Some Practice Lexical Semantics Questions
1. Here are two possible ways to refer to the same individual: Barack Obama and the current president of the United States. How are the "meanings" of these two referring expressions different? (You will need to talk about the difference between sense and reference in your discussion.)
We used this to discuss that proper names like Barack Obama don't have a sense, just a reference, while expressions like the president of the United States build their reference by taking the senses of the lexical items (president = chief executive office-holder, current = present, now, the United States = proper name of this country and we discussed that the means something like the speaker expects the hearer to be able to pick out a referent for the expression, either because it has been established in the discourse, it is unique in plain sight, the meanings of the parts of the expression narrow the possible referents to on) allow us to establish the expression as referring to "Barack Obama". Most simply, Barack Obama only has reference; the current president of the United States has a sufficiently narrowed sense to allow to establish a unique reference.
2. What are the relationships that hold between the following word sets: wife/spouse; toe/foot; end/terminate? How do these relationships differ from each other?
wife is a hyponym of spouse. toe is a meronym of foot. end and terminate are synonyms.
A subset of spouses are wives; a toe is a piece of a foot; end = terminate.
3. There are several kinds of anytonymy. Indicate which among the following are complementary pairs, which are gradable pairs, and which are converse pairs.
(From An Introduction to Language , Fromkin and Rodman)
4. In discussion of semantic decomposition, we noted that at least some words have meanings that can be represented in terms of smaller semantic features. Four such words are dog, puppy, cat and kitten.
A. Attempt to provide the semantic features associated with each of these words.
Dog and cat have two senses, one which means adult animal of its species (1) and the other which names the whole species (2).
We're going to need features like [ANIMAL], [CANINE], [FELINE], [ADULT]:
Note that some of these features are redundant: +CANINE implies -FELINE and +FELINE implies -CANINE; +FELINE or +CANINE implies +ANIMAL.
B. How are the pairs dog-puppy and cat-kitten different from man-boy and girl-woman?
Besides needing to add a [HUMAN] features, we need to add a gender feature, either [MALE] or [FEMALE], because the human terms not only distinguish adults from children, but also male from female.
C. Try to provide semantic features for the words circle, triangle, and quadrangle. What problems do you encounter?
It's difficult to find a working set of features for these that are generalizable to other terms.
(From Contemporary Linguistics , O'Grady, Dobrovolsky and Aronoff)
5. Figure out a set of semantic features needed to represent the meaning the Maricopa kinship terms listed below and then give a working componential analysis of each of the words.
With nine features, we distinguish 23 different kinship terms.
6. Compare how and how successfully semantic feature and prototype representations of meaning work with different kinds of lexical items. In particular, compare the representation of meaning in areas like the kinship system above and other lexical items like couch, sofa, bench. It is much more difficult to come up with necessary and sufficient features to distinguish a set like couch, sofa, and bench, than it is to distinguish the kinship terms. These terms are overlapping in multiple dimensions and are defined by function (for sitting, e.g.), by structure (having arms, legs, being upholstered or not, etc.) and by context of use (being in a home or in an office, being inside or outside, etc.). The kinship terms are in a fully elaborated network of meanings which are all distinguished from each other based on a relatively small set of distinctions. These furniture terms are multiply overlapping and not always distinct--semantic decomposition as represented in semantic features is much less effective with this set of items. Family resemblances to a prototype with overlapping fields works much better.
7. For each set of words below,
give semantic features that represent the elements of meaning that they share and that represents the elements of meaning that distinguish them from each other and specify each word with the appropriate semantic feature values.
describe their semantic relationships in terms of synonymy (partial and complete), hyponymy, antonymy (gradable, converses, complementary), hyponymy, and meronymy.
SET 1: rise/fall/move/plummet/ascend/climb
Features: MOTION VERTICAL INTENTIONAL RAPID UPWARD
Move is a superordinate item with the remaining words as hypnonyms. Move is +MOTION
Rise/ascend/climb are +MOTION +VERTICAL +UPWARD.
Rise/ascend are (near-)synonyms for upward movement. climb is a hyponym of them both with +INTENTIONAL added.
Fall/plummet are +MOTION +VERTICAL -UPWARD
Plummet is a hyponym of fall with +RAPID added.
Rise/ascend are complementary antonyms of fall (if something is engaged in vertical movement, it must be up or down)
SET 2: teacher/student/instructor/professor
Features: LEARNER INSTRUCTOR POSTSECONDARY
Teacher/instructor are synonyms +INSTRUCTOR; professor is a hyponym of both of them with +POSTSECONDARY added.
Student has the feature +LEARNER and is a converse antonym of teacher/instructor.
SET 3: loud/quiet/silent/noisy/audible
SET 4: hammer/screwdriver/screw/nail/tool