Introdungcing English language part 14 pptx

A peculiar set of words in English are contronyms, words that can have their own opposite meaning.. Basic terms and prototypes In all of these semantic relationships, there is often a no

/m/: voiced bilabial nasal

/f/: voiceless labio-dental fricative

/s/: voiceless alveolar fricative

/tt/: voiceless alveolar affricate

/n/: voiced alveolar nasal

LEXICAL SEMANTICS

A dictionary entry tends to give the meaning of a word as a statement which defines

its denotation: that is, its precise and narrowest direct and primary meaning A wide-ranging or detailed dictionary might also give some of the connotations of the word

– its additional or secondary meanings So, for example, the Oxford English Dictionary

defines ‘red’ firstly as the spectrum colour that the word denotes, but it also provides some of the different connotations of redness in fire, blood, violence or revolution

A word will also, of course, have very many looser and perhaps more culturally defined

associations: ‘red’ and ‘reds’ associates, in different places around the world, with

several British soccer teams wearing red shirts, with communists, with US Republican states, with roads of a particularly high accident rate, with embarrassment, with Marlboro strong cigarettes, with food labelling of a high fat and sugar content, with air squadron identifiers, with ginger hair, with prostitution, with a certain type of civic university, with the car maker Ferrari, and many others Some associations might be very personal and idiosyncratic However, all of these senses can be said to be part of the meaning of the word The study of the meanings of words and their relationships

is lexical semantics.

Words and their meanings

The relationships between the meanings of words can be differentiated and categorised

Synonymy, for example, refers to the ideal state in which a word means exactly the

same as another This can be said to be idealised, because in practice there are prob-ably no true exact synonyms, since the connotations and associations of the two words are likely to be slightly different For example, ‘book, volume, text, tome’ might all

be said to be synonymous, but it is easy to see that they have specific and different normal contexts of use A ‘text’ sounds more like a book for teaching or analysis, a

‘volume’ is grander than a book, but not so grand as a ‘tome’, which also has the suggestion that it might be a boring but worthy read Other sets of synonyms display similar variations: ‘letter, epistle, note, line’, or ‘clothes, gear, clobber, kit, threads, couture’, or ‘car, wheels, banger, automobile, motor’, or ‘dog, doggie, pup, mutt, canine, hound’, and so on

Certain lexical fields can be seen to be overlexicalised if they are of particular

interest to the speech community, and while the number of Eskimo/Inuit words for snow is exaggerated, you need only think of the fine gradations in precipitation of ‘rain, sleet, wintry showers, hail, snow, rime, drizzle, spitting, bucketing down, downpour’, and so on to realise the interest in the temperate climate in British English Other

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overlexicalised domains are often taboo or prohibited areas (‘toilet, bog, lavatory, bathroom, crapper, netty, loo, cloakroom, WC, restroom, ensuite, shithouse,

gents/ladies, little boys’/girls’ room, thunderbox’, and so on) Underlexicalised domains

tend to be highly technical, where only one very specific and precisely defined term exists,

or areas which the speakers know little about and so use vague or general words Matching up the cultural norms of synonyms and the degree of lexicalisation is

an important skill in the native speaker, as is knowing exactly how to disrupt those norms for particular effects In an email, ‘I’ll drop you a line’ is probably right, unless the email is to an authority figure, but even then, ‘I’ll communicate an epistle’ would probably be too grand

By contrast with synonymy, a word is an antonym of another if its meaning is

almost exactly opposite Again, we need the ‘almost exactly’ formula for the same reason that there are no precise synonyms: even ‘black and white’, or ‘up and down’ have associations that do not make them exactly equally opposite These two pairs of examples are binary opposites, in that they are usually taken as mutually exclusive and there is

no third possibility Other antonyms are gradable, such as ‘big and small’ or ‘long and short’ The sizes of drink sold by most multinational chains are highly gradable, including

‘long, grande, large, regular, straight, super, deluxe’, even ‘baby’ and (quite rarely) ‘small’ Some words have no apparent lexical antonyms: what is the exact opposite of ‘table’,

or ‘elephant’, or ‘fascism’? You might go for ‘chair’, or ‘mouse’, or ‘communism’, but

it is easy to argue about these Some words have opposites that can be imagined but are underlexicalised: is there a single word that is the opposite of ‘plain-speaking’; and

is the opposite of ‘religious’ ‘agnostic’ or ‘atheist’? Is the opposite of a word always synonymous with the negated word: is ‘black’ simply and exclusively ‘not white’, or

is ‘female’ the same as ‘not male’? Are the possible opposites of ‘democracy’ all

‘undemocratic’? These questions demonstrate that there are two distinct types of

oppositeness in terms of contrariness and contradiction.

Some antonyms necessarily involve their other pair For example, you cannot

‘borrow’ something without someone else being able to ‘lend’ it to you You cannot

‘return’ from somewhere that you have not ‘gone’ to in the first place ‘Come and go’,

‘this and that’, ‘yesterday, today, and tomorrow’ all entail each other as part of their

main meaning A peculiar set of words in English are contronyms, words that can have

their own opposite meaning Famous examples include ‘fast’ (both quickly moving or attached to a stationary object), ‘dispense’ (give out or give up), ‘peer’ (your social equal or a member of the aristocracy), ‘clip’ (attach together or cut apart), ‘cover’ (conceal or oversee), and many others

A word is a hyponym of another if it is part of the general category and is regarded

as more general than the subordinate term So, ‘mammal’ is a hyponym of ‘dog’, and

‘dog’ is a hyponym of ‘terrier’, and ‘terrier’ is a hyponym of ‘Yorkshire terrier’ This also means that ‘mammal’ is a hyponym of ‘Yorkshire terrier’ Again, matching up the level of specificity in these words is crucial in communication ‘I’m going to take the terrier for a walk’ is only normal if you have several dogs of different types By contrast, if you are asked at a dog show what a particular animal is, and you reply

‘It’s a dog’, you will probably be taken as being facetious

The relationship between the things denoted by hyponyms is conceptual, whereas if there is an actual part–whole relationship between the referents of related

words, then the relationship between those words is said to be one of meronymy ‘Hand

and fingers’ are in a meronymous relationship, as are ‘car and tyres’, or ‘tree and leaves’,

or ‘Washington and the US’ The part–whole relationship is often so culturally naturalised that one can be used for the other: ‘Washington condemned the attacks’,

‘Can I give you a hand?’ The extent to which the meronym (the most particular word)

is a necessary and essential defining part of the holonym (the superordinate word) is

debatable: is a hand without fingers still a hand? A dog without a tail? Without legs? Without a head? If the meronym is a defining part, then there should be a necessary logical consequence if anything happens to it: for example, if the tyres are on fire,

is it the case then that the car is necessarily on fire?

Polysemy and homonymy describe similar effects arising from different histories.

A word is polysemous if it has developed two distinct meanings, and a homonym where two distinct words have converged For example, ‘sole’ (the bottom of a shoe) and ‘sole’ (a type of fish) are polysemes; but ‘seal’ (the coastal mammal) and ‘seal’ (a glued interface) are homonyms The distinction between these two lexical semantic types is often only possible with a knowledge of etymology

Even more subtle is plesionymy A word is a plesionym if it is a near-synonym

but substitution of the word does not leave the same truth-conditions For example,

in ‘It wasn’t misty, just foggy’, the words ‘misty’ and ‘foggy’ are plesionyms of each other Other examples would be: ‘he was murdered, or rather executed’; ‘he’s a farmer, or strictly a stockman’; or ‘it’s a pie, or actually a savoury tart’ Plesionyms are often used to indicate that the speaker is grappling after precision, but perhaps does not possess the precise vocabulary or technical term for the object in mind Though subtle, the reality of plesionymy can be illustrated by considering some odd examples that are cast in the right form but are not lexical plesionyms: ‘?My brother’s a shop-keeper, or more exactly a policeman’; ‘?She bought a dog, or more exactly, a cat’;

‘?It wasn’t misty, just sunny’

In general, all closely located words in coherent discourse exhibit philonymy

Two words are philonyms if they collocate in an acceptable and expected way:

‘the speaker can speak French’; ‘the pregnant woman’; ‘fine and dandy’ Antonyms,

if used in a coherent sentence, can be philonymous Two words are tautonyms if they

merely repeat without adding new value, creating a tautology: ‘the speaker is speaking’;

‘boys will be boys’; ‘war is war’ Of course, it is easy to imagine contexts in which these tautonymous phrases could be communicatively valid, demonstrating again that connotations and associations are imported along with denotations whenever words are brought together

Words which are not used philonymously are xenonyms, if they create semantic

dissonance: ‘fat water’; ‘the inexorable sadness of pencils’; ‘whispering lunar incanta-tions dissolve the floors of memory’ Such xenonyms are often the ground of creative

or literary language (these examples are from a 1970s US West Coast rock and blues band, and the poets Theodore Roethke and T.S Eliot)

Basic terms and prototypes

In all of these semantic relationships, there is often a notion that there is a basic, normative or default word, against which the related words are measured For example,

‘dog’ seems to be a basic level term compared with its superordinates ‘mammal,

animal, creature’ and its subordinates ‘hound, terrier, collie’ Basicness, here, seems

to attach to those concepts that are most familiar or most accessible, most human in size, experience or understanding Basic terms tend to be etymologically ancient and persistent, even resisting newer and potentially displacing alternatives (‘canine’, for example) There is even an argument that a conceptually basic term is likely to be phono-logically and morphophono-logically simpler than other terms in its semantic domain

What these arguments are actually demonstrating is semantic prototypicality (see

also A7) We seem to carry around notions of the best examples of categories, on the basis of previous experience and cultural habit: so a dog is a good central example of

an everyday and familiar animal, and the conceptual level of ‘dog-ness’ is the most familiar and easiest way of thinking about those objects in the world most of the time Higher-level terms (‘mammal’ and so on) are too abstract, whereas subordinate terms (‘poodle’ and so on) are overly specific, most of the time Sometimes, of course,

‘mammal’ or ‘poodle’ will be normal Within the dog domain, a terrier or a collie is,

for us, a good example of a dog A poodle or a dingo is a less good example, in terms

of our cultural prototypicality judgement In fact, dingoes and wolves are peripheral examples of dogs for us, moving outwards to hyenas, coyotes, foxes and other dog-like semi-dogs in our minds Note that these judgements have nothing to do with sci-entific classification Next outward along the radial prototypicality structure of dogs would be wolverines, badgers, ferrets and weasels Beyond them would be very poor examples of dogs, like panthers, cheetahs, lions and other technically non-dog mammals

If this sounds odd to you, simply ask yourself: which is the worse example of a dog – a ferret or a badger? Or which is worse, a panther or a bicycle? The fact that you can probably answer this, and even defend your decision, shows that category membership is a matter of gradation and prototypicality rather than fixed definition

So it is not that a cat is simply not a dog, it is that a cat is just normally a very poor example of a dog The prototypicality of categories applies to every semantic type identified in this unit

PRAGMATIC PRINCIPLES

Alongside the features of Speech Act Theory introduced in A3, there are two princi-ples of pragmatics which have played a significant role in the field The first is the

co-operative principle, following the work of Grice (1975), and the second is the politeness principle, following the works of Leech (1983) and Brown and Levinson

(1987) Both of these principles are still influential today We will start off by con-sidering the co-operative principle and then move on to examine the politeness prin-ciple and the large amount of work which has emerged on politeness in the English language since these initial publications

Co-operative principle

Grice argued that a basic foundational principle which is followed by all rational adults

is to co-operate with one another when engaged in spoken interaction From Grice’s

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perspective, all interactions can be defined as co-operative efforts to at least some degree His co-operative principle is as follows:

Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.

(Grice 1975: 45)

In order to illustrate this further, Grice devised four conversational maxims which logically follow on from the co-operative principle:

Maxim of quantity

Make your contribution to the conversation as informative as necessary

Do not make your contribution to the conversation more informative than necessary

Maxim of quality

Do not say what you believe is false

Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence

Maxim of relevance

Say only things that are relevant

Maxim of manner

Avoid obscurity of expression

Avoid ambiguity

Be brief (avoid unnecessary wordiness)

Be orderly

(Grice 1989: 27) Abiding by the above maxims is considered to be the prototypical way of communi-cating with one another However, it is not uncommon for one (or more) of the above

maxims to be regularly flouted in everyday conversation This does not mean that

versationalists are ceasing to be co-operative On the contrary, when flouting of

con-versational maxims takes place hearers will search for a concon-versational implicature

of the speaker’s intention precisely because of the co-operative principle: faced with

an apparent break with a maxim, a hearer will still assume the speaker is being co-operative and will set off to find a reason why the maxim was deliberately flouted The co-operative principle is therefore maintained by implicature There are clear similarities here to Grice’s principles and the concepts of direct and indirect speech acts which we came across in A3

To illustrate this further, it is useful to consider some examples of flouting of maxims Similar to an indirect speech act, maxims can be described as being flouted when speakers are conveying a sense of implied meaning Consider which of Grice’s maxims is being flouted in the following examples Attempt to work out which conversational implicatures can be made from these scenarios:

Conversation between two strangers at a bus stop:

‘Lovely weather we’re having’ when it is pouring down with rain

Conversation between an arguing couple:

‘Where are you going?’

‘When will you be back?’

‘Later’

Conversation between two students:

‘There are millions of places to eat on-campus if you’re starving’

Conversation between a couple:

‘Have you finished the laundry yet?’

‘The Baxters over the road have bought a new dog’

Conversation between two friends over dinner:

‘Do you want some yoghurt?’

‘I had yoghurt last week it was strawberry flavour really nice I do like raspberry too though the bits get stuck in my teeth I don’t like cherry or natural’

There are many different ways in which the social force of implicatures can be inter-preted They can be used to generate humour, as with irony or sarcasm, or used as expressions of annoyance or exasperation, or as metaphors or as techniques of

under-statement or overunder-statement (also known as hyperbole), for poetic/creative effects

By flouting a conversational maxim the speaker is deliberately drawing the hearer’s attention to a form of implicit meaning While abiding by the conversational maxims

is conceptualised as the prototypical manner in which conversation takes place, flouting maxims and the search for implicature to arrive at the implied meaning of utterances happens with regularity in everyday conversation

Consider how often you break Grice’s conversational maxims in everyday inter-action, using the above examples as guide

Politeness principles

Lakoff (1973) was the first to suggest principles of politeness with accompanying rules: showing formality by avoiding imposition, making the hearer feel good by showing camaraderie and showing deference to the hearer by giving options (see D5) However, Leech’s principle is the better known and more thoroughly worked-out framework with an accompanying set of maxims Leech coined the following politeness principle

to work alongside the co-operative principle:

Minimise (all things being equal) the expression of impolite beliefs; maximise (all things being equal) the expression of polite beliefs.

(Leech 1983: 81)

The use of indirect speech acts can be frequently attributed to abiding by the principles of linguistic politeness Following Grice, Leech (1983: 104 – 5) coined a set

of politeness maxims to accompany his principle The four most significant maxims are as follows:

q Tact

q Generosity

q Approbation

q Modesty