COMPOSITIONAL SEMANTICS

NIK NURFAKHIRA BINTI NIK MOHD SALLEH NUR ATIKAH IBRAHIM HANIS AQILAH JOHARI NUR ALIA IZYAN RASLI Click to edit Master subtitle style WAN NURFARAHIYAH BT W.LIAH TUAN NUR IZZATI TUAN MOHAMAD

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Introduction :

Unlike lexical semantics, which focuses on the meanings of individual words, the field ofcompositional semanticslooks at the meanings of sentences and longer utterances. Much of the focus of traditional semantics has

been on vocabulary, but contemporary semantics is increasingly concerned with the analysis of sentence meaning, or al least of those aspects of sentenced meaning that cannot be predicted from
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the sum of the individual lexemes.

Area :

The major areas of compositional semantics are anomalies, idioms, ambiguities, and presuppositions.

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Anomalies

The semantic properties of words determine what other words they can be combined with. A sentence widely used by linguistics illustrates this fact: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

The sentence obeys all the syntactic rules of English. The subject iscolorless green ideasand the predicate issleep furiously. It
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the same syntactic structure as the

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

But there is obviously something semantically wrong with the sentence. The meaning ofcolorlessincludes the semantic feature "without color," but it is combined with the adjectivegreen, which has the semantic feature "green in color." How can something be both "without color" and "green in color"? This sentence violates what we know about semantic features and is, therefore, semantically anomalous.
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Semantic violations in poetry may form strange but interesting aesthetic images , as in Dylan Thomas's phrasea grief ago.Agois originally used with words specified by some temporal semantic features: A week ago , an hour ago, a month ago, a century
ago BUT NOT a table ago, a dream ago, a mother ago, a paper ago

When Thomas used the wordgriefwithago, he was adding a durable feature to grief for poetic effect, so while the noun phrase is anomalous, it
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evokes certain feelings.

So although phrases like Thomas'sa grief agoviolate some semantic rules, we can understand them. Breaking the rules creates the imagery desired. The fact that we are able to understand, or at least interpret, anomalous expressions, and at the same time recognize their anomalous nature, demonstrates our knowledge of the semantic system and semantics properties of the language.
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Idioms

Idiomatic expressions are phrases that have fixed meanings that are literal. Fixed meanings cannot be inferred from the meanings of the individual words. For example, "pull my leg" means to kid or joke and has nothing to do with pulling legs. It is an expression whose origins are often lost to history. Here are some common English idioms:

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some common English idioms:

GIVE THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT - BELIEVE SOMEONE'S STATEMENT, WITHOUT PROOF. EXAMPLE : "THE TEACHER'S EXPLANATION DID NOT SEEM LOGICAL, BUT I GAVE HER THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT." FIT THE BILL - SEEMS CORRECT. EXAMPLE : "THAT SEEMS TO FIT THE BILL. I'LL TAKE IT.

ROCK THE BOAT - CREATE PROBLEMS FOR OTHER PEOPLE. EXAMPLE: "EVERYONE LIKES ANTONIO. HE DOESN'T ROCK THE BOAT.

DON'T HOLD YOUR BREATH - DON'T WAIT TOO LONG BECAUSE IT MIGHT NOT HAPPEN. EXAMPLE : "YES, IT'S POSSIBLE THAT THEY WILL LOWER TAXES 4/25/12 BUT DON'T HOLD YOUR BREATH."

Idioms are similar in structure to ordinary phrases except that they tend to be frozen in form and do not readily enter into other combinations or allow the word order to change. Thus, (1)She put her foot in her mouth has the same structure as(2)She put her bracelet in her drawer

But

The drawer in which she put her bracelet was hers. Her bracelet was put in her drawer.

are sentences related to sentence (2).

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The mouth in which she out her foot was hers.

Ambiguity
Ambiguity, as you have learned, is when words have more than one meaning. For example,glassescan meaneye glass, sunglasses, anddrinking glasses. Ambiguity at the sentence level means a phrase or sentence has more than one underlying structure, such as these phrases

Tibetan history teacher (the 4/25/12

Presupposition
A presupposition is background belief relating to an utterance that

must be mutually known or assumed by the speaker and hearer for the utterance to be considered appropriate in context generally will remain a necessary assumption whether the utterance is placed in the form of an assertion, denial, or question, and can generally be associated with a specific lexical item or grammatical feature (presupposition trigger) in the utterance. 4/25/12

For example, the utterance John regrets that he stopped doing linguistics before he left the university

has the followingpresuppositions: There is someone uniquely identifiable to speaker and addressee asJohn. John stopped doing linguistics

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The utterance I'll have some more coffee presupposes that you have already had some. For your information, two terms related to presupposition that we don't cover in this class areimplicatureandentailment(which describes the relationship between two statements where the truth of one suggests the truth of the other, but -distinguishing implicature from 4/25/12 entailment -- does not require it.

~THE END~

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