Lexemes, mental lexicon, compositionality

Compositionality

• Helps us to combine sentences together to make them longer and longer

(1) The cat ate the rat.

(2) The cat ate the rat and the bat ate the cat.

(3) The cat which is fat ate the rat and the bat ate the cat.

- We are constantly hearing new phrases and sentences, ones we've never heard before, and yet we somehow manage to figure out what they mean

• The principle of compositionality = principle says that the meaning of a piece of language is based solely on the meanings of its parts, and the way they are put together (Portner)

• we only must know a finite number of basic things and this gives us enough knowledge to associate the right meaning with every bigger piece of language

• this principle helps us with predication of the sentence (She is the subject; loves is the predicate…) and with combining other things together

• the principle = The interpretation of a sentence is determined by the interpretations of the words occurring in the sentence and the syntactic structure of the sentence (Radford)

What’s in a lexicon

• two categories – lexical and grammar

• grammar is a system of rules or regularities in a language (tell us the difference between the kangaroo ate the flower and the flower ate the kangaroo), captures regular morphological and phonological processes

• lexicon is a collection of linguistic knowledge that cannot be captured by rules, it is collection of associations between pronunciations, meanings and grammatical properties

• lexicon is organized into lexical entries that pull together all the information on a headword, collect a lexemes and information about them

• lexeme = a linguistic form represents a lexeme if the form is conventionally associated with a non-compositional meaning

• morpheme – smallest meaningful units of language (language – morpheme, because it can’t be split in any meaningful parts)

• not all words are lexemes and not all lexemes are words

• lemma – dictionary word form (for verb – infinitive) – lexicographers needs lemma

lexemes are:

• simple words (free morphemes= can be used on their own)

• bound morphemes – suffixes, prefixes and other bits of the language are called bound morphemes, they can’t stand alone on their own (un- in unhappy)

• morphologically complex words – greenhouse

• set phrases – idioms=lexical expressions, non-compositional, because they have to be learned, the meaning is not made by the parts (apple of one’s eye) and phrasal verbs

• lexemes are conventional (combination of form-meaning)

• lexemes are non-compositional (the meanings of lexemes are not built out of the meaning of their parts

• compositional expressions possibly stored as units

• happiness (happy + ness) – some derived words have a compositional meaning

• how are you – fixed phrases

• fixed phrases – clichés

• collocations

dis- and whether it is compositional or not

• dislocate – compositional

• disappear – compositional

• disappoint – non

• discuss – non

• disagree – compositional

• discriminate – non

• disadvantage – compositional

• disgusting – non

• distribute – non

• disapprove – compositional

• disbelief – compositional

• disqualify – compositional

• discharge – both

• dislike – compositional

• discipline – non

• disconnect - compositional

• Words with semantic prosodies project semantic features onto fellow-constituents of multi-word lexical items. An example is the claimed "negative" feature projected by words such as cause and happen

• relexification: the loss of semantic significance of constituents of a lexified sequence

• selectional restrictions or selectional preferences = s selective pressure exercised by a word on its partners (fried and eggs are mutually selecting, fried phonemes and exponential eggs are mutually repelling)

• collocation high speed, while speed has its default sense, high has a special, non-default sense

• emergent meaning = “John poured the butter” – it means, that the butter was too hot to be liquid, which is not usual = it is non-compositional?

• minimal semantic constituent = cannot be divided into yet smaller semantic constituent (mat)

• IDIOMS (examples in Cruse p. 87)

• Elements are not separately modifiable without loss of idiomatic meaning

• Elements do not coordinate with genuine semantic constituents (curiosity killed and healed the cat, curiosity killed the cat and the dog)

• Elements cannot take contrastive stress, or be the focus of topicalizing transformations

• Elements cannot be referred to anaphorically

• An idiom does not survive the substitution of any of its constituent elements by a synonym or near synonym

• Some aspects of grammar (e.g. voice) may or may not be part of an idiom

• A semantic tag functions together with an element which designates a kind base to distinguish a sub-kind (functions together with an element which designates a kind to distinguish a sub-kind)

• empty tags – „black“ in blackbird, some can refer to a meaning, some have only distinctive function

• Semi-compositional expressions are those whose grammatical constituents are also semantic constituents, but whose overall meaning is not fully predictable

• clichés are perhaps best characterized as conventional things to say in certain contexts, rather than simply default encodings of specific meanings

• it no longer has such meaning and it is not interesting

• cliché – “the information revolution”

• clichés are mainly in politics – “it’s all going to come down to turnout” – všechno to záleží na volební účasti, “I don’t look at polling” – průzkumy veřejného mínění mě nezajímají

• “people sometimes rely on “ready-made” compositional expressions instead of composing new ones (how do you do, how are you…)

• Podle všeho – to all intents and purposes

• It cost a nominal egg – it cost an arm and a leg

• frozen metaphors = metaphorical expressions whose meaning and form have become relatively rigid (The ball's in your court now)

• idiomatic English = you speak the language fluently (idiomatic English = collocation)

• delexification – the word does not have the semantic meaning (break a leg – leg is delixified, it’s not about breaking a leg, it’s an idiom)

• holistic = takes care of the whole, not the parts

• open-choice principle – analyses an utterance word by word, each word is freely chosen and displays the same semantic properties as it does in isolation = compositionality (free choice of choosing adjectives)

• the idiom principle – have/get cold feet, cost/charge an arm and a leg – limited choice