Sentence semantics

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Sentence semantics
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Classifying meaning at sentence level

• Tense
• Aspect
• Situation type

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Situation types

• Static situations
• Adjectives
• Stative verbs
• Can you distinguish these two in Chinese?
• Dynamic situations
• Other verbs, mostly

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Dynamic verbs

• Durative or punctual?
• John lived a long time ago
• John died a long time ago
• Telic or atelic?
• John baked a cake
• John looked hungrily at the cake
• Look at Matrix 5.47
• What situation type are the above 4 sentences?

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Warning!

• Saeeds article is vague about what applies to
  verbs, and what applies to situations
• Vendler and Smith are talking about situations
• Be and love are stative verbs
• Build and gaze are telic and atelic respectively,
  but in
• Im building a house
• My son is being naughty
• progressive aspect makes the situations atelic
  and dynamic

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Tense and aspect

• The tense used in a sentence tells us when the
  event takes place
• - Johnny ate goulash.
• - Johnny eats goulash.
• - Johnny will eat goulash.
• Aspect gives extra time information
• - Johnny has eaten goulash.
• - Johnny is eating goulash.

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Tense and aspect

• Tense is marked by morphology in English (except
  cut, put)
• (and then some people say there are zero morphs)
• Aspect is not always
• Im looking for a burger
• I see it now
• Im eating it
• Im lovin it
• (Oh no I think Im going to be sick!)
• All those are happening right now

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Tense a deictic system

• Deixis mean pointing (in Greek)
• This and that are deictic pronouns (or
  determiners) his and her are not.
• So, question what does deictic mean in
  Linguistics?
• Think about who is pointing, and in which
  direction

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Aspect is not deictic

• It refers to an events temporal distribution or
  contour
• 5.63 thank you, Hockett (remember him?)
• So aspect can describe
• Long/short duration
• Completeness/ incompleteness
• Repeated/ continuous
• Tense is just the overall location in time of the
  event or activity

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Aspect in English and other languages

• Task How is aspect shown in
• - English?
• - Russian?
• - Chinese?
• (Look at pages 130-133, and write a couple of
  sentences about each language. Give a couple of
  examples from each language)

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Modality tasks

• Page 135 is pretty straightforward read it again
• What is in between You are crazy and You are not
  crazy?
• probably, maybe, might be, must be
• So, an epistemic modal verb
• You must be crazy (? I order you to be crazy!)
• A deontic modal verb
• You must not eat any more Big Macs
• How about
• I can reach down and touch my toes
• Can I have a Big Mac please?

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Rank them!
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