(2) Associative meaning
a. Connotative meaning: What is communicated by virtue of what language refers to.
b. Social meaning: What is communicated of the social circumstances of language use.
c. Affective meaning: What is communicated of the feelings and attitudes of the speaker / writer.
d. Reflected meaning: What is communicated through association with another sense of the same expression.
e. Collocative meaning: What is communicated through association with words which tend to occur in the environment of another word.
(3) Thematic meaning: What is communicated by the way in which the message is organized in terms of order and emphasis.
5. The difference between meaning, concept, connotation, and denotation
Meaning refers to the association of language symbols with the real world. There are many types of meaning according to different approaches.
Concept is the impression of objects in people’s mind.
Connotation is the implied meaning, similar to implication.
Denotation, like sense, is not directly related with objects, but makes the abstract assumption of the real world.
5.2 The referential theory
1. The referential theory: The theory of meaning which relates the meaning of a word to the thing it refers to, or stands for, is known as the referential theory.
2. The semantic triangle theory
Ogden and Richards presented the classic “Semantic Triangle” as manifested in the following diagram, in which the “symbol” refers to the linguist elements (word, sentence, etc.), the “referent” refers to the object in the world of experience, and the “thought” or “reference” refers to concept or notion. Thus the symbol of a word signifies “things” by virtue of the “concept,” associated with the form of the word in the mind of the speaker of the language. The concept thus considered is the meaning of the word. The connection (represented with a dotted line) between symbol and referent is made possible only through “concept.”
Concept / notion
Thought / reference
----------------------
Symbol object
Word stands for reality
Signifier referent
Code signified
5.3 Sense relations
5.3.1 Synonymy
Synonymy is the technical name for the sameness relation.
5.3.2 Antonymy
Antonymy is the name for oppositeness relation. There are three subtypes: gradable, complementary and converse antonymy.
1. Gradable antonymy
Gradable antonymy is the commonest type of antonymy. They are mainly adjectives, e.g. good / bad, long / short, big / small, etc.
2. Complementary antonymy
The members of a pair in complementary antonymy are complementary to each other. That is, they divide up the whole of a semantic filed completely. Not only the assertion of one means the denial of the other, the denial of one also means the assertion of the other, e.g. alive / dead, hit / miss, male / female, boy / girl, etc.
3. Converse antonymy
Converse antonyms are also called relational opposites. This is a special type of antonymy in that the members of a pair do not constitute a positive-negative opposition. They show the reversal of a relationship between two entities, e.g. buy / sell, parent / child, above / below, etc.
5.3.3 Hyponymy
Hyponymy involves us in the notion of meaning inclusion. It is a matter of class membership. That is to say, when x is a kind of y, the lower term x is the hyponym, and the upper term y is the superordinate. Two or more hyponyms of the same one superordinate are called co-hyponyms, e.g. under flower, there are peony, jasmine, tulip, violet, rose, etc., flower is the superordinate of peony, jasmine, etc., peony is the hyponym of flower, and peony, jasmine, tulip, violet, rose, etc. are co-hyponyms.
5.4 Componential analysis
Componential analysis defines the meaning of a lexical element in terms of semantic components. That is, the meaning of a word is not an unanalyzable whole. It may be seen as a complex of different semantic features. There are semantic units smaller than the meaning of a word. E.g.
Boy: [+human][-adult][+male]
Girl: [+human][-adult][-male]
Son: child (x, y) & male (x)
Daughter: child (x, y) & -male (x)
Take: cause (x, (have (x, y)))
Give: cause (x, (-have (x, y)))
5.5 Sentence meaning
5.5.1 An integrated theory
1. Compositionality: A principle for sentence analysis, in which the meaning of a sentence depends on the meanings of the constituent words and the way they are combine.
2. Selection restrictions: Restrictions on the choice of individual lexical units in construction with other units. E.g. the word breathe will typically select an animate subject (boy, man, woman, etc.) not an abstract or an inanimate (table, book, etc.). The boy was still breathing. The desk was breathing.
5.5.2 Logical semantics
1. Prepositional logic / prepositional calculus / sentential calculus: Prepositional logic is the study of the truth conditions for propositions: how the truth of a composite proposition is determined by the truth value of its constituent propositions and the connections between them.
2. Predicate logic / predicate calculus: Predicate logic studies the internal structure of simple propositions.
End of Chapter 5
Chapter 6 Language Processing in Mind
[I got the note of this chapter mostly from this blog of hjbbs, special thanks will go to this writer: http://blog.hjenglish.com/cxchun/archive/2006/07/27/391312.html – icywarmtea]
6.1 Introduction
1. Language is a mirror of the mind in a deep and significant sense.
2. Language is a product of human intelligence, created a new in each individual by operation that lie far beyond the reach of will or consciousness.
3. Psycholinguistics “proper” can perhaps be glossed as the storage, comprehension, production and acquisition of language in any medium (spoken or written).
4. Psycholinguistics is concerned primarily with investigating the psychological reality of linguistic structures.
5. The differences between psycholinguistics and psychology of language.
Psycholinguistics can be defined as the storage, comprehension, production and acquisition of language in any medium (spoken or written). It is concerned primarily with investigating the psychological reality of linguistic structures.
On the other hand, the psychology of language deals with more general topics such as the extent to which language shapes thought, and from the psychology of communication, includes non-verbal communication such as gestures and facial expressions.
6. Cognitive psycholinguistics: Cognitive psycholinguistics is concerned above all with making inferences about the content of the human mind.
7. Experimental psycholinguistics: Experimental psycholinguistics is mainly concerned with empirical matters, such as speed of response to a particular word.
6.1.1 Evidence
1. Linguists tend to favor descriptions of spontaneous speech as their main source of evidence, whereas psychologists mostly prefer experimental studies.
2. The subjects of psycholinguistic investigation are normal adults and children on the one hand, and aphasics----people with speech disorders-----on the other. The primary assumption with regard to aphasic patient that a breakdown in some part of language could lead to an understanding of which components might be independent of others.
6.1.2 Current issues
1. Modular theory: Modular theory assumes that the mind is structured into separate modules or components, each governed by its own principles and operating independently of others.
2. Cohort theory: The cohort theory hypothesizes that auditory word recognition begins with the formation of a group of words at the perception of the initial sound and proceeds sound by sound with the cohort of words decreasing as more sounds are perceived. This theory can be expanded to deal with written materials as well. Several experiments have supported this view of word recognition. One obvious prediction of this model is that if the beginning sound or letter is missing, recognition will be much more difficult, perhaps even impossible. For example: Gray tie------ great eye; a name-----an aim; an ice man-----a nice man; I scream-----ice cream; See Mable----seem able; well fare----welfare; lookout------look out ; decade-----Deck Eight; Layman------laymen; persistent turn------persist and turn
3. Psychological reality: The reality of grammar, etc. as a purported account of structures represented in the mind of a speaker. Often opposed, in discussion of the merits of alternative grammars, to criteria of simplicity, elegance, and internal consistency.
4. The three major strands of psycholinguistic research:
(1) Comprehension: How do people use their knowledge of language, and how do they understand what they hear or read?
(2) Production: How do they produce messages that others can understand in turn?
(3) Acquisition: How language is represented in the mind and how language is acquired?
6.2 Language comprehension
6.2.1 Word recognition
1. An initial step in understanding any message is the recognition of words.
2. One of the most important factors that effects word recognition is how frequently the word is used in a given context.
3. Frequency effect: describes the additional ease with which a word is accessed due to its more frequent usage in the language.
4. Recency effect: describe the additional ease with which a word is accessed due to its repeated occurrence in the discourse or context.
5. Another factor that is involved in word recognition is Context.
6. Semantic association network represents the relationships between various semantically related words. Word recognition is thought to be faster when other members of the association network are provided in the discourse.
6.2.2 Lexical ambiguity
1. lexical ambiguity: ambiguity explained by reference to lexical meanings: e.g. that of I saw a bat, where a bat might refer to an animal or, among others, stable tennis bat.
2. There are two main theories:
(1) All the meanings associated with the word are accessed, and
(2) only one meaning is accessed initially. e.g.
a. After taking the right turn at the intersection….
“right” is ambiguous: correct vs. rightward
b. After taking the left turn at the intersection…
“left” is unambiguous
6.2.3 Syntactic processing
1. Once a word has been dentified , it is used to construct a syntactic structure.
2. As always, there are cinokucatuibs due to the ambiguity of individual words and to the different possible ways that words can be fit into phrases. Sometimes there is no way to determine which structure and meaning a sentence has.
e.g. The cop saw the spy with the binoculars. “with the binoculars” is ambiguity
(1) the cop employed binoculars in order to see the spy.
(2) it specifies “the spy has binoculars.”
3. Some ambiguities are due to the ambiguous category of some of the words in the sentence.
e.g. the desert trains, trains (培训；列车)
the desert trains man to be hardly. 沙漠使人坚韧。
The desert trains seldom run on time.沙漠列车从不准时。
4. One interesting phenomenon concerning certain ambiguous sentences is called the “garden path.” Garden path sentences are sentences that are initially interpreted with a different structure than they actually have. It typically takes quite a long time to figure out what the other structure is if the first choice turns out to be incorrect. Sometimes people never figure it out. They have been “led up the garden path”, fooled into thinking the sentence has a different structure than it has. Reduced relative clauses quite frequently cause this feeling of having been garden-pathed.
