MODIFIER 5

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14

MODIFIERS─CAUSE AND RESULT

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PHRASE AND SENTENCE MEANING

Words and morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of language. For the most part, however, we communicate in phrases and sentences, which also have meaning. The meaning of phrases or sentences depends on both the meaning of its words and how these words are structurally combined. (Idioms are exceptional and will be discussed later.)

NAMES

‘What’s in a name?’ is a question that has occupied philosophers of language for centuries. Plato was concerned with whether names were ‘natural’. Though the question did not bother Adam when he named the animals; Humpty dumpty thought his name meant his shape, and in part it does.

MODIFIERS 4

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11

MODIFIERS─SAMENESS AND SIMILARITY

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Sameness and similarity are expressed by the following patterns:

Phonetic Transcription Exercise

Below is the exercise of phonetic transcription from antimoon.com. It is very important for those who learn English to read this.

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION (IPA)

Below are the phonetic transcription of English based on IPA.

HOMONYM/HOMOGRAPH

Homonymy is a kind of semantic relation. Two words are homonyms if they are pronounced or spelled the same way but have different meanings.

ANTONYMS

The meaning of a word may be partially defined by saying what it is not. Female means not male. Dead not alive. Words that are opposite in meaning are often called antonyms. Ironically, the basic property of two words is that they share all but one semantic property. Beautiful and tall are not antonyms; beautiful and ugly, or tall and short are. The property they do not share is present in one and absent in the other. Thus, in order to be opposites, two words must be semantically similar or in the same semantic category, such as ‘gender’ or ‘height’. means

       There are several kinds of antonymy. There are complementary pairs.

MODIFIERS 3

MODIFIERS─DEMONSTRATIVES

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The demonstratives this and that (singular) and these and those (plural) must agree  in number with the nouns they modify.

Determiner

1 Articles : a, an, the

Study this example: 

SEGMENTS OF SPEECH

      Linguists make use of the speech apparatus just explained to classify and describe the sounds of speech. The stream of speech sound is cut up into segments according to the way the sound is produced. One basic classification is the distinction between vowels and consonants. Vowels are those segments of speech produced without any interruption or stoppage of the airstream e.g. [i], [u]. Passage of air is continuous and frictionless. Consonants on the other hand, are segments marked by interruption of airstream. When the interruption is complete a stop is produced as in [t], [d]. When it is incomplete and accompanied by friction a fricative is produced as in [s], [v]. The interruption may be in the form of various kinds of trills as in Scottish [r]. All vowels are produced with vibration of the vocal cords, but consonants may be produced with or without vibration.

PARAPHRASES

There are not only words that sound the same but have different meanings; there are also words that sound different but have the same or nearly the same meaning. Such words are called synonyms. Dictionaries of synonyms contain many hundreds of entries, such as:

AMBIGUITY

‘Mine is a long and sad tale!’ said the Mouse, turning to Alice and sighing.

‘It is a long tail, certainly,’ said Alice, looking with wonder at the Mouse’s tail, ‘but why do you call it sad?’

(Lewis Carroll, Alice’s adventures in Wonderland)

SEMANTIC FEATURES

Words may be in intersecting semantic classes. For example woman is in the class with property ‘female’, child is in the class ‘young’, and  girl is in the intersecting class with the two properties ‘female’ and ‘young’.

            Additionally, there are semantic relations between  words and certain semantic categories may imply others. For example , the property ‘human’ implies ‘animate’.

MORPHOLOGY (2)

·  Basic terminology with definitions and examples

• MORPHEME = the smallest meaningful unit of language (any part of a word that cannot be broken down further into smaller meaningful parts, including the whole word itself). The word 'items' can be broken down into two meaningful parts: 'item' and the plural suffix '-s'; neither of these can be broken down into smaller parts that have a meaning. Therefore 'item' and '-s' are both morphemes.

VERBS OF DEMAND

            The simple verb (stem) is used for all persons in a noun clause after the following

            verb:

           

            demand                       advise                          be necessary

            insist                            request                         be essential

            propose                       ask                               be important

            suggest                        recommend                 be imperative

            urge                                                                 be vital

           

DESCRIBING SOUNDS

DESCRIBING SOUNDS

Linguistics is concerned primarily with the spoken word. So a priority task for anyone describing sounds is to decide how to represent the flow of speech. Clearly, the conventional written forms are most unsatisfactory, since they often provide little guide to pronunciation. There are two subjects (science) of the branch of linguistics which describes language sounds (speech sounds or phones) namely Phonetics and Phonology.

Phonetics (from the Greek: φωνή, phōnē, "sound, voice") is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech.

SEMANTIC PROPERTIES

Words and morphemes have meanings. We shall talk about the meaning of words, even though words may be composed of several morphemes.

POLYSEMY

Polysemy: A polysemous (or polysemantic) word is a word that has several sub-senses which are related with one another. (A1, A2 and A3 shares the same expression)

Polysemy refers to a word that has two or more similar meanings:

The house is at the foot of the mountains
One of his shoes felt too tight for his foot

'Foot' here refers to the bottom part of the mountains in the first sentence and the bottom part of the leg in the second.

SEMANTIC AND PRAGMATICS

Semantics is concerned with the study of (literal) meaning, and the relationship between meaning and language as phenomena.  Thus, it interacts with many other aspects of linguistics: morphology for word meaning, syntax for sentence meaning, etc.   

Pragmatics, on the other hand, is concerned with meaning in context: the ways in which the world must be considered in order to understand exactly what is intended and interpreted in the real world.