14.12.2010 Descriptive grammar

1. WORDS AND MEANING

• word meanings can be defined: concrete thnigs (table), activities(cutting) and abstract notions(sorrow)

• Emty words: be, have, it, there, up, to.

• Changes in empty-set are rareand slow (thou)

• Meaning of pronouns he vs. She

• I vs. We

• it vs. she/he

• meaning of prepositions is context-bound (above, to, in)

• articles: Look at THE tree! / I saw a cat. THE cat was black.

Cohensive ties and deictic elements

• morphemes as the smallest units of meaning

• their representation in a dictionary

• Inflectional morphemes have meanings

Plural morpheme 's' and its realistaions:

cat, cats /s/

dog, dogs /z/

horse, horses /yz/

2. DERIVATIONAL MORPHEMES

• un-meaning NOT

kind > unkind

• in- meaning NOT

ability> inability

• ise meaning to MAKE

pritave> privatise

• tion meaning THE PROCESS OF...

privatise> privatisation

• ly meaning IN A … MANNER

mad> madly

happy> happily

3. PETRIFIED AND PRODUCTIVE MORPHEMES

• be- meaning to MAKE

becalm, belittle, besmall, ???

• ish meaning FAIRLY....

smallish, darkish, roundish, foolish, girlish.

4. ZERO-MORPHEMES

give me the HAMMER.

I HAMMERED the nails into the board.

I'll get the SAW.

He was SAWING logs.

A tool vs. The activity

5. MEANING OF COUMPONDS

• transparent and opaque compound

swearword

blackbird

pickpocket

6. COMPONENTIAL ANALYSIS

• MAN: male+, adult+, human+

• WOMAN: male-, adult+, human+

• CHILD: adult-, human+

• CHAIR: for sitting upon+, with legs+, with a back+, for one person+.

-universla features

-too few examples of words have been analysed

-too many kind of semantic features employed

7. COMPONENTS AND SEMANTIC FIELDS

STRIDE walk/long steps

PACE walk/ repeatedly covering the same ground

MARCH walk/ placing feet down firlmy

GOOSESTEP walk/ placing feet down firmly/legs straight

8. SENSE RELATIONS

• synonymy (near-synonyms) within a semantic field

• oppositeness

slow – fast

happy – sad

break – mend

buy – sell

• hyponymy ( a superordinate and hyponyms)

9. IDEAL SYNONYMS ARE EXTREMELY RARE

• denotation

• sense relations

• grammatical behaviour

• connotation(equality in social base, formal or informal)

• collocation

• polysemy