Complementary antonymy is one link of oppositeness relation in sense relation, in which the two antonyms are complementary to each other. That is, they divide up the whole of a semantic field completely. Not only the assertion of one means the denial of the other, the denial of one also means the assertion of the other. Not only He is alive means He is not dead, He is not alive also means He is dead. There is no intermediate ground between the two. So the adjectives in this type cannot be modified by very.
The differences between the gradable antonymy and the complementary antonymy.
The difference between the two can be compared to the traditional logical distinction between the contrary反对命题 and the contradictory矛盾命题. In logic, a proposition命题 is the contrary of another if both cannot be true不能同真, though they may both be false但能同假; e.g. The coffee is hot and The coffee is cold. And a proposition is contradictory of another if it is impossible for both to be true, or false; e.g. This is a male cat and This is a female cat.
Secondly, the norm in this type is absolute. It does not vary with the thing a word is applied to.
Thirdly, there is no cover term for the two members of a pair. If you do not know the sex of a baby, you ask “Is it a boy or a girl?” not “How male is it?”. As a matter of fact, no adjectives in this type can be modified by how.
Now the pair of antonymy true: false is exceptional to some extent. This pair is usually regarded as complementary. But there is a cover term. We can say “How true is the story?” And we can also use very to modify true.
Ÿ Converse antonymy
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反向 of a relationship between two entities. It is same relationship seen from two different angles. They are also known as Relational Oppositions. There are always two sides. If there is a buyer, there must also be a seller. A parent must have a child. Without a child, one cannot be a parent.
The comparative degrees like bigger: smaller, longer: shorter, better: worse also belong here, since they involve a relation between two entities.
= Hyponymy
Hyponymy, the technical name for inclusiveness sense relation, is a matter of class membership. The upper term in this sense relation, i.e. the class name, is called Superordinate, and the lower terms, the members, Hyponyms. A superordinate usually has several hyponyms. Under flower, for example, there are peony牡丹, jasmine, chrysanthemum, tulip, violet, carnation and many others apart from rose. These members of the same class are Cohyponyms.
From the other point wiew, the hyponym’s point of view, animal is a hyponym of itself, and be called auto-hyponym.
A superordinate may be missing sometimes. Hyponyms may also be missing.
«Componential Analysis
On the analogy of distinctive features in phonology, some linguists suggest that there are Semantic Features, or Semantic Components. That is, the meaning of a word is not an unanalysable whole. It may be seen as a complex of different semantic features. There are semantic units smaller than the meaning of a word. For example, the meaning of the word boy may be analysed into three components: HUMAN, YOUNG, and MALE.
It is claimed that by showing the semantic components of a word in this way, we may better account for sense relations. Two words, or two expressions, which have the same semantic components, will be synonymous with each other. Words which have a contrasting component, on the other hand, are antonyms. Words which have all the semantic components of another are hyponyms of the latter.
= Entailment
Entailment is a very important relation between sentences. The member sentences of each pair are in such a relationship that the truth of the second sentence necessarily follows from the truth of the first sentence, while the falsity of the first follows from the falsity of the second. In terms of semantic components, we can say it is because the first sentence contains words which have all the semantic components of the words used in the second sentence.
«Sentence Meaning
= An Integrated Theory
The idea that the meaning of a sentence depends on the meanings of the constituent words and the way they are combined is usually known as the principle of Compositionality组合性原则. According to Katz and Fodor and their study, their basic idea is that a semantic theory consists of two parts: a dictionary and a set of projection rules. The dictionary provides the grammatical classification and semantic information of words. The projection rules are responsible for combining the meaning of words together.
= Logical Semantics
Ÿ Propositional Logic
Propositional logic命题逻辑, also known as propositional calculus命题演算 or sentential calculus句子演算, is the study of the truth conditions真值条件 for propositions命题: how the truth of a composite proposition复合命题 is determined by the truth value of its constituent propositions 分命题and the connections between them.
Ÿ Predicate Logic
Predicate logic谓词逻辑, also called predicate calculus, studies the internal structure of simple propositions. In this logical system, propositions like Socrates is a man will be analyzed into two parts: argument主目 and predicate谓词. An argument is a term which refers to some entity实体 about which a statement is being made. And a predicate is a term which ascribes把…归于 some property, or relation, to the entity, or entities, referred to. In the proposition Socrates is a man, therefore, Socrates is the argument and man is the predicate.
补充：
1. tautology 同义反复
2. Polysemy 一词多义
3. homonymy 同形同音异义异源词
P Chapter 4 From Word to Text
& Syntax
Syntax is the study of the rules governing the ways different constituents are combined to form sentences in a language, or the study of the interrelationship between elements in sentence structures.
« Syntactic Relations
Syntactic relations can be analyzed into three kinds, namely, positional relations, relations of substitutability可代换性, and relations of co-occurrence.
= Positional Relation
Positional relation, or WORD ORDER, refers to the sequential arrangement of words in a language. Positional relations are also called Horizontal Relations or simply Chain Relations. In this way of classification, there are totally six possible types of language, they are SVO, VSO, SOV, OVS, OSV, and VOS. English belongs to SVO type, though this does not mean that SVO is the only possible word order.
= Relation of Substitutability
Firstly, the Relation of Substitutability refers to classes or sets of words substitutable for each other grammatically in sentences with same structure. Secondly, it refers to groups of more than one word which may be jointly substitutable grammatically for a single word of a particular set.
= Relation of Co-Occurrence
Co-occurrence means that words of different sets of clause may permit, or require, the occurrence of a word of another set or class to form a sentence or a particular part of a sentence.
« Grammatical Construction and Its Constituents
= Grammatical Construction
= Immediate Constituents
Constituent is a tern used in structural analysis for every linguistic unit, which is a part of a larger linguistic unit. 练习册 P26
Ÿ Immediate Constituent Analysis or IC analysis
To dismantle a grammatical construction into immediate constituents is called Immediate Constituent Analysis or IC analysis.
There are two ways to represent the constituent structure, which are Tree Diagram and Bracketing.
= Endocentric and Exocentric Constructions
The syntactic constructions analyzed are of two types: endocentric and exocentric constructions, depending on their distribution and the relation between their constituents.
Ÿ Endocentric
Endocentric construction is one whose distribution is functionally equivalent to that of one or more of its constituents, i.e., a word or a group of words, which serves as a definable Center or Head.
Usually noun phrases, verb phrases and adjective phrases belong to endocentric types because the constituent items are subordinate to the Head.
Ÿ Exocentric
Exocentric construction is just the opposite of endocentric construction. It refers to a group of syntactically related words where none of the words is functionally equivalent to the group as a whole, that is, there is no definable “Centre” or “Head” inside the group. Exocentric construction usually includes basic sentence, prepositional phrase, predicate construction, and connective construction.
=Coordination and Subordination
Endocentric constructions fall into two main types, depending on the relation between constituents: coordination and subordination.
ŸCoordination
Coordination is a common syntactic pattern in English and other languages formed by grouping together two or more categories of the same type with the help of a conjunction such as and, but and or.
In a coordinate sentence, two (or more) S constituents occur as daughters and co-heads of a higher S.
One property coordination reveals is that there is no limit on the number of coordinated categories that can appear prior to the conjunction.
Therefore, coordination occupies its own place in the creativity of language: i.e. recursiveness.
Ÿ Subordination
Subordination refers to the process or result of linking linguistic units so that they have different syntactic status, one being dependent upon the other, and usually a constituent of the other. Thus the subordinate constituents are words which modify the Head, they can be called modifiers.
Certainly, clause can be used as subordinate constituents, the three basic types of subordinate clauses are: complement clauses宾语从句, adjunct clauses状语从句, and relative clauses关系从句.
« Syntactic Function
The Syntactic Function shows the relationship between a linguistic form and other parts of the linguistic pattern in which it is used.
Names of functions are expressed in terms of subjects, objects, predicators, modifiers, complements, etc.
= Subject
Ÿ Grammatical subject and Logical subject
In order to account for the case of subject in passive voice such as “John was bitten by a dog”, we have another two terms “Grammatical subject” and “Logical subject”.
Since the core objects noun (John in this case) sits in the slot before the verb in the passive, it is called the Grammatical Subject. The core subject (A dog), now the object of a preposition (by a dog), is called the Logical subject.
Ÿ What characteristics do subjects have in the language of English?
In English, “subject” may have the following characteristics:
A. Word order:
Subject ordinarily precedes the verb in statement such as “I collect stamps”.
B. Pro-forms:
The first and third person pronouns in English appear in a special form when the pronoun is a subject. And when in other positions, this form of pronouns is not used. For example:
