8 posts from February 2008

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)

east:west

• paradigmatic relationship because: they belong to the same syntactic category (We went [east]/[west]); and because they reflect semantic choices available at a particular structure in a sentence.
• reversives because they belong to the category of directional opposites. Going 'east' is the reverse of going 'west', thus paradigmatic relationship of exclusion.
  

barrel:gun

• paradigmatic relationship because: they belong to the same syntactic category (I held the barrel; I held the gun); and because they reflect semantic choices available at a particular structure in a sentence.
• meronymic relation because 'barrel' (meronym) is a part of the whole 'gun' (holonym). Test: 'An X is a part of a Y, A Y has an X/Xes' works. 'I hold the barrel' implies you hold the gun, 'I hold the gun' does not imply you hold the barrel.
• Paradigmatic relationship of inclusion.
• There is a canonical necessity for a well-formed gun to possess a barrel. Motivation = the barrel has an identifiable function with respect to the whole 'gun'.

apple:fruit

• paradigmatic relationship - see above. One of inclusion because the relationship is:
• hyponomy: apple is a hyponym of fruit; fruit is a superordinate of apple. Test: 'It's an apple' entails but is not entailed by 'It's a fruit'. Test: transitive relationship: An apple is a type of fruit. A fruit is a type of food. An apple is a type of food.
  
• "From the extensional point of view, teh class denoted by the superordinate term includes the class denoted by the hyponym as a subclass; thus, the class of fruit includes the class of apples as one of its subclasses.

• paradigmatic - 'Did he come?/Did he go?' - exclusion because they're:
  
• reversives - "denote literal movement or relative movement in opposite directions"

• paradigmatic - He stood/he sat. exclusion because they're:
• reversives - These are opposite directions between two states (sittingness/standingness), though this is more abstract than 'come:go'. In terms of people's stationary posture in public places, if one is not standing, one is probably sitting. We don't crouch enough.

• paradigmatic - she is pretty/she is gorgeous: inclusion:
  
• near synonyms -they have (pretty much) the same propositional content ('She is pretty' (pretty much) entails 'She is gorgeous' and vice versa (though 'gorgeous' is the superlative term, thus it entails 'pretty' more than vice versa'
  
• They are different degrees of something, namely 'attractiveness'
  
• are not equally normal in all contexts: ?'The woman in the ornate Elizabethan dress looked absolutely pretty'

• paradigmatic - ""; exclusion because they are antonyms whose meanings are in opposition to each other
• equipollent antonyms - neither term is impartial in comparative: 'happier' presupposes 'happy', v.v.
• No neutral 'How X is Y' question.
• Emotion

• paradigmatic - ""; exclusion because they are antonyms whose meanings are in opposition to each other
• overlapping - one member yield impartial comparative, other committed; ?'John is polite, but he's more rude than Tom' vs 'John is rude, but he is more polite than Tom' 
  
• 'How polite is X?" - not very; 'how rude is X' assumes rudeness;

I'll try my hand at an aspect rundown.

State: Earthlings live on the earth. - 'live' here is unbounded as it is not applied to a single individual's lifetime; ditto for 'no inherent beginning'; it is durative in that, hopefully, earthlings will persists in living on the earth.

Activity: I'm playing the piano. This is unbounded (who knows when or if I'll stop?), it is durative in that I'll play for a non-instantaneous amount of time, but heterogenous, in that I am not necessarily always going to be playing that piano (there's change involved)

Process: The player piano is playing the piano. Ditto, except the player piano is not an agent.

Accomplishment: I shelved the books. durative, heterogenous, but has a clear goal (when everything is in its right place, the shelving will be completed).

Achievement: I finished my coffee. heterogenous, bounded by transition between 'finishedness' and 'non-finishedness', and punctual, in that, at the moment the coffee is gone, it is finished.

This probably won't be on the test, but I'd like to ramble some thoughts on modal verbs. Modals belong to that irritating class of vocabulary which is relatively static. You can come up with new nouns and verbs and adjectives till the cows come home, but new modals, like new prepositions, are pretty rare. This is because modals grammatically encode 'a particular attitude on the part of the speaker to the proposition expressed or the situation described'. Thus it would take a new and very culturally important attitude towards events to emerge to justify the creation of a new modal verb (whereas if its not that important, we would just use some other way of expression i.e. adverb plus normal verb, etc). Thus, since modals are based on culturally-conditioned attitudes, it makes sense to say that they express cultural biases. I would suggest that most of our modals make sense only in the context of our western concept of 'free will'. So to say 'He should have eaten the hamburger but didn't' presupposes that: 1) he was faced with a dilemma between what he ought to do and what he wanted to do 2) he has free will 3) he exercised this free will to choose to eat the hamburger 4) there might have existed a world in which what 'ought to have happened' could have happened. However, if you took a determinist position, in which there is really no free will and he, all 'oughts' aside, eating the hamburger was what he had to do, this 'should' doesn't make much sense. So if our attitude towards the universe shifted towards a non-free will model, we might introduce a new modal verb, say, 'shicksal' (German word for 'fate'). That sentence would read: 'He shicksal ate the hamburger' which means 'He, despite all impulses to the contrary, was determined by fate to eat that hamburger'. So modals are built on ingrained cultural preconceptions about reality.

In the phrase 'You're refrigerator is running', the terms 'refrigerator' and 'running' can only be philonyms if running is interpreted as 'leaking a liquid' as opposed 'moving forward quickly on legs'. If 'running' had the latter meaning, these would be xenonyms. Because 'running' can only be philonymically interpreted as 'leaking water' in syntagmatic relation with 'refrigerator' (a stereotypically legless appliance), 'refrigerator' is the selector that selects the interpretation of 'running' (which makes 'running' the selectee).
Imho 'running' here is actually an adjective joined to 'refrigerator' by the copula 'is', so the two words could also be joined in the noun phrase: 'the running refrigerator'. Here we can clearly see that the semantic head (refrigerator) is doing the selecting of the semantic dependent ('running'). Well, actually, it's probably a verb here.

I'm going to run through proofs for those sample test questions we did in class. ('In-class written assessment' is just semantic speak for test!)

1) fast:stop - polar antonyms

• objectively measurable properties
• both terms are fully gradable (very/sort of/too fast)
• they are incompatibles, not complementaries (X can be neither fast nor slow)
• Their comparative forms stand in a converse relationship: 'A is faster than B' entails 'B is slower than A'
• Comparative forms are impartial: ('X is faster than Y' doesn't mean X is fast and vice versa)
• One term gives impartial question ('How fast is X?') and the other a committed one ('How slow is it' means it's slow)

• Have same propositional content ('My couch blew up' entails that 'My sofa blew up')
• The 'minor differences' on 157 don't apply: ('Couch' and 'sofa' aren't degrees of something; have no difference in aspectual distinctions nor difference of prototype center)
• There are no contexts in which I find either 'sofa' or 'couch' more or less normal

• 'dangerous', the negative, indicates the presence of an undesirable property ('danger'); the positive 'safe' indicates its absence
• The 'How question test': 'How safe is it?' is neutral (it might not be safe); 'how dangerous is it?' is committed (it's definitely dangerous)

• If 'If John gave Jane a dog', then 'Jane received a dog from John' is necessarily entailed; they describe the same arrangement (and since this is a three-place converse, it also entails 'A dog was given to Jane by John' and 'A dog was received by Jane from John'.
  

• they have (pretty much) the same propositional content ('I'm joyful' (pretty much) entails 'I'm cheerful' and vice versa (though less so, because:
• They are different degrees of something, namely 'happiness'
  
• Though 'joy' implies the feeling of the sublime; cheerful is an everyday thing

• These are straightforward directions (or are they extremes along an axis)...either way, that's all the book gives us to work with

• these denote literal movement in opposite directions
• Book note: "Notice, however, that even in these cases it is the overall effective direction of movement from origin to goal which counts, not the details of the path traversed in between)

I'm just going to talk myself through the various 'paradigmatic relations of exclusion and opposition' from this chapter, because, after getting most of the homework questions wrong, it's clear I don't quite grasp the concepts.

Incompatibility: When superordinates have more than one immediate hyponym , they may be related via incompatibility. So, under the superordinate animal we have the classes: lion and tiger. Because these two classes have no members in common (are disjunct), they are incompatible. (Never mind the 'liger')

Liger

Furniture

This diagram shows one of Cruse's exceptions to the proposition that "hyponomy is a transitive relation" i.e.
A is a type of B. B is a type of C. Therefore A is a type of C.

However this doesn’t apply to the statement:

A car seat is a type of seat.

A seat is a type of furniture.

*A car seat is a type of furniture.

Cruse explains this using the concept of prototypes. Only prototypes will be hyponyms in transitive relation to their superordinate. Whereas 'chair' is a prototypical seat (shown by centeredness), 'car seat' is not (shown by its banishment to the far corner of 'seat') and thus is not part of 'furniture'. Our mind must have lots of pretty interconnected conceptual doodles inside it.

Wait! Ahh! NO!!!

Cvp_mueble1

Take that Mr. Cruse!