UNIT 1: …..

(9/1/2024)

1. Conceptual/ Denotative meaning: Nghĩa gốc/ nghĩa đen

 Also called logical or cognitive meaning. It is the basic propositional meaning which
corresponds to the primary dictionary definition.
 It is the essential or core meaning.

E.g: Boy= + human, +male, -adult

The hierarchical structure of “Boy” = +Human, +Male, -Adult

Child: +human, -mature, +-male, +innocent

Aunt: +human, -male, +female, +father or mother’s sister

Bachelor: +human, +-male, +-female, +mature, +stay single

Actress: +human, +female, +-mature, +play an act/ play a role, +professionally artistic

Chick: -human, +baby bird, +young chicken, -mature, +animate, -fully grown

Tip toe: +motion, +walk, +on toes, +silently

2. Connotative meaning:
 The communicate value of an expression over and above its purely conceptual
content. It is sth that goes beyond mere referenr of a word and hints at its attributes in
the real world.
3. Social meaning:
 The meaning conveyed by the piece of language about the social context of its use is
called the social meaning
 The decoding of a text is dependent on our knowledge of stylistics and other
variations of language
 We recognize some words or pronunciation as being dialectical i.e. telling us sth
abt…

E.g: I ain’t done nothing

The line tells us abt the speaker and that is the speaker is probably underprivileged and
uneducated
 “Come one yaar, be a sport. Don’t be Lallu”

The social meaning can be that of Indian young close friends.

4. Affective or Emotive meaning:

 It refers to emotive association or effects of words evoked in the reader, listener. It is
what conveyed abt the personal feelings or attitude towards the listener.

E.g: “home” for a sailor/soldier or expatriate

- “mother” for a motherless child

- “a married woman” (esp. in Indian context) will have a special effective, emotive
quality.

E.g: “You are a vicious tyrant and a villainous reprobation and I hate you”

Or: “I hate you, you idiot”

 We are left with a little doubt about the speaker’s feelings towards the listener. Here
speaker seems to have a very negative attitude towards the listener. Here speaker
seems to have a very negative attitude towards his listener. This is called affective
meaning.
5. Reflected Meaning:
 Reflected meaning arises when a word has more than one conceptual meaning or
multiple conceptual meaning.
6. Collocative Meaning:
 The meaning which a word acquires in the company of certain words. Words
collocate or co-occur with certain words only e.g. Big business not large or great.
 Refers to associations of a word because of its usual or habitual co-occurrence with
certain types of words. “Pretty” and “handsome” indicate “good looking”.
7. Thematic Meaning:
 It refers to what is communicated by the way in which a speaker or a writer organizes
the message in terms of ordering focus and emphasis.
 Thus active is different from passive though its conceptual meaning is the same
  The ways we order our message also convey what is important and what not. This is
basically thematic meaning.

E.g: 1. He likes Indian goods most  He is the theme

2. Indian goods he likes most  Indian goods is the theme

HW 9/1: Find one or two words and define all 7 types of meaning of the words.

UNIT 2: UTTERANCES, SENTENCES AND PROPOSITIONS (16/01/24)

E.g: I need ice cream now. If

 Spoken/ read aloud: Utterance

 Written down: Sentence

 Thought about (in mind): Proposition

UNIT 5: PREDICATES

Analyzing simple declarative sentence, there are two major semantic roles:

1. The role of Predicator (played by predicate (any kinds of word) )

2. The role of Argument (played by referring expression)

E.g:

1. My dog bit the postman

2. Mrs Wraith is writing the Mayor’s speech

3. Cairo is in Africa

4. Edinburgh is between Aberdeen and York

5. This place stinks

6. John’s car is red

7. Einstein was a genius

Which word carries the most specific information.

  Predicator only appears in sentence, if it just a word, it is just a predicate (or referring
expression)
 Predicate can become predicator (in a sentence) and referring expression (if standing
alone)

e.g: I love cars  “I” and “cars” is referring expression, “love” is predicator

 The predicator is a word (or a group of words) which does not belong to any of
the referring meaning of the sentence.
 The predicator describes the state or process in which the referring expressions
are involved
 A predicate is any word which can function as the predicator of a sentence

The degree of Predicate

 There are different degree of predicate:

- Examples:
1. They scream loudly  Scream is a predicate of degree one (one-place predicate)
2. We watch TV together  Watch is the predicate of degree two (two-place predicate)
3. John gives Mary a bouquet of roses  Give is a predicate of degree three (three – place
predicate)
 Sometimes two predicates can have nearly, if not exactly, the same sense but be of
different grammatical part of speech

Example: Jack is foolish, Jack is a fool  Foolish and fool are predicate, but both have
different part of speech.

Exercises:

1. Determine the semantic role:

A. The child is afraid of cats  “afraid of” is the predicator
B. The lamp is over the table
C. The new campus is outside the city
2. Determine the degree of predicate:
A. The students build the green house  two–place predicate
Generic sentence

- The whale is a mammal (understood in the most usual way) is a generic sentence
- That whale over there is a mammal is not a generic sentence

Note: A generic sentence can be introduced by either “a” or “the” (or neither)

- A generic sentence is a sentence in which some statement is made about a whole

unrestricted class of individuals, as opposed particular individual.

Tuesday, 30th Jan: Deixis and Definiteness

 Deixis: Từ trực chỉ  chỉ đích danh đối tượng

 Definition:
- Deictic word: One which takes some element of its meaning from the situation
(the speaker, the addressee, the time and the place) of the utterance in which it is
used.
- The general phenomenon of its occurrence is called Deixis.
- The phenomenon of deixis (pointing/indicating via language) constitutes the
single most obvious way in which the relationship between language and context
is reflected in the structure of languages themselves.
- Any linguistic form used to accomplish this pointing is called a deictic
expression.
- Used in face-to-face spoken interaction, easily understood by the people present
(but difficult for someone not right there and then or in darkness)

E.g: Listen, I’m not disagreeing with you but with you, and not about this, but about
this.

 Deictic Usage:
1. Gestural: Terms used in gestura; deictic way can only be interpreted with reference to an
audio-visual-tactile, and in general a physical, monitoring of the speech event:

E.g:
+ This one’s genuine, but this one’s fake (with selecting gesture)

+ He’s not the Duke. He is. He’s the butler (with selecting gesture)

2. Symbolic: Symbolic usages of deictic terms require for their interpretation only
knowledge of the basic spatio – temporal parameters of the speech event (and
occasionally participant role, discourse and social parameters)

+ This city is really beautiful (General location is sufficient)

+ You can all come with me if you like (Set of potential addresses)

Types Definition Proximal form (Near Distal form Examples

of deixis speaker) (away from
speaker)

Universe of discourse  Context of utterance  Immediate situation of utterance

“I saw a man walking his dog in the park”

- Universe of Discourse: a man, his dog, the park

- Context: Time, place, social context, purpose (affect the meaning of the sentence)
 The universe of discourse for any utterance is the particular world, real or imaginary
(or part real part imaginary) that the speaker assumes he is talking about at the time.
- When an astronomy lecturer, in a serious lecture, states that the Earth revolves
around the Sun
 Real world is the universe of discourse.
- When I tell my children a bedtime story and say “The dragon set fire to the woods
with his hot breath”
 Imaginary world is the universe of discourse.
 Universe of Discourse can be referring expression.

Context
  The context of an utterance is a small subpart of the universe of discourse shared by
speaker and hearer, and includes facts about the topic of the conversation in which the
utterance occurs, and also facts about the situation in which the conversation itself takes
place.
 The exact context of any utterance can never be specified with complete certainty
 The notion of context is very flexible (even somewhat vague)

DEFINITENESS

 Definition: A feature of noun phrase selected by the speaker to convey his assumption
that the hearer will be able to identify the referent of the NP.

Tuesday, February 27th 2024

UNIT 9: SENSE PROPERTIES AND STEREOTYPES

1. Analytic sentence:
- Cats are not human
- Broccoli is vegetable
2. Synthetic sentence:
- The man over there is my brother
- Some students are not good at English
3. Contradiction:
- My father is her aunt
- The bachelor has already married

UNIT 10: SENSE RELATIONS (1)

Identity & Similarity of sense

Sense relationships (Sameness of meaning): Individual predicates (Synonymy) & Whole

sentences (Paraphrase)

I. Hyponymy:
 - HYPONYMY is a sense relation between predicates (or sometimes longer
phrases) such that the meaning of one predicate (or phrase) is included in the
meaning of the other.
 The meaning of red is included in the meaning of scarlet
- Red is the superordinate term  more general or inclusive in meaning, abstract,
or schematic than its hyponyms.
- Scarlet is a hyponym of red  more specific in the kind of colour it describes.

Examples:

1. Red, yellow, blue are hyponyms (đồng hạ vị) of “color” OR “color” is the hypernym
(thượng vị) of “red”, “yellow”, “blue”
II. Synonymy:
- The similarity of meaning  vague definition
- Synonymy is the relationship between two predicates that have the same sense
 Requires identity of sense  strict definition  very few examples
e.g: Stubborn and obstinate are synonyms (in most dialects of English)

 Some words have the same sense although they may differ in dialectical, stylistic or social
associations (big – large; buy – purchase; hide – conceal;…)

Synonymy & Sense:

- Interdependent  one can’t understand one without understanding the other

- Best communicated by a range of examples
- When dealing with sense relations:
 Stick to clear cases
 Abstract away from any stylistic, social, or dialectal associations the word may have
 Concentrate on what has been called the cognitive or conceptual meaning of a word
III. Entailment:
IV. Paraphrase:
- A sentence which expresses the same proposition as another sentence is a
PARAPHRASE of that sentence (asssuming the same referents for any referring
expressions involved)
 - Paraphrase is to SENTENCES (on individual interpretations) as SYNONYMY is
to PREDICATES (though some semanticists talk loosely of synonymy in the case
of sentences as well).

e.g: Bachelors prefer redhaired girls is a paraphrase of Girls with red hair are preferred by
unmarried men

Sense relations (Meaning inclusion): Individual predicates (Hyponymy) & Propositions in a

language involving truth conditions (Entailment)

Buổi 03.01.2024: Unit 11 Sense relations (2): OPPOSITENESS AND DISSIMILARITY OF

SENSE AND AMBIGUITY

Sense relations (oppositeness of meaning) = individual predicates (Antonymy) & whole

sentences(contradictoriness)

ANTONYMY

The traditional view of antonymy

  Simply “oppositeness of meaning”
 Not adequate
- Some words may be opposite in meaning in different ways
- Some words have no real opposites

TYPES OF ANTONYMY

1. Binary antonym:
 Also called complementary
- Binary antonyms are predicates which come in pairs and between them exhaust
all the relevant possibilities. If the one predicate is applicable, then the other
cannot be, and vice versa.
- Ex: same – different; dead – alive; married – unmarried.
2. Converse:
- If a predicate describes a relationship between two things (or people) and some
other predicate describes the same relationship when the two things (or people)
are mentioned in the opposite order, then the two predicates are CONVERSES of
each other.
- Applies when three things (or people) are mentioned.
- Ex: Greater than – less than; own – belong to;

Semantic fields

 Miniature semantic systems

- In atonymy & converseness
- The antonyms come in pairs or more between them, the members of a pair of
binary antonyms fully fill the area to which they can be applied.

E.g: The sex system in English: male – female

3. Multiple incompatibility:
a) All the terms in a system are mutually imcompatible
 E.g: A playing card cannot belong to both the hearts suit and the spades suit
b) Together, the members of a system cover all the relevant area
 E.g: And besides hearts, clubs, diamonds, and spades, there are no other suits
 - There are large numbers of open-ended systems of multiple incompatibility
4. Gradable:
 Two predicates are GRADABLE antonyms if they are at opposite ends of a continuous
scale of values (a scale which typically varies according to the context of use)

(Hot – warm – cool – tepid – cold)

 Gradability test:
 Check whether a word can combine with

(very, or very much, or how? Or how much?)

E.g: How tall is he?  is acceptable

How top is that shelf  is not acceptable

E.g: tall – short; long – short; clever – stupid; love – hate

CONTRADICTORINESS

- A proposition is a CONTRADICTORY of another proposition if it is impossible for them

both to be true the same time and of the same circumstances.
- The definition can naturally be extended to sentences thus: a sentence expressing one
proposition is a contradictory of a sentence expressing another proposition if it is
impossible for both propositions to be true at the same time and of the same
circumstances
- Alternatively (and equivalently) a sentence contradicts another sentence if it entails the
negation of the other sentence.

The relationship between Contradictoriness & Antonymy (& Incompatibility)

- Statement A

Given two sentences, both identical except that: (a) one contains a word X where the other
contains a word Y, and (b) X is an antonym of Y (or X is incompatible with Y) then the two
sentences are contradictories of each other (i.e. contradict each other)

AMBIGUITY
  Describing and explaining ambiguities in words and in sentences  is one of the goals of
a semantic theory
 A word or sentence is AMBIGUOUS when it has more than one sense. A sentence is
ambiguous if it has two (or more) paraphrases which are not themselves paraphrases of
each other.

E.g: Crop: Time to harvest plants VS. to handle sth with hand.

Ambiguous words (the closeness, or relatedness, of the senses of the ambiguous words) =
Homonymy (different senses) & Polysemy (closely related senses)

HOMONYMY

- A case of HOMONYMY is one of an ambiguous word whose different senses are far
apart from each other and not obviously related to each other in any way with respect to a
native speaker’s intuition
+ Mug (drinking vessel vs gullible person)
+ Bank (financial instituition vs the side of a river or stream)
- Homonymy seems to be a matter of accident or coincidence  There is no obvious
conceptual connection between the two meanings of either word.

POLYSEMY

- A case of POLYSEMY is one where a word has several very closely related senses  In
other words, a native speaker of the language has clear intuitions that the different senses
are related to each other in some ways.

E.g: Mouth (of a river vs of an animal) in a case of polysemy.

 The concepts of an opening form the interior of some solid mass to the outside & of a
place of issue at the end of some long narrow channel

- Polysemy in nouns is quite common in human languages.

HOMONYMY & POLYSEMY

 Polysemy is much more common in human language  most words have related
variations in sense that depend on the particular linguistic context in which they are used.
  It is nearly impossible to draw a clear line between homonymy and polysemy  they
occupy places along a graded continuum of meaning
 Homonymy  polysemy  vagueness

VAGUE WORDS

Buổi 15.03.2024: PARTICIPANT ROLES

 AGENT
 AFFECTED
 INSTRUMENT
 LOCATION
 BENEFICIARY
 EXPERIENCER

(AGENT) AFFECTED (INSTRU)

(INSTRUMENT) AFFECTED

AFFECTED

B4.

a. AG AF
b. EX TH
c. AF AG
d. AG AF
e. AG AF IN
f. EX TH LO
g. AG AF LO
h. AG BE AF
i. BE AF AG
j. AG AF BE
k. LO
l. AG AF BE
Buổi 19.03.2024: Speech acts (Hành động ngôn từ)

To speak is to act

- People do not only produce utterances containing grammatical stuctures and words, they
perform actions via those utterances.

e.g: You’re fired

 The utterance can be used to perform the act of ending an employment. However, the actions
performed by utterances do not have to be dramatic or unpleasant.

- JJ Austin (1955) observed that “many utterances do not communicate information, but
are equivalent to actions) – Performative utterance

e.g:

I apologise

I promis

I will

I name this ship…

 A PERFOMATIVE utterance is one that actually describe the act that it performs, i.e. it
PERFORMS some act and simultaneously describe that act.

E.g: I promise to repay you tomorrow (promise + describe a promise  P)

 A CONSTATIVE utterance is one which makes an assertion (i.e. it is often the utterance
of a declarative sentence, a statement that convey information)

E.g: He promised to repay me tomorrow.

PERFORMATIVE VERBS

- Used in a simple positive present tense sentence

- Used with 1st person singular subject
- Can make the utterance performative
E.g: apologize, authorize, condemn

Performative utterance = a performative verb, 1st person singular subject, in present tense.

EXCEPTIONS (Performative utterance)

- You are hereby forbidden to leave the room

- All passengers on flight number 47 are requested to proceed to gate 10
- We thank you for the compliment you have paid us
 All performative but NOT with 1st person singular subject
 Test: “hereby” + verb

E.g: It hereby gives me great pleasure to open the building.

5 CATEGORIES OF SPEECH ACTS (PERFORMATIVES) (Searle 1981)

1. Representatives/ assertives (tường giải): The speaker

THE 3 STAGES OF A (SUCCESSFUL) SPEECH ACTS

1. The locutionary (what was said and meant)

2. The illocutionary (what was done – request)
3. The perlocutionary (mượn lời)

Sentence types and illocutionary forces

 The three basic sentence types (declarative, interrogative, imperative) are typically
associated with the three basic illocutionary forces:
 Declarative: asserting/stating
 Interrogative: asking/ questioning
 Imperative: ordering/ requesting

PERLOCUTIONARY ACT/ PERLOCUTION

The perlocutionary act: That is the particular effect of the utterance, which does not necessarily
correspond to the locutionary act.

The PERLOCUTIONARY ACT (or just simply the PERLOCUTION) carried out by a speaker
making an utterance is the act of causing a certain effect on the hearer and others

Buổi 22.03.2024

IDIOMS

IDIOMATIC EXPRESSIONS (IDIOMS) are multi-word phrases whose overall meanings are
idosyncratic and largely unpredictable, reflecting speaker meanings that are not derivable by
cmobining the literal senses of the individual words in each phrase according to the regular
semantic rules of thse language.

Ex: An eye for an eye (Tit for tat)

Where there’s a will, there’s a way

A man is known by company he keeps

A honey tongue, a heart of gall

METAPHORS

METAPHORS are conceptual (mental) operations reflected in human language that enable
speakers to structure and construe abstract areas of knowledge and experience in more concrete
experiential terms

Ex: She is Thi No

He is So Khanh  Hidden comparison

Used words: như, như là, as, like (simile)

KINDS OF METAPHOR

1. Ẩn dụ cấu trúc (Structural metaphor)

- The kind of metaphor where a notion is expressed with a field of vocabulary of another
notion

Ex:

 LIFE IS A JOURNEY. In this case, notion “LIFE” is expressed with a field of

vocabulary of another notion of “JOURNEY”
 ARGUMENT IS WAR. In this case, notion “WAR” is expressed with a field of
vocabulary of another notion of “ARGUMENT”

E.g: “Look how far we’ve come”

Now that we’ve come this far, just hold on (Westlife)

“We can’t turn back now”

2. Ẩn dụ định hướng (Orientational metaphor)

3. Ẩn dụ bản thể (Ontological metaphor)