Practice Exercises in Semantics 2

free gift; kill you dead - syntagmatic - hold between items which occur in the same sentence; they are an expression of coherence constraints.pleonastic abnormality - one of the combined terms adds nothing new to the other, thus is redundant. Freeness is implicit in gifthood.

giant purple pizza shoe - syntagmatic - semantic clash abnormality  - "the ontological discrepancy is so large that no sense can be extracted at all without radical reinterpretation"

'the babies were madly in love'/'the child audited the tax return' - syntag. - semantic clash abnormality - love and the ability to do tax returns are not typical abilities of young human beings, thus there is semantic clash. However, because they are the ability of older human beings, I would say this is not a radical clash, and thus it is only an example of innappropriateness. 'cheerful carpet' on the other hand, is more radical, because cheerfulness implies not only a living thing, but a sentient being, and carpet is neither of these. Thus I would say it is a paradox. I see nothing wrong with 'a small crowd' since small is a relative adjective and some crowds are smaller than others.

You can't win them all - cliche - its propositional meaning is fully compositional, but it has 'global properties' as a whole phrase meaning 'I'm sorry that happened but that's what happened' or 'Chin up - you lost here but that's the way of things and there'll be more opportunity later' etc. The expression of similar meaning would be marked if you used non-default encoding i.e. 'It is not possible to be victorious in every competition' (never mind that, strictly speaking, it is possible).

'raining cats and dogs' - frozen metaphor - although it resists modification, transformation, so forth, the effect of synonym substitution doesn't collapse the non-literal reading i.e. 'it's raining felines and canines' still gets the point across (though maybe just because the phrase is so well-known)