Words and Meaning: From Primitives to

Complex Organization

Dahlia G. Maglasang Reporter

Words and Meaning: Separate but linked Domains

• Words and meaning are related but separate entities

3 Arguments• 1. Translation arguments• 2. Imperfect mapping illustration• 3. The elasticity argument

The study of words

• Morphemes that can stand by themselves as words are called free morphemes e.g. run, walk, keyboard

• those that require attachment to other units are known as bound morpheme(pre-, dis-, in-, un-, -ful, -able, -ment, -ly, -ise)

• Word primitives ( the smallest form in which a word is stored in the mental lexicon is a separate entry (lexeme) in our lexicons.

• Each variant of a word has its own representation (book ,books, bookish).When we hear or read a word we access its lexeme as a whole.

• Another hypothesis is that words are made up of constituent morphemes that these morphemes serve as word primitives.

Factors influencing Word Access and Organization

1. Frequency (Predict or vilify, angry or puddle)2. Imageability and concreteness and abstractness (apple ,wisdom ,umbrella ,evil )3. Semantics (needle-thread, pin; king-queen-Semantic associate)4. Grammatical Class

• Open-class words are the basic content words in the language expresses as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs

• Closed-class words are function words that traditionally provide the architecture for our sentences but no content- words such as the, and, from on so forth…

5. Phonology- (TOT) Tip of the tongue phenomenon.

Models of Lexical Access

• Serial Search model. It claims that when we encounter a word while reading, for example- we look through a lexical list to determine whether the item is a words or not, and then retrieve the necessary information about the word( such as meaning or grammatical class). Serial search model means that the process takes place by scanning one lexical entry at a time, sequentially.

• Parallel Access Models.• Logogen Model Morton (1969,1979 proposed

that words are not accessed by determining their locations in the lexicon but by being activated to a certain threshold.

• Connectionist Model Advocates of this approach in psychology, philosophy, computer science, and other fields, known as connectionist, use the analogy of the brain and neurons to develop models of cognition process.

Nodes are of three types : input nodes which process the auditory or visual stimuli; output nodes, which determine the responses, and hidden nodes, which perform the internal processing between when we hear and see a word and when we respond to it.

• Cohort Model• Design to account only for auditory word

recognition (Marslen-Wilson 1987) proposed that when we hear a word, all of its phonological neighbors get activated as well. . Thus, upon hearing the sentence, Paul got a job at the ca…. candy…cash….candle….cashier…camp, and many others would-be available for selection. This set of words is known as the word initial cohort ( refers to a division of words)

MEANING

• Determining what constitutes meaning and formulating accurate definitions that cover all possible instances of a concept has been the difficult job of philosopher.

• The meaning of a term is referred to as its intension. For example , there are two intension of the concept chair- an object upon which we sit ,and a person who heads a meeting or organization. The set of that to which a word applies is known as extension….

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Philosophical Theories of Meaning

• REFERENCE THEORY. This theory postulates that the meaning of a term is the object to which that term refers in the real world(that is, its referent)

• Ideational theory. According to British philosopher John Locke, words in their primary and immediate signification stand for nothing but the ideas in the mind of him that uses them

Alternative Theories: Meaning is in the Public Domain

• This view is supported by philosopher Quine (1960), who postulated that the meaning of individual words can never be strictly derived. According to Quine, words even sentences have no meaning independently , but are based on their connection to other words and sentences within the language

Conceptual Primitives

Three issues address the study of meaning1. What are the smallest units (or primitives)of meaning?2. Morpheme are considered the primitives of words, as

complex can be composed of several individual morphemes.

3. Whether concepts have clear boundaries or not. (what counts as a cup and not)

• Whether it is sufficient to represent a category as a list of features.(The morpheme dis- and agree can go together, but ot un-and agree

Feature Theory

• Some characteristics that count as features can be designated as either perceptual (gray, large like an elephant), functional (Used to transport people (Vehicles), microstructural (composed of hydrogen and oxygen, molecules, of water)or societal/conventional (supreme ruler, of a king or queen)

• Features can be considered as meaningful units themselves.

Variations of Features Theories

• The classical View. The proponent o the classical view consider features the smallest units of meaning. They also contend that concepts are defined in a rule like fashion, with clear boundaries

• The family Resemblance.a. Characteristicsb. Family resemblancec. Category or concept

Knowledge based Approaches

• Psychological essentialism is the position advocated by Medin & Ortony (1989) that people act as if things have essences or underlying natures that make them the thing that they are.

• Psychological Contextualism refers to the idea that certain either defined by goal or by culture, can provide the bond between features in a concept and concepts in a category.

Models of Semantic Representation

A special problem for the mental lexical: Lexical Ambiguity

• We use language to convey an intended meaning in the mind of the speaker or writer that can be accurately decoded by the listener or reader. Ambiguous words may foil comprehension because of their multiple meanings.

• Single word can have multiple meanings :BANK can mean (1) a place to store money, (2) the side of a river, (3) what a race car driver does when he encounters a steep turn.

Reciprocal and Influential Relationships Of words and meaning

• Reference Principle leads learners to assume that a word denotes or maps onto an object, event, or property.

• The object scope principle leads learner to look for a whole object rather than as a referent.

• The extendability principle posits that children assume that a word refers not to a single object, action, or event, but to a class of objects, actions, and events.

• The categorical scope principle leads learner to extend words to the same kinds of things

• The novel name/nameless category principle biases learners to assume that a novel word refers to an unnamed object in the environment rather than to an object that already has a name.

Thank you ..