himself believes to be true. Stating, believing, sweating, hypothesizing are among the most typical of the representatives.
Directives ate attempts by the speaker to get the hearer to do some- thing. Inviting, suggesting, requesting, advising, wanting, threatening and ordering are all specific instances of this class.
Commissives are those illocutionary acts whose point is to commit the speaker to some future course of action, i.e. when speaking the speaker