Test

f meaning).......................... meaning is what is communicated through association with another sence of the same expression.

2. Combinatory axes are called syntagmatic axes and selectional axes are called................. (?)

3. What is the term for probability expressed in the sentence: John may by in his office.

4. Words with the "same" meaning are called.....................

5. This is a tulip entails.........................

6. .................. restrictions are responsible for the choice of the words which can co-occur within one sentence.

7. Meaning inclusion is also called...................

8. Explain two criteria for distinguishing between homonymy and polysemy.

9. Identify arguments in John put the book on the table.

10. Words which tend to occur together are called........................

11. .................semantics sees semantics as a source of grammar.

12. Lexical words are also called...................words.

13. Devise a sentence with two-place predicate.

14. Give an example of a deictic expression.

15. langue - parole

16. Transparent words are those whose meaning can be determined from the meaning of their parts, ...................... words are those for which this is not possible.

17. What kind of oppositeness is between words buy and sell.............................

18. sth with phonetics and phonology

19. Devise a sentence with a intransitive verb....................................

20. Intonation, stress, rhythm, laudness are called.......................
The scope of semantics
language: a communication system with on the one hand the signifier, on the other the signified
- one of the oldest views = in Plato´s dialogue Cratylus is that the signifier is a word in the language and the signified is the object in the world that it “stands for”, “refers to” or “denotes”. Words, that is to say, are “names” or “labels” for things.
- A process of namingDenotation:
- Indicate the class of persons, things, etc., generally represented by the expression
- Cow will denote the class of all cows
- Problem: Even where there are physical objects that are identifiable, it is by no means the case that the meaning of the relevant word or expression is the same as its denotation. Example: the planet Venus – the evening star and the morning star. These can hardly be said to have the same meaning, yet they denote a single object – the planet.
- Proper nouns: used to refer to particular people, places, times, etc.
Linguistic meaning:
- Matematicky naprosto stejné, ale sémanticky nikoli, např.: John married Susan is not the same as Susan married John. (z hlediska lingvistického jsou tyto věty jiné!!! Podmět je aktivnější než předmět!!!)
Další problémy s denotací: Chairs, for instance, come in all shapes and sizes, but precisely what is it that makes each one a chair rather than a settee or a stool? For when is a hill a hill and not a mountain or a stream a river?
Realist view: all things called by the same name have some common property; that there is some kind of reality that establishes what is a chair, a hill, a house.
Nominalist view: the things have nothing in common but the name. This view is obviously false because we do not use chair or hill for objects that are completely different – the objects so named have something in common.

reference:
- Indicate the actual persons, things, etc., being referred to by it in a particular context
- That cow will refer to a particular cow
- Reference deals with the relationship between the linguistic elements, words, sentences, etc. and the non-linguistic world of experience.
sense: relates to the complex system of relationships that hold between the linguistics elements themselves (mostly the words); it is concerned only with intra-linguistic relations.
- Not always possible to distinguish clearly between sense and reference for the simple reason that the categories of our language correspond, to some degree at least, to real-world distinctions.
object word: object words are learnt ostensibly, i.e. by pointing at objects (toto jsou dveře)
dictionary word: Dictionary words have to be defined in terms of the object words. Slovník nemůže ukázat toto jsou dveře. The object words thus have ostensive definitions.
ostensive definitions - musíme používat jazyk. Bez použití jazyka nejsme schopni podat definici něčeho.
- To understand an ostensive definition we have to understand precisely what is being pointed at. If I point to a chair and say “This is a chair”, it is first of all necessary to realize that I am pointing to the whole object, not to one of its legs, or to the wood it I made of.
- Wittgenstein: “I must already be the master of a language to understand an ostensive definition.”
sign theory of de saussure:
- According to de Saussure the linguistic sign consists of a signifier and a signified; these are, however, more strictly a sound image and a concept, both linked by a psychological “associative” bond.
semiotic triangle of ogden and richards
- They saw the relationship as a triangle. The “symbol” is of course, the linguistic element – the word, sentence, etc. and the “referent” the object, etc., in the world of experience, while “thought of reference” is concept. According to the theory there is no direct link between symbol and referent (between language and the world) – the link is via thought of reference, the concepts of our minds.

sense relations: vnitřní smyslová záležitost (metafora, metonymie…); relating words to words; a word whose meaning is unknown to a word of words whose reference is already understood; referential meaning
Phonetics: deals with speech sounds as such and describes them in terms of their auditory or acoustic characteristics or of the articulations of the vocal organs
phonology: deals with the sound systems of languages in terms of the internal relations between sounds.
Full words: tree, sing, blue, gently…; full words seem to have the kind of meaning that we would expect to find in a dictionary
form words / grammatical words: the, of, and, it…
- the form words belong rather to the grammar and have only grammatical meaning. Such meaning cannot be stated in isolation, but only in relation to other words and even sometimes the whole sentence.
morpheme: element smaller than the word; the smallest unit of meaning (e.g. berry in blackberry)
lexeme: forms of the same word (take, took); meaning of the words (plurals cat/cats, past tense)
phonaesthetic words / secondary iconisity/ sound symbolism:
- Often the initial cluster of consonants gives an indication of meaning of a rather special kind (slide, slip, slither, slush, sludge…beginning with “sl-” = slippery words).
- An amusing set is that which ends in – ump = almost all refer to some kind of roundish mass (plump, chump, rump, hump, lump, bump, stump)
transparent words: those words whose meaning can be determined from the meaning of their parts (chopper, doorman…)
Opaque words: those words for which this is not possible (axe, porter…)
idioms:
- whole groups of words must be taken together to establish meaning
- sequences of words whose meaning cannot be predicted from the meanings of the words themselves
- semantically, idioms are single units, but they are not single grammatical units like words, for there is no past tense *kick the bucketed.
- kick the bucket (natáhnout bačkory), fly off the handle, spill the beans, red herring…
deep structure:
- the statement of the meaning of heavy smoker in terms of X smokes heavily
- the meaning is to be related to more abstract deep structure
surface structure: the meaning is to be related to the actual surface structure
ellipsis: the omission of parts of the sentences
pro-formation: the use of pronouns and similar forms that replace verbs and other parts of speech
prosodic features of language – intonation, stress, rhythm, loudness
paralinguistic features of language – facial expressions and gestures
functional sentence perspective: funkční větná perspektiva (Function of sentence in a given context): The car hit the child. The child was hit by the car. (zdůrazňujeme to podstatné)
speech acts (řečové akty): někdy prostřednictvím obyčejné věty dáváme najevo i varování, výhružku, např.: there is a bull in the field (could be meant as a warning, not simply as a piece of information)
presupposition (presupozice):
- Logical composition that has to be valid for a sentence to be true and to make sense. Have you stopped beating your wife? (ať už odpoví jakkoliv, je zjevné, že buď stale bije nebo bil svou ženu. Tato otázka tedy říká, že to dělal, i když to není přímo vyjádřeno.)
- Presupposition is constantly under negation (it does not change even if you negate the sentence, e.g.: Pass me the salt. Don´t pass me the salt. But in both cases THERE IS SOME salt.
affective meaning:
- Dáváme najevo svůj postoj k tomu druhému (social relations). Je rozdíl říct: He died a He kicked the bucket.
- We can be rude or polite, and the decision to be one or the other may depend upon the social relationship with the person to whom we are speaking. We may ask for silence: Shut up, be quiet. Would you please be quiet? Would you keep your voice down?
sentence meaning (Lyons): is directly predictable from the grammatical and lexical features of the sentence
utterance meaning: includes all the various types of meaning that we have just been discussing.
- The part of the meaning of a sentence that is not directly related to the grammatical and lexical features, but is obtained either from associated prosodic and paralinguistic features or from the context, linguistic and non-linguistic, in which it occurs.
Modality:
- Extrinsic (epistemic)
Probability, world around you
John may be in his office - indicates the speaker’s attitude towards the probability of John being in his office.
- Intrinsic (deontic):
Permissions – you can go when u finish.
deictics terms = take their meaning from the context (I, there, yesterday…)