Unit 5

(1) the main concerns of semantics

semantics:①D ②eg. Meaning of morphemes and sentences.③the following are what key concepts look like: semantic, components, denotation of words. Sense relations between words such as antonymy and synonymy, sense relation between sentences such as entailment and presupposition.

③provides an insight into the meaning of and a way to study the relationships between words that are related in meaning.

(2) the advantage and disadvantage of compential analysis

1.advantage:①the meaning of a word consists of a number of distinctive meaning features. This analysis breaks down the meaning of the word into those features, and it’s these different features that distinguish word meaning.②2 words or 2 expressions, which have the semantic components will be synonymous with each other. On the other hand, words

⒉disadvantage:①many words are polysemous. They have more than meaning, consequently they will have different sets of semantic components. A case in point is the word “man”, which is usually said to have a component Male. But it may also be used in a generic sense as in “Man is Mortal”, which applies to both sexes.

②secondly, some semantic components are seen as binary tax –onomies. “MALE” and “FEMALE” is one, and “ADULT” and “YOUNG” is another. But as we have learnt in the discussion of antonymy above , the opposition between “male” and “female” is different from that between “adult” and “young”. The former is absolute while the latter is relative.

③thirdly, the examples we have seen are only concerned with the neatly organized parts of the vocabulary. There may be words whose semantic compents are difficult to ascertain. There is the question of whether they are really universal, whether the vocabulary of every language may be analysed in this way. And even if the answers to these questions are all positive, there is still the question of how to explain the semantic components themselves. As it stands ,semantic components like “human”, “adult”, “male” are not ordinary words of English, they belong to a “Meta-language”, a language used for talking about another language. The attempt to explain the meaning of man in terms of these components is simply a translation from English to the meta-language. To someone who does not know the meta-language, this translation explains nothing.

(3) the character of synonymy

①total synonymy is rare. The so-called synonyms are all context dependent. they all differ one way or another .eg. they may differ in style . In the context “Little Tom_a toy bear”, “buy” is more appropriate than “purchase”.

②They may also differ in connotation. That is why people jokingly say “I’m thrifty. You are economical. And he is stingy.”

③thirdly, there are dialectal differences. “Autumn” is British while “fall” is American.

(4)the character of gradable antonymy

①as the name suggests, they are gradable. That’s, the members of a pair differ in terms of degree. The denial of one is not necessarily the assertion of the other. Something which is not good is not necessarily bad. It may simply be “so-so”, and can be modified by “very”. And they