Semantics and Pragmatics

 Five  

Semantics and Pragmatics

Semantics
Lexical semantics is concerned with the meanings of words and the meaning of relationships

Eight

Child Language Acquisition and Second Language Acquisition

Language acquisition

Babbling

Linguistic competence develops in stages, from babbling to one word to two word, then telegraphic speech. Babbling is now considered the earliest form of language acquisition because infants will produce sounds based on what language input they receive. One word sentences (holophrastic speech) are generally monosyllabic in consonant-vowel clusters. During two word stage, there are no syntactic or morphological markers, no inflections for plural or past tense, and pronouns are rare, but the intonation contour extends over the whole utterance. Telegraphic speech lacks function words and only carries the open class content words, so that the sentences sound like a telegram.

Three theories: Imitation, reinforcement and analogy

The three theories of language acquisition: imitation, reinforcement and analogy, do not explain very well how children acquire language. Imitation does not work because children produce sentences never heard before, such as "cat stand up table." Even when they try to imitate adult speech, children cannot generate the same sentences because of their limited grammar. And children who are unable to speak still learn and understand the language, so that when they overcome their speech impairment they immediately begin speaking the language. Reinforcement also does not work because it actually seldomly occurs and when it does, the reinforcement is correcting pronunciation or truthfulness, and not grammar. A sentence such as "apples are purple" would be corrected more often because it is not true, as compared to a sentence such as "apples is red" regardless of the grammar. Analogy also cannot explain language acquisition. Analogy involves the formation of sentences or phrases by using other sentences as samples. If a child hears the sentence, "I painted a red barn," he can say, by analogy, "I painted a blue barn." Yet if he hears the sentence, "I painted a barn red," he cannot say "I saw a barn red." The analogy did not work this time, and this is not a sentence of English.

Acquisitions
Phonology: A child's error in pronunciation is not random, but rule-governed. Typical phonological rules include: consonant cluster simplification (spoon becomes poon), devoicing of final consonants (dog becomes dok), voicing of initial consonants (truck becomes druck), and consonant harmony (doggy becomes goggy, or big becomes gig.)

Morphology: An overgeneralization of constructed rules is shown when children treat irregular verbs and nouns as regular. Instead of went as the past tense of go, children use goed because the regular verbs add an -ed ending to form the past tense. Similarly, children use gooses as the plural of goose instead of geese, because regular nouns add an -s in the plural.

The "Innateness Hypothesis"

The "Innateness Hypothesis" of child language acquisition, proposed by Noam Chomsky, states that the human species is prewired to acquire language, and that the kind of language is also determined. Many factors have led to this hypothesis such as the ease and rapidity of language acquisition despite impoverished input as well as the uniformity of languages. All children will learn a language, and children will also learn more than one language if they are exposed to it. Children follow the same general stages when learning a language, although the linguistic input is widely varied.

The poverty of the stimulus

The poverty of the stimulus states that children seem to learn or know the aspects of grammar for which they receive no information. In addition, children do not produce sentences that could not be sentences in some human language. The principles of Universal Grammar underlie the specific grammars of all languages and determine the class of languages that can be acquired unconsciously without instruction. It is the genetically determined faculty of the left hemisphere, and there is little doubt that the brain is specially equipped for acquisition of human language.

The "Critical Age Hypothesis"

The "Critical Age Hypothesis" suggests that there is a critical age for language acquisition without the need for special teaching or learning. During this critical period, language learning proceeds quickly and easily. After this period, the acquisition of grammar is difficult, and for some people, never fully achieved. Cases of children reared in social isolation have been used for testing the critical age hypothesis. None of the children who had little human contact were able to speak any language once reintroduced into society. Even the children who received linguistic input after being reintroduced to society were unable to fully develop language skills. These cases of isolated children, and of deaf children, show that humans cannot fully acquire any language to which they are exposed unless they are within the critical age. Beyond this age, humans are unable to acquire much of syntax and inflectional morphology. At least for humans, this critical age does not pertain to all of language, but to specific parts of the grammar.

Second Language Acquisition Teaching Methods

Grammar-translation

Grammar-translation: the student memorizes words, inflected words, and syntactic rules and uses them to translate from native to target language and vice versa; most commonly used method in schools because it does not require teacher to be fluent; however, least effective method of teaching

Direct method

Direct method: the native language is not used at all in the classroom, and the student must learn the new language without formal instruction; based on theories of first language acquisition
Audio-lingual: heavy use of dialogs and audio, based on the assumption that language learning is acquired mainly through imitation, repetition, and reinforcement; influenced by psychology

Natural Approach: emphasis on vocabulary and not grammar; focus on meaning, not form; use of authentic materials instead of textbook

Silent Way: teachers remain passive observers while students learn, which is a process of personal growth; no grammatical explanation or modeling by the teacher

Total Physical Response: students play active role as listener and performer, must respond to imperative drills with physical action

Suggestopedia: students always remain comfortable and relaxed and learn through memorization of meaningful texts, although the goal is understanding
Community Language Learning: materials are developed as course progresses and teacher understands what students need and want to learn; learning involves the whole person and language is seen as more than just communication
Community Language Teaching: incorporates all components of language and helps students with various learning styles; use of communication-based activities with authentic materials, needs of learner are taken into consideration when planning topics and objectives

Four skill areas
The four skill areas of learning a foreign language need to be addressed consistently and continually. Good lesson plans incorporate all four: Listening, Speaking, Reading (and Vocabulary), and Writing (and Grammar). Native speakers do not learn the skill areas separately, nor do they use them separately, so they shouldn’t be taught separately. However, it is easy to fall into the trap of teaching about the language, instead of actually teaching the language. Most textbooks resort to teaching grammar and vocabulary lists and nothing more.

Source: http://www.ielanguages.com/linguist.html

among words, while phrasal semantics is concerned with the meaning of syntactic units larger than the word. Pragmatics is the study of how context affects meaning, such as how sentences are interpreted in certain situations.

Semantic properties are the components of meanings of words. For example, the semantic property "human" can be found in many words such as parent, doctor, baby, professor, widow, and aunt. Other semantic properties include animate objects, male, female, countable items and non-countable items.

The -nyms

Homonyms: different words that are pronounced the same, but may or may not be spelled the same (to, two, and too)

Polysemous: word that has multiple meanings that are related conceptually or historically (bear can mean to tolerate or to carry or to support)

Homograph: different words that are spelled identically and possibly pronounced the same; if they are pronounced the same, they are also homonyms (pen can mean writing utensil or cage)

Heteronym: homographs that are pronounced differently (dove the bird and dove the past tense of dive)

Synonym: words that mean the same but sound different (couch and sofa)

Antonym: words that are opposite in meaning
Complementary pairs: alive and dead
Gradable pairs: big and small (no absolute scale)

Hyponym: set of related words (red, white, yellow, blue are all hyponyms of "color")

Metonym: word used in place of another to convey the same meaning (jock used for athlete, Washington used for American government, crown used for monarcy)

Retronym: expressions that are no longer redundant (silent movie used to be redundant because a long time ago, all movies were silent, but this is no longer true or redundant)

Thematic Roles
Thematic roles are the semantic relationships between the verbs and noun phrases of sentences. The following chart shows the thematic roles in relationship to verbs of sentences:

Thematic Role	Description	Example
Agent	the one who performs an action	Maria ran
Theme	the person or thing that undergoes an action	Mary called John
Location	the place where an action takes place	It rains in Spain
Goal	the place to which an action is directed	Put the cat on the porch
Source	the place from which an action originates	He flew from Chicago to LA
Instrument	the means by which an action is performed	He cuts his hair with scissors
Experiencer	one who perceives something	She heard Bob play the piano
Causative	a natural force that causes a change	The wind destroyed the house
Possessor	one who has something	The tail of the cat got caught
Recipient	one who receives something	I gave it to the girl

Sentential Meaning

The meaning of sentences is built from the meaning of noun phrases and verbs. Sentences contain truth conditions if the circumstances in the sentence are true. Paraphrases are two sentences with the same truth conditions, despite subtle differences in structure and emphasis. The ball was kicked by the boy is a paraphrase of the sentence the boy kicked the ball, but they have the same truth conditions - that a boy kicked a ball. Sometimes the truth of one sentence entails or implies the truth of another sentence. This is called entailment and the opposite of this is called contradiction, where one sentence implies the falseness of another. He was assassinated entails that he is dead. He was assassinated contradicts with the statement he is alive.

Pragmatics
Pragmatics is the interpretation of linguistic meaning in context. Linguistic context is discourse that precedes a sentence to be interpreted and situational context is knowledge about the world. In the following sentences, the kids have eaten already and surprisingly, they are hungry, the linguistic context helps to interpret the second sentence depending on what the first sentence says. The situational context helps to interpret the second sentence because it is common knowledge that humans are not usually hungry after eating.

Maxims of Conversation

Grice's maxims for conversation are conventions of speech such as the maxim of quantity that states a speaker should be as informative as is required and neither more nor less. The maxim of relevance essentially states a speaker should stay on the topic, and the maxim of manner states the speaker should be brief and orderly, and avoid ambiguity. The fourth maxim, the maxim of quality, states that a speaker should not lie or make any unsupported claims.

Performative Sentences

In these types of sentences, the speaker is the subject who, by uttering the sentence, is accomplishing some additional action, such as daring, resigning, or nominating. These sentences are all affirmative, declarative and in the present tense. An informal test to see whether a sentence is performative or not is to insert the words I hereby before the verb. I hereby challenge you to a match or I hereby fine you $500 are both performative, but I hereby know that girl is not. Other performative verbs are bet, promise, pronounce, bequeath, swear, testify, and dismiss.

Presuppositions
These are implicit assumptions required to make a sentence meaningful. Sentences that contain presuppositions are not allowed in court because accepting the validity of the statement mean accepting the presuppositions as well. Have you stopped stealing cars? is not admissible in court because no matter how the defendant answers, the presupposition that he steals cars already will be acknowledged. Have you stopped smoking? implies that you smoke already, and Would you like another piece? implies that you've already had one piece.

Deixis
 

Deixis is reference to a person, object, or event which relies on the situational context. First and second person pronouns such as my, mine, you, your, yours, we, ours and us are always deictic because their reference is entirely dependent on context. Demonstrative articles like this, that, these and those and expressions of time and place are always deictic as well. In order to understand what specific times or places such expressions refer to, we also need to know when or where the utterance was said. If someone says "I'm over here!" you would need to know who "I" referred to, as well as where "here" is. Deixis marks one of the boundaries of semantics and pragmatics. 


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