problems with pinning down word meaning确定词汇意义 语义学作业.ppt

3.4 Problems with pinning down word meaning---Contextual effects Context has an influence on word meaning. Contextual effects: restricting influence: is the tendency for words to occur together repeatedly---collocation eg. strong/powerful + arguments strong tea powerful tea strong car powerful car Collocation: can undergo a fossilization process until they become fixed expressions. Eg. husband and wife salt and vinegar hot and cold running water …… Idioms: expressions where the individual words have ceased to have independent meanings. Eg. kith and kin Contextual effects Contextual effects can also pull word meanings towards creativity and semantic shift. Eg. A noun like run can have somewhat different meanings I go for a run every morning. The tail-end batsmen added a single run before lunch. The ball-player hit a home-run. We took the new car for a run. He built a new run for his chickens. There’s been a run on the dollar. The bears are here for the salmon run. Ambiguity and Vagueness Ambiguity: the context will cause one of the senses to be selected. （歧义） Vagueness: the context can add information that is not specified in the sense. （模糊） The proposal is that if each of the meanings of run in a-g is a different sense, then run is seven ways ambiguous; but if a-g share the same sense, then run is merely vague between these different uses. do so identity test Kempson’s test relies on this identity: if the preceding verb phrase has more than one sense, then whichever sense is selected in this first full verb phrase must be kept the same in the following do so clause. Charlie hates mayonnaise and so does Mary. He took a form and Sean did too. 3.5 Lexical Relations Lexicon is a network. Lexical field: is a group of lexemes which belong to a particular activity or area of specialist knowledge, such as the terms in cooking or sailing; or the vocabulary used by doctors,