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Form, Meaning, and Use Exam Summary

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Samenvatting voor het tentamen van het vak Form, Meaning, and Use van de opleiding Engelse Taal en Cultuur aan de Universiteit Utrecht.

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  • 25 juni 2020
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FMU Exam
- Birner Ch. 1: Defining Pragmatics

Competence = our (in principle flawless) knowledge of the rules of our own idiolect.

Performance = what we actually do linguistically – including all the false starts, speech errors etc.

Idiolect = our own individual internalised system of language that has a great deal in common with
the idiolects of other speakers in our community but almost certainly is not identical to any of them.

Garden-path sentences  sentences which lead us “down the garden path” toward an incorrect
interpretation. We have to retrace our steps in order to get to the right interpretation.

Pragmatics = the study of language use in context. Our knowledge of pragmatics is rule-governed.
Pragmatic knowledge is generally implicit. Pragmatics typically has to do with meaning that is non-
literal, context-dependent, inferential, and/or not truth-conditional.

Every figure of speech began as a brand-new but perfectly interpretable utterance. Upon their first
utterance, they require pragmatic inference for their interpretation; the hearer must work out what
was intended. When a figure of speech becomes commonplace, it’s possible that it becomes more
like a regular word, whose meaning is conventionally attached to that string of sounds.

Not truth-conditional  the conditions under which the statement is true don’t depend on its
pragmatic meaning.

Discourse analysis = studies strings of sentences produced in a connected discourse.

Pragmatics and discourse analysis differ in focus. Pragmatics uses discourse as data and seeks to
draw generalisations that have predictive power concerning our linguistic competence, whereas
discourse analysis focuses on the individual discourse, using the findings of pragmatic theory to shed
light on how a particular set of interlocutors use and interpret language in a specific context.

Linguists have traditionally used one of three basic methods to study language use and variation:

1. Native-speaker intuitions  valuable during the initial stage of research. Helps guide the
researcher toward a reasonable hypothesis. Once you have a hypothesis, your intuition
becomes unreliable.
2. Psycholinguistic experimentation  testing people’s actual linguistic knowledge and
behaviour outside of their ability to manipulate this behaviour. Typically, the subject is
unaware of what is actually being tested.
3. Naturally occurring data  observing language in actual use under natural conditions.
Elicitation / natural observation / corpus data.

The type of hypothesis that you are testing should be falsifiable and predictive.

Empirical claim  a claim is empirical if you can imagine a circumstance that would show that it is
false.

Semantic meaning = literal meaning. Study of word meaning is lexical semantics, study of sentence
meaning is sentential semantics.

Lexical relations = relationships of overlap in the words’ semantic features.

Synonyms  words that overlap in all of their semantic features.

,Antonyms  share all of their features except for one – and on that one, they differ in choosing
either opposing ends of a continuum (gradable antonyms: hot-cold & complementary antonyms:
dead-alive).

Hyponymy  one word (the hyponym) shares all of the features of another (superordinate) as well
as other.

Homonyms  result from two distinct words having the same form, as with ‘light’ (not heavy) and
‘light’ (illumination). This results in lexical ambiguity.

Polysemy  a single word has two related meanings (nickel  coin & metal).

Componential semantics  attempts to boil down the meanings of words to a set of primitive
features. For many lexical items, it’s not easy to determine what the correct set would be.

Alternative: fuzzy sets  the meaning of a word is a fuzzy set, a set whose boundaries are indistinct.
The set contains a prototype, that constitutes the “best” example of the set. Other things will be
more or less like the prototype depending on their resemblance to it, and toward the fuzzy boundary
there will be cases whose memberships in the class is debatable.

Compositional semantics = takes the meaning of a sentence to be essentially the sum of its parts, in
combination with a set of rules governing the way in which the meaning of the sentence is built up
from the meanings of its components in light of the syntactic structures in which they are placed.

Redundancy = partial repetition of meaning

Paraphrases = paraphrase can be due to synonymy at the lexical level. They are distinguished by the
fact that the two sentences are true under the same set of conditions.

Anomaly = a clash of semantic meaning, can be caused by antonymy. The syntactic correlate of
semantic anomaly is ungrammaticality.

Structural ambiguity  may arise due to the existence of two distinct syntactic analyses for the
sentence (Jenny ate the pizza on the table).

Deductive logic  involves rules for drawing necessarily valid inferences (conclusion) from a set of
propositions (premises). The conclusion is entailed by the premises. There is no situation in which the
premises could be true and the conclusion is false.

Inductive logic  matter of probability. Inferences are not necessarily true. The conclusion is very
likely to be true, but it is not necessarily true by virtue of the premises.

Sentence = a sequence of words.

Utterance = a sentence that’s produced in some actual context.

Proposition = what a sentence expresses. Can be true in some possible world and false in others.

Possible world = a way that the world could have been.

Analytic sentence = one whose truth is independent of what the world is like; it’s either necessarily
true (if a dog is blue, it’s blue) or necessarily false (if a dog is blue, it is not blue).

A sentence that is true is any possible world is a tautology. A sentence that is not true is any possible
world is a contradiction. A sentence whose truth depends on the condition of the world (some dogs
are blue) is synthetic.

,Truth conditions = the conditions under which a sentence would be true. Independent of what the
world is actually like.

Truth value = specification of whether the sentence is in fact true in that world.

Truth-conditional meaning = any piece of meaning that affects the conditions under which a
sentence would be true.

Propositional calculus = the study of logical relationships between sentences. P, Q, and R stand for
propositions, and they are connected by various logical connectives such as ‘and’ and ‘or’. These
connectives can be viewed as functions that map truth values onto truth values.

Truth table of logical negation:

P ~p ~p = not-p
T F
F T
Truth table for conjunction ‘and’ (&)

P Q P&
Q
T T T
T F F
F T F
F F F
Truth table for disjunction ‘inclusive or’ (v)

P Q Pv
Q
T T T
T F T
F T T
F F F
Truth table for disjunction ‘exclusive or’ (v)

P Q Pv
Q
T T F
T F T
F T T
F F F
Truth table for logical implication (condition, if…then, )

P Q P The truth of P guarantees the truth of Q.
Q
4th row: “If you’re a genius, then I’m a monkey’s uncle”.
T T T
T F F 3rd row: “If you’re brilliant, I’m even more brilliant than you are.”
F T T
F F T
Truth table for equivalence / bidirectional implication (“if and only if”, )

, P Q P PQ is true in exactly those situations in which they have the same truth
Q value.
T T T
T F F
F T F Predicate logic  looks at truth-conditional meaning within an individual
F F T sentence.

Predicates are capitalised, and terms/arguments (individuals) are lower-
cased.

Entities can be represented by a constant (specific individual) or a variable (‘x’, unspecified).

Example: Sally is a plumber  P(s). Sally likes Paul  L(s,p).

∀  universal quantifier, “for all”

∃  existential quantifier, “there exists”

Examples:

- ∀x(P(x)): “For all x, x is a plumber” or “Everyone is a plumber”
- ∃x(P(x)): “There exists an x such that x is a plumber” or “Someone is a plumber”
- ∀x(P(x)  T(X)): “For all x, if x is a plumber, then x is tall” or “All plumbers are tall”

The use of logical notation has the advantage that it is unambiguous, which makes it useful for
expressing precise meanings where natural language utterances might be subject to ambiguity.

Natural meaning  an indication that is independent of anybody’s intent.

Non-natural meaning  there is no automatic, natural correlation between the word and its
meaning. This goes for the vast majority of words in a language.

Sense of a word = the sort of meaning that a dictionary would give for the word. Context-
independent.

Reference  the “meaning” in question can be a matter of what particular entity is being picked out.
May require access to pragmatic information.

Sentence meaning = the literal meaning of a sentence, derivable from the sense of its words and the
syntax that combines them. Context-independent.

Speaker meaning = the meaning that a speaker intends, which usually includes the literal meaning
but also extends beyond it. Context-dependent.

Linguistic communication is collaborative in nature.

Discourse model = a representation of the discourse. Each interlocutor has a distinct discourse
model, and a speaker’s goal is to increase the similarity between their and the interlocutor’s model.
A discourse model maps onto a set of possible words. It doesn’t necessarily represent reality. Our
discourse model reflects only our beliefs concerning the possible worlds under discussion.

Mentalist point of view  the referent of linguistic expressions are mental entities.

Referential point of view  the referent of linguistic expressions are real-world entities.

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