Integrated Integrated Language Language Skills Skills 11
Introduction to Textual Analysis, LESSON 2 1
What are words “made of”? • Structure (morphology, suffixes, prefixes, case markers, etc) • Content (meaning and referential relations) • Lexical Relations (synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms, etc.) • Grammatical Relations (syntactic templates, textual structure) 2
Denotation and connotation: what are words worth? • The denotation of a word is its explicit definition listed in a dictionary. •
Connotation refers to the emotional loading that many words carry, and to the way producers of text can exploit this capacity of language to make texts effective. HOUSE vs. HOME 3
• Denotation refers to the literal meaning of a word, the "dictionary definition."¨ For example, if you look up the word snake in a dictionary, you will discover that one of its denotative meanings is "any of numerous scaly, legless, sometimes venomous reptiles¡having a long, tapering, cylindrical body and found in most tropical and temperate regions.“ 4
• Connotation, on the other hand, refers to the associations that are connected to a certain word or the emotional suggestions related to that word. The connotativemeanings of a word exist together with the denotative meanings. The connotations for the word snake could include evil or danger. 5
Word and Sense • Most users of English would assume that words are the smallest units of language to carry meaning. • This, however, is not (necessarily) the case.
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Look at the following sentence: The plogs glorped bliply. 1. What do the words in this sentence mean? 2. How many plogs were there? One or more than one? 3. What were they doing? 4. Were they doing it now or in the past? 5. How, or in what way, were they doing it? 7
• There was more than one plog, because this word carries the plural marker ‘s’. • ‘Glorped’ is marked as a verb by the use of the past tense marker ‘ed’, so the reader knows what the plogs were doing, and the fact that they were doing it in the past. • Finally, the reader can tell how or in what manner the plogs were glorping—bliply— because the word carries the adverb marker ‘ly’. • Just a brief look at text can establish that units smaller than words are carrying meaning. These units are morphemes. 8
Words may be made up of one or more morphemes: • One morpheme dog, elephant, establish, child • Two morphemes dog+s, establish+ment, child+ish • Three morphemes dis+establish+ ment, child+ish+ness. 9
• In theory, there is no limit to the number of morphemes a word can have. • However, there tends to be an upper limit (due to logic and comprehension), and six morphemes is about it for English. – Antidisestablishmentarianism (28 letters) 10
• Meaning therefore exists in units of language smaller than the word, in morphemes. • Users of English frequently use the term ‘word’ when, strictly speaking, they are referring to morphemes. • For this reason, linguists prefer the term ‘lexeme’ to the term ‘word’. • Lexeme refers to a unit of meaning that may be smaller or larger than the traditional term ‘word’ implies. 11
LEXEME • A meaningful linguistic unit that is an item in the vocabulary of a language. • Also called citation form.
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Words and meaning Lexical ambiguity: say what you mean, or mean what you say? – This looks at the way users of text can exploit the capacity of words to carry more than one meaning. – Polysemy? A lexical unit with two or more meanings.
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Examples • You know, somebody actually complimented me on my driving today. They left a little note on the windscreen; it said, 'Parking Fine.' So that was nice." (English comedian Tim Vine) • "'Do you believe in clubs for young people?' someone asked W.C. Fields. 'Only when kindness fails,' replied Fields." (Quoted by Graeme Ritchie in The Linguistic Analysis of Jokes. Routledge, 2004)
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Syntactic (grammatical) ambiguity – The presence of two or more possible meanings within a single sentence or sequence of words.
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Examples: • The professor said on Monday he would give an exam.
• The chicken is ready to eat.
• Visiting relatives can be boring. 17
• A lady with a clipboard stopped me in the street the other day. She said, 'Can you spare a few minutes for cancer research?' I said, 'All right, but we're not going to get much done.' (English comedian Jimmy Carr)
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IDIOMS • An idiom is a phrase, or a combination of words, that has developed a figurative meaning through frequency of use.
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Idiomatic language: flogging dead crocodiles and keeping your feet under water • Here, you will look at some set structures of language having specific meanings that don’t necessarily relate to the individual words within the structure.
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Costs an arm and a leg!
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blessing in disguise • Definition: Something good and beneficial that did not initially seem that way. • Example: “It was raining so hard that our cab was late, and we were late to our reservation at the restaurant. Turns out everyone who ate there that night got food poisoning. I guess the bad weather was a blessing in disguise!” 25
chip on your shoulder • Definition: When someone is upset about something that happened a while ago. • Example: “He has a chip on his shoulder from years of being bullied as a kid.”
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slap on the wrist • Definition: A mild punishment, such as a scolding. • Example: “The cop pulled me over for speeding, but it was my first time so she just gave me a slap on the wrist.”
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No syntactic transformation • Kick the bucket. – He was kicking the bucket. – The bucket was kicked. – He regularly kicks the bucket. – He kicked the bucket twice. – They kicked the bucket together. – He kicked the bucked slowly • Vs. He died slowly. 28