On the test yesterday I don't know if I was right when I was doing the test for homonyms and polysemy.
"She was at the head of her class" "She was born with a full head of hair"
Does X Mean Y in some context and Z in others? Yes head in the first case means "top" of class and in the second sentence it means "body part"
Does X only mean Y? NO
Are Y Z related? NO- this means that they are homonyms
Does X mean YZ? No
Both of these heads are homonyms
I think I finally understand how you can tell the difference between metaphors and idioms.
Idioms can't be translated over from one language to another because they lose there meaning so saying "They are going out and painting the town red" can't be translated because saying "They are going out and coloring the town ruby" does not make sense.
Metaphors can be translated from one language to another and subsituting synonyms it still does not loose all it's literal meaning. You can say "She put her money where her mouth is" and subsititute cash for money and people will still get what is trying to be said "She put her cash where her mouth is".
Since I was not in class on Thursday I am going to make sure that I understand the part of the homework that confused me the most, The major aspectual classes of events:
a) States- the tense here never changes and is adjectival so an example would be: Maggie is Sarah’s younger sister; I will always be younger than my sister.
b) Activities- something is going on; an example would be She is talking about the test she just took; this would be an activity because she is currently talking
c) Accomplishment- has durativity; He is going to study for that test; I don’t completely understand this one but would it be because it takes a long time to study for a test?
d) Achievement- transtition from one state to another is instant: She turns 22 next week. The state of being 21 to 22 changes in one day next week so it would be an achievement rather than an accomplishment.
e) Semelfactives- “punctual accomplishment”- The house caught on fire- Is this different because of the length of duration? I am confused about the differences between this and accomplishment.
To make sure I understand chapter 12 I am going to give some examples:
a) abnormal- pleonasm: The time telling clock; it is a pleonasm because it is redundant to say that a clock tells time: could change clock to technology
b) abnormal-semantic clash- inappropriateness: The female cat wore the pants in their relationship; to “wear the pants” you must be human
c) abnormal- semantic clash- paradox: the large mouse: this is a paradox because you can change large to another size a superordinate would be size and an incompatible choice would be gigantic
d) abnormal-semantic clash- incongruity: The purple cow slept over the sky: Does not make sense
Are all of these correct?
After class yesterday I started thinking about lexical hierarchies and how they can be seen everywhere to organize things. I never thought about that until after class but everything has a ranking of some sort to organize things. I am going to use two examples that I have been thinking about the most, one for meronymic and one for taxonomic to make sure that I know them and their differences.
Meronymic:
University of Kentucky (beginner)
Colleges (i.e. College of Communications and Information Studies) Superordinate
Departments (i.e. Communications Department) Basic
Students who are majors (i.e. I am a communication major) Subordinate
Taxonomic:
How clothes are organized in a store at the mall:
Clothes Beginner
Gender (Men and Women) Superordinate
Types of clothing (pants shirts) Basic
Types of individual kinds of clothes (Pant to Khaki; shirt to sweater) Subordinate
Are these correct?
It is hard to make these hierarchies on the computer.
I have had a lot of family happenings going on lately and I started thinking about family trees. A family tree is a hierarchy but can someone look at it from a lexical hierarchy. When you look at it from a lexical hierarchy, is it meronymic or taxonomic? I believe it would be meronymic because each level is “part of” the level before it. You could also have many lexical gaps for things such as skipped generations or step children.
Family Tree
Great Grandparents: Beginner
Grandparents and Great Aunts and Uncles: Superordinate
Parents, Aunts and Uncles, and second cousins: Basic
Children, First Counsins: Subordinate
Does this work because it can go on forever? Am I right to think that it would be meronymic?
I was thinking about the incompatibility section of chapter nine and was trying to understand it. I started to think of a superordinate and incompatible hyponyms. The first category I came up with was sports.
Superordinate: Sports
Incompatible Hyponyms: Football, Basketball, Soccer, Baseball
They are incompatible because they are each separate items under the superordinate and they one cannot be the other. Then I started thinking each of these can be compatible hyponyms. The movie “Baseketball” came to mind. The two main characters in the movie combined the rules of baseball with the rule of basketball to form the game baseketball. In this movie sports would not be an example of incompatible hyponyms. I added a clip from the movie.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Y8WdDmAFcJw
This shows that if a hyponym is compatible or not, is not always black or white, sometimes it is personal opinion or sometimes it is the amount of knowledge that a person has that makes them decide whether or not hyponyms are compatible or not.
I started to think about synonyms after class on Tuesday when I was writing a paper for another class and used my computer to look up a synonym for a word I kept using. If you right click a word in Word you have the option to see synonyms. Our book said that there are no such things as absolute synonymy. If there is no such this as absolute synonymy then what are the words is my computer is giving me? If they do not mean the exact thing then in a way the sentence that I am writing can turn out completely differently than I wanted it to because the word the computer suggested may not match exactly. The realization taught me two things. One to not use a word the computer suggests just because it sounds “smart”, because a teacher may know the exact definition of the word and he or she may see the sentence as not making sense. The second reason is to carefully read over a sentence once I change a word to make sure that the sentence still keeps its meaning.
Some examples:
Changing the meaning:
I read the book.
Computer suggested synonyms: I read the reserve
Does not make sense:
I flew yesterday.
Computer suggested synonyms: I fly yesterday.
After class one day I was eating lunch with one of my best friends, she randomly asked “You know when someone says someone has caused them heartbreak because someone they liked or loved hurt them but there heart didn’t actually break, well I started to think about how words or phrases don’t actually make sense.” I told her that in my class we are discussing meaning. She then went on to say another word that has been bothering her is eluded someone told her they felt eluded and she did not know how someone could feel eluded. This reminded my of the questions that people in linguistics have to ask. My question is how do people come up with the meaning for words or phrases? If people come up with these meanings then why do they give two meaning to one word that is not homonyms? There are so many words that if you actually think about it does not make sense with the meanings.
When we were doing the activity in class about prototypes and the GOE ratings, I started to think about ways that this type of categorization is used in the real world. Almost every type of store uses this list but the one that stands out the most is a grocery store. Everything is laid out in certain sections (or a list like we made in our class would be used to help categorize it. However, people have different opinions on what categorizes certain things, as we learn in class. The could be a reason why someone is looking for an item that would have a high GOE rating in one section and find it in another section that they themselves would give it a low GOE rating but the person who choice to put it their may feel that it is the prototype for that section.
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