SLHS 227 Exam 2

Chapter 3

Ambiguity:

  • Lexical ambiguity: words can have different meanings

    • Ex: the child’s stool

  • Structural ambiguity: sentences can be interpreted in different ways; can't point to a single word for ambiguity

    • Ex: two cars were reported stolen by the groveton police


Syntactic Categories:

  • Nouns: typically name entities (people + things)

  • Verbs: typically designate actions, sensations, or states

  • Adjectives: define a property/attributes of nouns

  • Adverbs: denotes attributes and properties of verbs

  • Determiners: come before a noun to give more information about it; ex: the, a, an

  • Auxiliary Verbs: help form different tenses, moods, or voices of other verbs; ex: be, have

  • Prepositions: show relationships between nouns (or pronouns) and other words in a sentence; ex: in, on, at, under

  • Conjunctions: connect words, phrases, or clauses; ex: and, but

  • Pronouns: replace nouns to avoid repetition; ex: he, she

  • Problem: some members of categories may not be consistent; similar words with similar meanings will be in different categories 

    • Ex: mice like/are fond of cheese; like = verb, found of = adjective 


Morphological/Syntactic Frames:

  • Morphological Frames: position of a word with respect to bound morphemes that can attach to it

  • Syntactic Frames: position in which words can occur relative to other classes if words in the same phrase

  • Open class: can add new words; ex: adjectives, nouns, verbs

  • Closed class: can not add new words; ex: determiners, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns 


Constituency/Tests: 

  • Constituency: Internal hierarchical organization; groupings within a sentence; must have the ability to stand alone 

    • Ex: On mondays, I go to school - On mondays; I go; go to school

  • Constituency tests: must pass 2/3

  1. can be substituted by a pro-form (pro-word)

  2. can be moved to the end/beginning of the sentence

  3. can it answer a question 

  • Phrasal categories: what each constituent represents 

  • Embedded sentence: a noun/verb phrase within a sentence 

    • Ex: A student, who met Leslie last Monday, when to the soccer game (NP)


Phrase Trees:

  • Higher nodes dominates all categories below it

  • Sisters: categories that are immediately dominated by the same node 

    • Ex: My aunt likes her cats

     My aunt (NP)                           likes her cats (VP)

        My (det)      aunt (noun)       likes (verb)         her cats (NP)

  her (det)    cats (noun)

Recursion: 

  • The ability to place a component within another competent indefinitely; keep adding prepositional phrases 

    • Ex: This is the cat (that sits by the window) (next to the dog)...


Chapter 4 

Lexical Semantics: 

  • meaning of words

  • Synonyms: words that have the same meaning in some or all contexts

    • Dialect difference: lift vs elevator

    • Stylistic difference: formal vs informal; ex: insane vs looney

    • Connotation difference: generic vs negative; ex: house vs hut

  • Antonyms: words that have opposite meaning 

    • Complementary: alive vs dead; present vs absent

    • Gradable pairs: big vs small; hot vs cold

    • Relational: give vs receive; buy vs sell

  • Homonyms: words that have different meaning but sound the same

    • Ex: bear vs bare

  • Polysemous: multiple conceptually/historically related meanings

    • Ex: diamond: the shape or stone

  • Hyponyms: relationship between specific term and a general term 

    • Ex: rose, iris, poppy, daisy → flower

  • Hypernyms: relationship between a general term and specific instance of that term

    • Ex: color → red

Argument Structure: 

  • different kinds of verbs take different numbers of arguments

  • Intransitive: none; ex: sleep

  • Transitive: 1 augment; ex: find

  • Ditransitive: 2 arguments; ex: give 


Phrasal Semantics: 

  • meaning of syntactic units larger than 1 word


Thematic Roles:

  • Express the relationship between the verb argument and verb situation

  • Agent: doer of the action

  • Theme: the undergoer of the action

  • Goal: the endpoint of a change in location 

  • Source: where the action originates 

  • Instrument: the means used to accomplish an action

  • Experiencer: one receiving sensory input/emotion

  • Location: where the action takes place



Nonliteral Expressions

  • Indirect requests: can you open the door?

  • Idioms: phrases with meaning that's not meaning of the individual words

  • Metonymy: part used to represent the whole

  • Irony: wow. What a great performance.

  • Metaphor: sally flew down the street on her bike


Pragmatics:

  • Understanding language in context

  • Situational context: nonlinguistic things in environment of discourse

  • Linguistic context: the discourse that precedes the phrase

  • Deixis: word meaning relies on the situational context; person, time, place

    • Ex: he; yesterday; there

  • Entailment: one sentence entails another if 1st makes 2nd true

    • Ex: jack swims beautifully entails jacks swims

  • Implications: indirect suggestions

  • Maxims of conversation: conversational convention that governs discourse

    • Quality: do not lie

    • Quantity: say enough to keep the conversation going

    • Relevance: staying within the topic

    • Mannar: avoid ambiguity, be clear