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SEMANTICS
NIK NURFAKHIRA BINTI NIK MOHD SALLEHNUR ATIKAH IBRAHIMHANIS AQILAH JOHARINUR ALIA IZYAN RASLIWAN NURFARAHIYAH BT W.LIAH
TUAN NUR IZZATI TUAN MOHAMAD
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Introduction :
Unlike lexical semantics, which focuses on the
meanings of individual words, the field
ofcompositional semantics looks at the
meanings of sentences and longer utterances.
Much of the focus of traditional semantics has
been on vocabulary, but contemporary semantics
is increasingly concerned with the analysis of
sentence meaning, or al least of those aspects of
sentenced meaning that cannot be predicted from
the sum of the individual lexemes.
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Area :
The major areas of compositional
semantics are anomalies, idioms,
ambiguities, and presuppositions.
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Anomalies The semantic properties of words determine
what other words they can be combined with.
A sentence widely used by linguistics
illustrates this fact:
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
The sentence obeys all the syntactic rules of
English. The subject is colorless green
ideas and the predicate is sleep furiously. It
has the same syntactic structure as the
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Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
But there is obviously something semantically
wrong with the sentence. The meaning
ofcolorless includes the semantic feature
"without color," but it is combined with the
adjective green, which has the semantic feature
"green in color." How can something be both
"without color" and "green in color"? This sentence
violates what we know about semantic features
and is, therefore, semantically anomalous.
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Semantic violations in poetry may form strange
but interesting aesthetic images , as in Dylan
Thomas's phrase a grief ago. Ago is originally
used with words specified by some temporal
semantic features:
When Thomas used the word grief with ago, he
was adding a durable feature to grief for poetic
effect, so while the noun phrase is anomalous, it
evokes certain feelings.
A week ago , an hour ago, a month ago, a centuryago BUT NOT a table ago, a dream ago, a motherago, a paper ago
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So although phrases like Thomas's a grief
ago violate some semantic rules, we canunderstand them. Breaking the rules creates
the imagery desired. The fact that we are
able to understand, or at least interpret,
anomalous expressions, and at the same time
recognize their anomalous nature,
demonstrates our knowledge of the semantic
system and semantics properties of the
language.
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Idioms
Idiomatic expressions are phrases that have fixed
meanings that are literal. Fixed meanings cannot
be inferred from the meanings of the individual
words. For example, "pull my leg" means to kid or
joke and has nothing to do with pulling legs. It is
an expression whose origins are often lost to
history. Here are some common English idioms:
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some common English idioms:
GIVE THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT- BELIEVE SOMEONE'S STATEMENT, WITHOUT PROOF.
EXAMPLE : "THE TEACHER'S EXPLANATION DID NOT SEEM LOGICAL,
BUT I GAVE HER THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT."
FIT THE BILL
- SEEMS CORRECT.EXAMPLE : "THAT SEEMS TO FIT THE BILL. I'LL TAKE IT.
ROCK THE BOAT
- CREATE PROBLEMS FOR OTHER PEOPLE.
EXAMPLE: "EVERYONE LIKES ANTONIO. HE DOESN'T ROCK THEBOAT.
DON'T HOLD YOUR BREATH- DON'T WAIT TOO LONG BECAUSE IT MIGHT NOT HAPPEN.
EXAMPLE : "YES, IT'S POSSIBLE THAT THEY WILL LOWER TAXESBUT DON'T HOLD YOUR BREATH."
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Idioms are similar in structure to ordinary phrases except
that they tend to be frozen in form and do not readily enter
into other combinations or allow the word order to change.
Thus,
(1) She put her foot in her mouth
has the same structure as (2) She put her bracelet in her
drawer
But
The drawer in which she put her bracelet was hers.
Her bracelet was put in her drawer.
are sentences related to sentence (2).
The mouth in which she out her foot was hers.
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AmbiguityAmbiguity, as you have learned, is
when words have more than onemeaning. For
example, glasses can mean eye
glass, sunglasses, and drinkingglasses.
Ambiguity at the sentence level
means a phrase or sentence hasmore than one underlyingstructure, such as these phrases
Tibetan history teacher (the--
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Presupposition
A presupposition is background belief
relating to an utterance that
must be mutually known or assumed bythe speaker and hearer for the utteranceto be considered appropriate in context
generally will remain a necessaryassumption whether the utterance isplaced in the form of an assertion,
denial, or question, and can generally be associated with a
specific lexical item or grammaticalfeature (presupposition trigger) in the
utterance.
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For example, the utterance
John regrets that he stoppeddoing linguistics before he left the
university
has thefollowing presuppositions:
There is someone uniquelyidentifiable to speaker andaddressee as John.
John stopped doing linguistics
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The utterance
I'll have some more coffee
presupposes that you have already hadsome.
For your information, two terms relatedto presupposition that we don't cover inthis classare implicature and entailment (whichdescribes the relationship between twostatements where the truth of onesuggests the truth of the other, but --distinguishing implicature from
entailment -- does not require it.
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~THE END~