Learner goal in learning the language
to use language for communication.
''Applied Linguistics” is using what we know about
(a) language,
(b) how it is learned
and (c) how it is used, in order to achieve some purpose or solve some problem in the real life. " /Norbert Schmitt /
Any language is able to convey everything.
However, they differ in what a language must convey.
Roman Jakobson
According to Dell Hymes, Speakers build up their communicative competence by developing three different and interrelating aspects: |
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1.Linguistic rules:
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ability to deal with language structures |
2.Sociolinguistic rules:
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ability to behave in a particular social context |
3. Cultural rules: |
ability to perform within the appropriate cultural rules of a specific speech community |
Canale and Swaine (1980) describe the four dimensions of communicative competence.
- Grammatical competence: refers to what Chomsky calls linguistic competence.
- Sociolinguistic competence: refers to an understanding of the social context in which communication takes place (role relationships, shared beliefs and information between participants …)
- Discourse competence: refers to the interpretation of individual message elements in terms of their interconnectedness and how meaning is represented in relationship to the entire discourse or text.
- Strategic competence: refers to the coping strategies that participants use to initiate terminate, maintain, repair and redirect communication
Types of utterance |
Performative utterance |
Constative utterance
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Definition |
Action-performing utterance |
Statement-making utterance. |
Truth value |
neither true nor false
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either true or false |
Function
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make part of the world conform to what is said |
represent a state of affair or experience |
Example |
I sentence you to death.
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He is the most famous businessman in the world. |
We can investigate language (or a language) by considering:
1. how it is learnt by speakers
2. where language (or a particular) language came from, in other words, its ancestry or past
3. how it is used by speakers
4. its structure.
Exercises
Exercise 8.
Can you think of four (or more) types of information we can find out about a particular word in a dictionary?
1. Part of Speech
2. Transcription
3. Primary meaning (or any, or many) /Syn; Ant; Par;/
4. Origin
5. Collocations and colligations.
More?
morphemics [mɔːˈfiːmɪks]
plural noun [treated as sing.]
Linguistics: the study of word structure in terms of minimal meaningful units.
Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd Edition © Oxford University Press 2010
Richard Nordquist
Updated February 12, 2020
In English grammar, a colligation is a grouping of words based on the way they function in a syntactic structure--i.e., a syntactic pattern. Verb: colligate.
As linguist Ute Römer has observed, "What collocation is on a lexical level of analysis, colligation is on a syntactic level. The term does not refer to the repeated combination of concrete word forms but to the way in which word classes co-occur or keep habitual company in an utterance" (Progressives, Patterns, Pedagogy).
The word colligation comes from the Latin for "tie together." The term was first used in its linguistic sense by British linguist John Rupert Firth (1890-1960), who defined colligation as "the interrelation of grammatical categories in syntactical structure."
https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-colligation-1689763
https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-colligation-1689763
Normal collocation |
Normal colligation |
a terrible cold |
I
allowed him to go
|
abnormal collocation |
abnormal colligation |
*a large cold |
*I let him to come
|
Exercise 8. Tips
Pay attention to the spelling and meaning variations of the word.
Etymology concerns the origins of a word and how its meaning may have changed over time.
Paronyms [ˈpærənɪm] are words that are pronounced or written in a similar way but which have different lexical meanings.
A synonym is a word with an identical or very similar meaning to another word.
The term antonym / ˈæntəˌnɪm / (and the related antonymy) is commonly taken to be synonymous with opposite, but antonym also has other more restricted meanings.
Graded (or gradable) antonyms are word pairs whose meanings are opposite and which lie on a continuous spectrum (hot, cold).
Complementary antonyms are word pairs whose meanings are opposite but whose meanings do not lie on a continuous spectrum (push, pull).
A complementary antonym, sometimes called a binary or contradictory antonym (Aarts, Chalker & Weiner 2014), is one of a pair of words with opposite meanings, where the two meanings do not lie on a continuous spectrum. There is no continuous spectrum between 'odd' and 'even',but they are opposite in meaning and are therefore complementary antonyms.
Relational antonyms are word pairs where opposite makes sense only in the context of the relationship between the two meanings (teacher, pupil).
A word is an autohyponym if it is used for both a hypernym and its hyponym:
Homonym | BrE ˈhɒmənɪm, AmE ˈhɑməˌnɪm, ˈhoʊməˌnɪm |
Homophone | BrE ˈhɒməfəʊn, ˈhəʊməfəʊn, AmE ˈhɑməˌfoʊn, ˈhoʊməˌfoʊn |
Homograph / ˈhɒməɡr(ɹ)æf /;
Heteronym/ ˈhɛt.ə.ɹoʊ.nɪm /
Dictionaries also distinguish between homonyms. These are words which are pronounced the same and are sometimes spelt the same but which have different and sometimes completely unrelated meanings. Another name for them is homophones.
Homonyms are a tricky and confusing area because there are different types.
Homographs are a type of homonym but they refer to words which have the same spelling but different meanings and are sometimes pronounced differently as well.
Homonyms are a tricky and confusing area because there are different types.
Homographs are a type of homonym but they refer to words which have the same spelling but different meanings and are sometimes pronounced differently as well.
Homonyms are a tricky and confusing area because there are different types.
Homographs are a type of homonym but they refer to words which have the same spelling but different meanings and are sometimes pronounced differently as well.
Heteronyms are a further category. These refer to words which differ in meaning and pronunciation but have the same spelling.
Exercise 9
For each, list a few examples in the table below:
Term |
Example
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Noun
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Pronoun
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Verb
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Adjective
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Article
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Adverb
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Preposition
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Conjunction
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Then consult
Yule, G. The Study of Language. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
fourth edition
[ISBN 9780521749220] p.81.
Exercise 10
Identify the parts of speech in the following sentences:
a) ‘I had a frightening experience yesterday.’
b) ‘There is a beautiful painting in the lounge of my friend’s house.’
c) ‘The spider moved very quickly and they screamed.’
d) ‘She ran fast but the dog caught her.’
Make substitutions for some of the terms, for example, change some of the pronouns and nouns.
Try changing a word for one from another part of speech.
Do your new sentences always make sense?
Do they mean what they did before?
If not, think about why not.
Finally, can you make some observations about the order of the words?
Exercise 13
Fill in the missing word in the following sentences:
• How ____ is the mountain?
• How ____ are you in metres?
• How ____ are you at your next birthday?
• How ____ does your car go?
Your Home assignment by 02-04-2020
Exercise 8A
For each, list a few examples in the table below:
Homonyms |
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Homophones |
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Homographs |
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Heteronyms |
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Exercise 10b Answer the questions.
1. Are words 'impressive' and 'expressive' just cognates, synonyms, antonyms or paronyms? What sort of?
2. Are words 'terrible' and 'terrific' just cognates, synonyms, antonyms or paronyms?
3. Are words 'alternately' and 'alternatively' just cognates, synonyms, antonyms or paronyms?
4. Are words 'entrance' and 'exit' just cognates, synonyms, antonyms or paronyms?
5.Do various meanings
of the word mundane /mʌnˈdeɪn/
show that these are just cognates, paronyms or some sort of homonyms?
Here are they:
земно́й /worldly/;
светский /secular/;
обыкнове́нный /ordinary/;
ску́чный /tedious/;
Exercise 11
Look up the following words in a dictionary:
pupil; expire; mouse.
How are the different meanings dealt with?
Did they have separate entries?
Think of at least three more homonyms and use a dictionary to see how the different meanings are dealt with.
Distributional semantics is a research area that develops and studies theories and methods for quantifying and categorizing semantic similarities between linguistic items based on their distributional properties in large samples of language data.
The basic idea of distributional semantics can be summed up in the so-called
Distributional hypothesis:
linguistic items with similar distributions have similar meanings.
The underlying idea that "a word is characterized by the company it keeps" was popularized by John Rupert Firth in the 1950s.
More support
Dictionaries!
Denotation:
Part of the meaning of a word or phrase that relates it
to phenomena in the real world.
Ex: child a young human being
Connotation:
The additional meaning that a word or phrase has beyond its central meaning. These meanings show people’s emotions and attitudes.
Ex: child = a young human being many other characteristics can be associated to this word by different people (positive and negative)
Morphology Learning outcomes Review
… you should be able to:
1) demonstrate an understanding of the theoretical notions used in the study of word structure in English and be able to discuss them using appropriate
examples;
2) demonstrate a good knowledge of the basic word-formation and inflectional
processes of English;
3) demonstrate the skills to conduct morphological analyses over datasets from English;
4) discuss the debates and difficulties in the study of morphology.
More Semantics
Learning activity
· Are cat and cats one word or two?
· What about cat, catty and catcall: one, two, three words or more?
· And how many words are there in catty and catcall?
· How many words are there in ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’?
Sample examination questions
1. Explain how the notion of ‘prototype’ has been applied to word meaning. What are the strengths and weaknesses of approaching word meaning in terms of prototypicality?
2. Explain the distinction between sense and reference. Why do some linguists believe that both sense and reference are necessary to account for the meanings of words?
3. What relationships can you find between the meanings of the following words (discuss each group separately):
a. building, house, mansion, apartment, shack, bungalow;
b. jump, hop, leap, skip;
c. friendly, hostile.
In each case, explain your reasoning. With reference to the examples given here,
are there things about the meaning of words that cannot be explained through
lexical relations alone?
If you don’t know the meaning of any of the words mentioned above, please
consult the following list of definitions from
The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English:
Wine and cakes for gentlemen, Hay and corn for horses, A cup of ale for good old wives, And kisses for young lasses. |
The Task
In the table below indicate with a cross which adjective collocates with which noun.
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milk |
fish |
butter |
bread |
eggs |
rancid
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stale
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addled
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curdled
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rotten
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Polysemy [ˌpɒlɪ'siːmɪˌ pə'lɪsəmɪ]
is the existence of several meanings in a single word Compare: monosemy Etymology: from New Latin polysēmia, from Greek polusēmos having many meanings , from POLY- + sēma a sign Derived words: polysemous
Enantiosemy = contronym = contranym = auto-antonym [ɔːtə(u)-'æntənɪm]= self-antonym (Gr. ἐνάντιος [enantíos] “opposite” and σημασία [semasia] “meaning”) – is a word which means opposite things.
In other words enantiosemy is a linguistic phenomenon of antonymy [æn'tənəmɪ]? within the same word.
The origin of this phenomenon is three-fold:
1) some cases of enantiosemy are homographs, that is two words which used to be quite different in the past, but developed the same form in modern English. For instance, the word cleave is an example of enantiosemy which means “to separate” and “to adhere”. The meaning “separate” comes from Old English clēofan. The meaning “adhere” comes from Old English clifian;
The origin of this phenomenon is three-fold:
1) some cases of enantiosemy are homographs, that is two words which used to be quite different in the past, but developed the same form in modern English. For instance, the word cleave is an example of enantiosemy which means “to separate” and “to adhere”. The meaning “separate” comes from Old English clēofan. The meaning “adhere” comes from Old English clifian;
2) some cases of enantiosemy are a form of polysemy, a word that developed several meanings some of which are opposite. For instance, quite (“clear” or “free” in Middle English) means “slightly” (quite nice) or “completely” (quite right). A considerable number of English words in this category are the nouns which became verbs, e.g. to dust (“to remove dust” and “to add dust”); to seed (“to produce seeds” and “to remove seeds”);
The origin of this phenomenon is three-fold:
3) finally, some cases of enantiosemy are words which come from different languages (or language varieties) and have the opposite meanings in these languages. One such instance is in the picture above. In this picture, there are three lines in English, Spanish, and French correspondingly. The English word flammable means “catching fire easily” while inflammable would mean “not susceptible to fire”. Another such example is BrE to table a deal “to present a deal for discussion” vs AmE to table a deal “to withdraw a deal from a discussion”. These examples may qualify for translator’s false friends. However, not all translator’s false friends are enantiosemy, but only those which are opposite in meaning.
Some other examples of enantiosemy include:
custom = “standard” and “tailored”
fast = “immovable” and “moving quickly”
presently = “now” and “not now, but shortly in the future”
to rent = “to borrow from” and “to lend to”
to sanction = “to allow” and “to forbid”
to trim = “to add edging” and “to cut away at the edges”
Adjacency Pairs
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First part |
Second part |
A: Good mornin’. |
B: Good mornin’.
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A: Where’s Mary? |
B: She’s at work already.
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A: Thanks for your help yesterday. |
B: Oh, you’re welcome.
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A: Okay, talk to you later. |
B: Bye.
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Some Extra Readings
Home Assignment by 09-04-2020
1. Task Solving in Written form /pages 201; 201-2/
2. Writing an essay (on a tentative topic): 600-1000 words.
3. Try to pass a test below. Get ready with your witty questions.
Home Assignment by 16-04-2020
I. Someone stands between you and the TV set you were watching, so you decide to say one of the following. Identify which would be direct and which would be indirect speech acts.
(1) Move!
(2) You’re in the way.
(3) Could you sit down?
(4) I can’t see anything.
(5) Please get out of the way.
II Classify these speech acts according to Searle’s classification
(a) You're hired!
(b) John Searle classified speech acts.
(c) Well done!
(d) Can you get the door?
(e) Wait until your father gets home!
III. Вопрос. Какие максимы общения реализованы в следующих коммуникативных эпизодах?
"— Как ваше драгоценное имя?
— Моё ничтожное имя Чжан.
—Сколько маленьких сыновей у вашего почтенного родителя?
— У него всего два грязных поросёнка.
— Ваше высокое мнение…
— По моему незрелому мнению…
— Где ваша драгоценная супруга?
— Моя ничтожная жена дома.
— Как чувствует себя ваш дорогой сын?
— Мой собачий сын здоров вашими молитвами."
IV. Learning activity
Fairclough (2003, 61) draws on a ‘classic’ example to illustrate this point. He describes a situation where he may be asked to provide an academic reference for a
job applicant.
If he writes:
the candidate is well-dressed and punctual,
we can argue that he is flouting the maxims of quantity and relevance:
he is not providing enough information and, moreover, he is not being particularly relevant.
However, it is likely that Fairclough wants to draw attention to something and there is meaning in what he writes, meaning which goes beyond the literal.
What do you think Fairclough is implying in his reference and what do you think the recipient of the reference is likely to infer?
Note: you should take care with the meaning of the terms imply and infer. These are easily confused. Do some research on these two terms to ensure that you are clear as to how they should
be used.
Identify the maxims which have been flouted in the following:
(4) ‘I’m starving’ says someone who is hungry.
(5) A: Where is she going to?
B: Somewhere in Spain.
(6) A: Do you want to go to a movie?
B: I have a lot of work to do.
REVIEW EXERCISE
Learning activity
Below you will find some meanings of bank the way they are listed in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. What we have not shown here, however, is whether the dictionary listed these as the meanings of one polysemous lexeme bank or whether some meanings belong to one lexeme bank1 and some to a second, homonymous lexeme bank2.
Look at the meanings and try to decide for yourself how they should be grouped and how many lexemes you think we are dealing with here. Then check your intuitions with two or three dictionaries. Did the dictionaries themselves treat bank differently?
a. a business that keeps and lends money and provides other financial services
b. land along the side of a river or lake;
c. a large mass of clouds or mist;
d. a place where human blood, etc.
is stored until someone needs it;
e. a large number of machines, television screens, etc. arranged close together in a row.
Check a few other words in the dictionaries you have available to you. For example, look up the nouns head, pool and tap.
Do the dictionaries attribute different meanings to these words, do they take different decisions with respect to the distinction between polysemy and homonymy?
Dictionaries usually include introductory parts where they sometimes explain what principles were behind the decision-taking process of the people who wrote them.
REVIEW
Learning activity
What distinguishes the synonyms below from each other?
Use one of the synonyms in a sentence. Can you substitute the other synonyms? Does the substitution change the meaning of the sentence?
Are there contexts where one of the sentences is appropriate, but the same sentence with a synonym is not?
You may want to check your intuitions with a suitable dictionary.
a. clever, smart, bright, brilliant, brainy, cunning
b. walk, stroll, wander, stride, stagger
c. doctor, quack
d. violin, fiddle
e. tap, faucet.
REVIEW
Learning activity
Examine the antonyms below.
Are they gradable or non-gradable?
a. dead, alive
b. happy, unhappy
c. come, go
d. short, tall
e. thin, thick
f. black, white.
REVIEW
Learning activity
Propose a componential analysis of words that name various types of publications,
for example:
article, book, pamphlet, leaflet, monograph, newspaper,
magazine, journal.
Did you encounter any difficulties?
How about words like
angry, annoyed, amused, perplexed, livid, furious?
From your reading, try to list some shortcomings of this approach to lexical semantics.
REVIEW
Learning activity
Identify the semantic roles of each member in English and in Russian sentences.
(EN) I like you.
(RU) Ты мне нравишься.
REVIEW TERMS
Presuppositions are:
"the shared background assumptions that are taken for granted when we communicate."
/Griffiths, 2006, 143/
An Introduction to English Semantics and Pragmatics
/ by Patrick Griffiths
© Patrick Griffiths, 2006 Edinburgh University Press Ltd
REVIEW TERMS
Definition
SENTENCE MEANING is what a sentence means, regardless of the context
and situation in which it may be used.
UTTERANCE MEANING is what a speaker means when he makes an utterance in a particular situation.
/304/
Semantics
A Coursebook
SECOND EDITION
JAMES R. HURFORD
BRENDAN HEASLEY
MICHAEL B. SMITH