Patrick Griffiths' book on semantics

Patrick Griffiths' semantics.

1.What parts does a prototype computer have? Do those parts have parts?

Answer: CPU, monitor, keyboard and mouse are hyponyms of the superordinate word computer. Parts have parts of CPU are RAM, CD-RO Drive, Hardisk drive, Motheboard and Adapter. Parts have parts of Monitor are Regulator, Driver Horizontal, flyback and RGB.

2. The top of a thing is one of its sides : the side that is uppermost. The bottom of a thing is one of its sides: the side that is down. The front is one of the sides : the side that faces forwards. The back is one of its sides, the side that faces away from the front.

What sense relations hold between the words side, top, bottom, front and back? Give reasons to support your answer.

Answer: If the statement is accepted as a reasonable reflection of a competent user of English’s knowledge of meaning, then side is a superordinate for top, bottom, front and back. The statement names the latter four as different kinds of side, and the relation of incompatibility holds between these four hyponyms of side. The “definitions” that follow each colon in the statement consist of the superordinate (side) and a modifier. The different modifiers of side are what make the four hyponyms incompatible.

3. Parent is a superordinate for mother and father. At the level immediately below parent there are only those two hyponyms. What is the semantic relation between mother and father ? Is it incompatibility or antonymy? Justify your answer.

Answer: Mother and father are incompatible. This is my mother entails This is not my father; This is my father entails This is not my mother; however, we do not get entailments from the negative sentences to the affirmative ones, for example someone who is not my mother need not be my father, but could be my aunt or cousin or a passing stranger. The term

antonymy is reserved for incompatibility between pairs of adjectives or adverbs; mother and father are nouns.

4. For class discussion. The following words are hyponyms of footwear: shoes, sneakers, trainers, sandals, slippers, boots, galoshes.

a. Is footwear the superordinate that you use for all of the hyponyms or do you use the word shoe in a general sense that we might distinguish as shoe 1, as the superordinate? (After all, the kind of shop that could sell all of them is a shoe shop.)

b. Find as many other hyponyms of footwear (or shoe ) as you can.

c. Draw up a hyponym hierarchy, for the given words and any additional ones you have found.

d. Try to provide a brief characterisation of the meaning of each word in the hierarchy, in the form of its immediate superordinate plus a modifying phrase.

Answer: Some initial ideas: (a) “We don’t sell marshmallows here; this is a Shop 1” would be a memorable objection, but it feels like one that respects the meaning of the word shoe. On the other hand, the following objection would strike me as peculiar in meaning: “?We don’t sell sandals here; this is a Shop 1 .” And it would be just as strange with slippers or boots substituted for sandals. (b) (c) and, in single quotes, (d). Draw an upside down tree with shoes (or footwear) ‘clothing for the feet, having a sole’ as the overall super ordinate. On three branches below it, put shoes ‘footwear covering just the feet’, boots ‘footwear covering feet and ankles, at least’ and sandals ‘ventilated footwear’. Hyponyms dangling from branches below shoes2 include clogs ‘wooden shoes’, trainers and sneakers. (Sneakers and trainers are a synonym pair. It should not be hard to supply a concise meaning ‘shoes for …’). Hyponyms below boots include football boots ‘boots for football’ and gumboots. If you know the word, then jandals ‘waterproof minimal sandals’ is a hyponym of sandals.

3. In February 2016 a minister government minister announced the resignation of a senior civil servant in his department. According to one report, it was only from listening to the radio on his way back to work from a hospital appointment that the civil servant heard about his own alleged resignation. This led to a question in the media: ?Who is going to be resigned next? (The question mark at the beginning marks the sentence as semantically odd.) The civil servant eventually resigned in May 2016. Resigning is supposed to be a conscious act performed by the person who quits the post, but if, in talking about the situation described, someone had used the expression ?The minister resigned the civil servant, would the sentence have been causative? Would it have the same meaning as The minister made the civil servant resign?

Answer: Talking about the situation after the civil servant’s resignation – more than two months later – the sentence ?The minister resigned the civil servant might be taken as causative, if a correct understanding of it is: ‘an action by the minister directly caused the civil servant to resign’. This situation could be described by the two-clause formulation The minister made (the civil servant resign), because this covers both direct and indirect causation. However, coming so much later it seems more likely that, if it was the minister’s announcement in February that caused the civil servant to resign in May, the causation was indirect. If so, a one-clause sentence ?The minister resigned the civil servant would not be an appropriate way to talk about it, because one-clause causatives encode direct causation. Back in February 2016, ?Who is going to be resigned next? was probably not a question meaning ‘Who will be made to resign next?’, but rather a way of catching people’s attention with the ill-formedness of the question as a way of getting them to think about the meaning of the word resign and, from there, to consider the minister’s apparent high-handedness.

4. Classify the following as achievements, states, activities or accomplishments: (a) The kid was having a tantrum. (b) The band had a makeover. (c) I caught a cold. (d) Part of the Louvre resembles a pyramid. (e) The music stopped. (f) He got the joke the second time. (g) Khalid played the violin.

Answer: (a) Activity. (b) Accomplishment. (c) Achievement. (d) State. (e) Achievement when talking about a single stop, because the following is not an acceptable way of expressing ‘The music waned but continued’: *The music stopped stopping; also because restitutive again works straightforwardly. The music was stopping is unacceptable unless we interpret this as habitual or if it is said with reference to a scheduled stop. On the habitual interpretation, The music stopped is an activity. (f ) Achievement. (g) Activity. Yes, The violin is a definite direct object, but not one that delimits the activity: Khalid played the violin does not encode a situation in which he plays until the violin is “finished” (compare Khalid played the sonata).

5.Ministry of Education and Culture told the Indonesian government that they had saved many million of rupiahs because schools were developing. Think of the sentence in italics as part of a newspaper report (and note that the pronoun they refers to the Indonesian government). Identify the combinations of tense and aspect used in the sentence and draw a diagram to represent the relative timing of the events. Position ‘time of report’ on a time line. Then indicate the positions when ministry of education and culture told the Indonesian government something, when the government saved many millions of rupiahs and when schools developed.

Answer: The verb told is past simple, had saved is past perfect; were developing is past progressive.

 Before the time                         After the time    of writing                                        of writing

 

Time of writing

The Gov. saved the many million...

Ministry of education told the Gov....

 

 Schools were developing.

6. Think about possible interpretations of the modality in the five sentences below. Can they be understood as deontic, epistemic, both or neither? Give a reason for each answer.

They must be made from buckwheat.

We must get up early tomorrow.

The email needn’t have been sent.

I can hear you now.

They might or might not make it.

You better apologise.

Answer: They must be made from buckwheat can be either deontic (a demand or strong recommendation that buckwheat be used) or epistemic (speaker infers from evidence – colour or taste, perhaps – that buckwheat is an ingredient).

We must get up early tomorrow is deontic. What might happen tomorrow is too uncertain to justify epistemic must. The email needn’t have been sent can bear either interpretation: deontically that there was no demand for the sending of the email; epistemically that it is possible that the email has not yet been sent.

I can hear you now indicates “capability” sound level, transmission and reception conditions mean that what is coming from you is now being heard. Some semanticists take this sort of modality as similar to deontic: physics and physiology allow something to happen (paralleling the way an authority’s permission allows something to happen). Others would classify it as dynamic modality. A pointer to the example being an unusual use is the possibility of removing the modal without affecting the meaning much: I hear you now is a paraphrase of I can hear you now.

Although it is possible to use might to report permission having been given, found that almost all instances of might in their large samples of conversational and academic English were epistemic. A deontic interpretation of They might or might not make it is somewhat implausible because it is hard to imagine permission being given for people to succeed or not succeed.

You better apologise is deontic. This is a reduced form of You had better… or You’d better… The idiom had better is not used to express epistemic modality.

7. In terms of relative scope, can’t P means ‘not (possibly P)’, deontically as well as epistemically. The same holds for cannot P. What about may not (or mayn’t, if this reduced form is acceptable to you)? They may not have an invitation can be understood either deontically (‘I forbid them having an invitation’) or epistemically (‘Perhaps they do not have an invitation’). What is the scope of negation relative to the scope of modality for these two interpretations?

Answer: Deontic may not is similar to can’t : negation has wider scope: ‘not (possibly (they have an invitation))’. However, epistemic may not behaves like mustn’t : modality has wider scope: ‘possibly (not (they have an invitation))’.

For the comparison of relative scope, it does not matter that may is represented as ‘possibly’, using the same word as was used for can. The meanings of may and can share the notion of possibility, the ‘negative ruled out’ part of their core meanings .

8. Few corgis are vegetarian is true provided the proportion of vegetarian corgis is small, in comparison to the number who are nonvegetarian. However,few is an ambiguous quantifier. It can also serve as a cardinal quantifier, as when someone who has been asked whether there are many boats in the harbour replies: “No, there are few boats there today”. If possible, write the set theoretic specification for this sentence’s truth conditions. If that is too hard, explain in words the meaning of few when it is a cardinal quantifier.

Answer: | B n H | is a small number. (B represents the set of boats and H the set of things that are in the harbour in question). Taking few as a cardinal quantifier, the speaker is just saying that there was a small number of boats in the harbour; the harbour seemed uncrowded by boats. Only the intersection is taken into consideration. Boats that are not in the harbour are left out of the calculation. What number is a small number? That is pragmatically decided by the speaker and relates to the size of the harbour, the density of boats that the speaker is used to, to the fact that they are boats rather than cars or ants or castles, and to the speaker’s ideas on what the addressee would regard as a small number in such a case.

9. Why is there no need for a preparatory introduction of topic before giving the following warnings: Keep your head down and mind the step, where the underlined phrases are definite?

Answer: It is a reasonable assumption about prototypical interlocutors that each has a head, which justifies first-off definite reference. And the warning about the step would typically be given in a situation where it is possible for the addressee to experience it directly, for example by looking, or tapping with a stick, again making it part of the background without further ado. The answer is not simply that warnings of this kind may have to be issued in a hurry. Where the danger is not so accessible an indefinite is perfectly feasible: Careful, there’s a snake in there.

10. Pseudo-clefts can be inverted, for example The hammer was what hit the floor. What hit the floor was the hammer. Is the presupposition the same or different? (Hint: start by trying to find a proposition that is both entailed by The hammer was what hit the floor and implicated by The hammer wasn’t what hit the floor That is to say: find out what it presupposes.)

Answer: The presuppositions are the same for a pseudo-cleft and for an inverted pseudo-cleft. The given example presupposes ‘Something hit the floor’.