Word semantics 1 DAY 26 – Oct 28, 2013

WORD SEMANTICS 1DAY 26 – OCT 28, 2013

Brain & LanguageLING 4110-4890-5110-7960NSCI 4110-4891-6110Harry HowardTulane University

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Course organization• The syllabus, these slides and my recordings are

available at http://www.tulane.edu/~howard/LING4110/.• If you want to learn more about EEG and neurolinguistics,

you are welcome to participate in my lab. This is also a good way to get started on an honor's thesis.

• The grades are posted to Blackboard.

10/28/13 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University

http://www.tulane.edu/~howard/LING4110/

REVIEWI know, the quiz was the review, but let's review again.

10/28/13 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 3

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Linguistic model, Fig. 2.1 p. 37


Discourse model

SyntaxSentence prosody

MorphologyWord prosody

Segmental phonologyperception

Acoustic phonetics Feature extraction

Segmental phonologyproduction

Articulatory phonetics Speech motor control

INPUT

SEMANTICS

Sentence level

Word level

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What causes the priming effect?Table 9.4

Conditions prime ~ probe Priming effect

1. [–sem, +morph] casualty ~ casual no

2. [+sem, +morph] punishment ~ punish yes

3. [–sem, +morph] successful ~ successor no

4. [+sem, +morph] confession ~ confessor no

5. [–sem, +morph] restrain ~ strain no

6. [+sem, +morph] insincere ~ sincere yes

7. [–sem, +morph] depress ~ express no

8. [+sem, +morph] unfasten ~ refasten yes


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A little too early• The previous experiment suggests that prefixes and

suffixes are processed differently.• I want to introduce a model of word semantics first, and then we

will return to this issue.• Ingram has a good summary of a PET and a MEG

experiment on morphological processing.• MEG is more informative, but to understand the results, we need to

wait until we have discussed Broca’s area.


LEXICAL SEMANTICS 1Ingram: III. Lexical semantics, §10.


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Some semantic relations• synonymy

• words share the same meaning: violin ~ fiddle• antonymy

• words have opposite meanings: long ~ short• hypernymy

• one word ‘contains’ the meaning of another in a taxonomy: animal ~ horse• hyponymy

• one word is ‘contained’ in the meaning of another in a taxonomy: horse ~ animal• holonymy

• one word is a whole for the meaning of another: hand ~ finger• meronymy

• one word is a part for the meaning of another: finger ~ hand• metonymy

• a part of a concept stands for the whole concept: Hollywood ~ American movie industry


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PolysemyWrite down all the meanings of “play” that you can think of.

1. Activity for amusement only, especially among the young.2. The conduct, or course of a game.3. An individual's performance in a sport or game.4. An action carried out when it is one's turn to play.5. A literary composition, intended to be represented by actors

impersonating the characters and speaking the dialogue.6. A theatrical performance featuring actors.7. A major move by a business.8. The extent to which a part of a mechanism can move freely. 9. A geological formation that contains an accumulation or

prospect of hydrocarbons or other resources.


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Semantic anomalies

anomaly

1. a club for married bachelors

2. a vase of whiskey3. colorless green ideas4. your heart’s dissent5. freeze structure6. bang my hammer with a

finger

intended expression

1. ?

2. a flask of whiskey

3. ?

4. your heart’s content

5. phrase structure

6. bang my finger with a hammer


Write down every word that you associate with this object



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Semantic networks


Ingram goes into great detail on Quillian’s Teachable Language Comprehender (TLC); I could not find an image, but this illustrates the idea just as well.

NEXT TIMEContinue with word semantics


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Word semantics 1 DAY 26 – Oct 28, 2013