Contrastive linguistics

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Contrastive linguistics

• Meaning-Semantics

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Semantics what is it?

• the study of linguistic meaning
• the study of the meaning of words and sentences
• sentences and utterances
• sentence
• no context
• utterance
• in context

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Meaning which linguistics units?

• those in which form and meaning occur together
• syllables?
• No
• morphemes
• and above them

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Meaning words and sentences

• words and sentences mean in a different way
• sentences refer to situations
• anchored in time and space
• words refer to conventional constant things
• certain bundles of features that a given speech
  community often talks about

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Meaning words and sentences

• EXAMPLE
• dog
• cat
• this is a cat
• the cat is there
• My cat is called Dog.
• Is this a cat or a dog?

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meaning of words

• the meaning of "brown"
• is associated with the set of things that are
  perceived as being brown
• the meaning of "cow"
• is associated with the set of things that are
  typically cows
• nothing stops us arbitrariness! to say brown
  of things that somebody perceives as blue, red,
  etc.

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Meaning words and sentences

• words
• lexical meaning
• lexical semantics
• sentences
• propositional meaning
• propositional semantics

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lexical meaning

• deals with
• semantic properites of lexical units and
• relationships within sets of semantically related
  lexical units in and between particular
  languages.

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lexical items

• one-morpheme word / a simplex word
• a word built of one (free) morpheme (e.g. crush)
• compound word
• as you may remember, an expression that consists
  of at least two free morphemes.
• complex word
• a word built of at least two morphemes

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lexical items

• idiom
• multi-element expression whose meaning is not
  motivated by (i.e. cannot be directly derived
  from) the meaning of its components
• this phenomenon is called non-compositionality
  and
• the substitution of a single element, if
  possible, brings unsystematic change of meaning
• e.g. I've got a crush on you meaning I'm in love
  with you
• phraseological units
• their meaning is partially motivated by the
  meanings of the words they contain
• show one's teeth

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lexical meaning

• the typical relation of a lexeme to the external
  world is called
• denotation
• the relation of a lexeme to other lexical items
  is called
• sense
• a lexeme enters into sense relations

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sense relations

• syntagmatic
• with what other lexemes the given lexeme
  co-occurs
• collocability
• a nice cat, a pet cat, a cat purs
• a nice dog, a pet dog, but NOT a dog purs

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paradigmatic sense relations

• substitution synonymy

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lexical meaning

• sense relations are primary in establishing the
  meaning of a lexeme
• an item first is NOT any other item,
• THEN it refers to the outside world
• a finger is NOT a toe not a digit
• THEN it refers to a finger

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lexical meaning

• therefore the meaning of any lexeme can be
  discussed only on the basis of the language it
  belongs to
• an English lexeme has an English meaning
• a Polish lexeme has a Polish meaning
• finger vs palec
• the English words seem more precise because it is
  narrower in denotational meaning

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types of meaning

• this is the most common fallacy in comparison of
  meaning of lexical items
• it is suggested that there are meanings which
  exist outside languages
• they are objects-like
• and languageA and languageB simply give different
  names to these meanings
• this is not true

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comparison of meaning

• any lexical items can be translated into any
  other language
• except that the translation will not necessarily
  be the same type of lexical item
• a simplex word a simplex word
• so what?

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everything translatable?

• Lenneberg argues that the cultural and physical
  contexts of Chukchee utterances are ...
  incompatible with the contexts within which
  English is spoken ...
• Thus, practically no common frame of reference,
  no basis for a segmental, one-by-one comparison
  exists between these two languages.
• Translation here can be only a very rough
  approximation of what has been said and intended
  originally.
• Lenneberg 1953 464

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encoding

• colour terms in Polish and English
• Polish granatowy, niebieski and blekitny
• English navy blue, (dark) blue and sky blue.
• just a coincidence
• finger vs. toe
• palec vs. palec u nogi

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Encoding of meaning

• in its surface forms Polish, Russian (and other
  Slavic languages) or German, is more explicit
  semantically than English.
• English,
• when contrasted with German or with Slavic
  languages,
• is more ambiguous and vague in its surface forms,
  
• it depends to a great degree on pragmatic and
  contextual clues in specifying the exact
  interpretation of its linguistic forms.

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encoding of meaning

• In English one linguistic form can be used to
  encode a variety of meanings
• context is decisive
• any lexical item means by its relation to context
• while in German or the Slavic languages the
  mapping between form and meaning is more
  one-to-one
• forms are more precise

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• In the lexicon these differences are shown by the
  preferences of the speakers of English for
  certain types of lexeme.
• to encode a message English speakers usually
  choose lexemes very broad in meaning, rather than
  more specific lexemes,
• which is possible because English has both very
  broad lexemes and specific ones.
• In contrast, broad lexemes often do not exist in
  German or in Slavic languages.

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Example

• Russian English
• it' plat'e make (sew) a dress
• pec ' chleb make (bake) bread
• varit' caj make (brew) tea
• vit' gnezdo make (weave) a nest
• proloit' dorogu make (lay) a road
• Comrie 1986 1162

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make

• You can use make with a wide range of nouns to
  indicate that someone performs an action or says
  something. For example, if you make a suggestion,
  you suggest something.
• I'd just like to make a comment.
• I made a few phone calls.
• I think you're making a serious mistake.
• The Pope said the world had made some progress
  towards peace in 1991.
• Science and technology have made major changes to
  the way we live.
• She had made us an offer too good to refuse.

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make

• Make is one of the most common verbs in English.
  It is often used in expressions where it does not
  have a very distinct meaning of its own, but
  where most of the meaning is in the noun that
  follows it.
• COBUILD ENGLISH LANG DICTIONARY, make

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• make, take, give, get, do