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Words are used to represent things and experiences in the real or imagined world.
Different words can be used to describe the same thing or experience.
Definition
A referent is the concrete object or concept that is designated by a word or expression.
A referent is an object, action, state, relationship, or attribute in the referential realm.
Example
Historically, there was only one person called George Washington, the first president
of the United States. He can be referred to in a text in many ways, such as
the president
Mr. Washington
he, or even
my friend.
Even though there are many ways to talk about him, there is only one referent in the
referential realm.
Definition
A proposition is that part of the meaning of a clause or sentence that is constant,
despite changes in such things as the voice or illocutionary force of the clause.
A proposition may be related to other units of its kind through interpropositional
relations, such as temporal relations and logical relations.
Discussion
The meaning of the term proposition is extended by some analysts to include the
meaning content of units within the clause.
Example: The tall, stately building fell is said to express propositions corresponding
to the following:
"The building is tall."
"The building is stately."
"The building fell."
Definition
A presupposition is background belief, relating to an utterance, that
must be mutually known or assumed by the speaker and addressee for the
utterance to be considered appropriate in context
generally will remain a necessary assumption whether the utterance is placed in
the form of an assertion, denial, or question, and
can generally be associated with a specific lexical item or grammatical feature
(presupposition trigger) in the utterance.
Examples (English)
The utterance John regrets that he stopped doing linguistics before he left
Cambridge has the following presuppositions:
There is someone uniquely identifiable to speaker and addressee as
John.
John stopped doing linguistics before he left Cambridge.
John was doing linguistics before he left Cambridge.
John left Cambridge.
John had been at Cambridge.
Definition:
The presence of two or more possible meanings within a single word. Compare to syntactic
ambiguity.
See also:
Ambiguity
Amphiboly
Context
Crash Blossom
Distinctio
Homophones
Homographs
Polysemy
Psycholinguistics
Pun
Examples and Observations:
The Rabbi married my sister.
She is looking for a match.
The fisherman went to the bank.
"[C]ontext is highly relevant to this part of the meaning of utterances. . . . For
example
They passed the port at midnight
is lexically ambiguous. However, it would normally be clear in a given context
which of the two homonyms, 'port' ('harbor') or 'port' ('kind of fortified wine'), is being
used."
--and also which sense of the polysemous verb 'pass' is intended."
(John Lyons, Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995)
"The following example, taken from Johnson-Laird (1983), illustrates two important
characteristics of lexical ambiguity:
The plane banked just before landing, but then the pilot lost control. The strip on the
field runs for only the barest of yards and the plane just twisted out of the turn before
shooting into the ground.
First, that this passage is not particularly difficult to understand in spite of the fact that
all of its content words are ambiguous suggests that ambiguity is unlikely to invoke
special resource-demanding processing mechanisms but rather is handled as a by-
product of normal comprehension. Second, there are a number of ways in which a
word can be ambiguous. The word plane, for example, has several noun meanings,
and it can also be used as a verb. The word twisted could be an adjective and is also
morphologically ambiguous between the past tense and participial forms of the verb
to twist."
(Patrizia Tabossi et al., "Semantic Effects on Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution" in
Attention and Performance XV, ed. by C. Umiltà and M. Moscovitch. MIT Press,
1994)
Definition:
The presence of two or more possible meanings in any passage. Also, a fallacy in which the
same term is used in more than one way. Adjective: ambiguous.
See also:
Lexical Ambiguity
Syntactic Ambiguity
Amphiboly
Crash Blossom
Double Entendre
Equivocation
Garden-Path Sentence
Polysemy
Etymology:
From the Latin, "wandering about"
Examples and Observations:
I can't tell you how much I enjoyed meeting your husband.
We saw her duck.
Roy Rogers: More hay, Trigger?
Trigger: No thanks, Roy, I'm stuffed!
"We call it ambiguous, I think, when we recognize that there could be a puzzle as to
what the author meant, in that alternative views might be taken without sheer
misreading. If a pun is quite obvious it would not be called ambiguous, because there
is no room for puzzling. But if an irony is calculated to deceive a section of its
readers, I think it would ordinarily be called ambiguous."
(William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1947)
"Some sentences are syntactically ambiguous at the global level, in which case the
whole sentence has two or more possible interpretations. For example, 'They are
cooking apples' is ambiguous because it may or may not mean that apples are being
cooked. . . .
"One of the ways in which listeners work out the syntactic or grammatical structure of
spoken sentences is by using prosodic cues in the form of stress, intonation, and so on.
For example, in the ambiguous sentence 'The old men and women sat on the bench,'
the women may or may not be old. If the women are not old, then the spoken duration
of word 'men' will be relatively long and the stressed syllable in 'women' will have a
steep rise in speech contour. Neither of these prosodic features will be present if the
sentence means the women are old."
(M. Eysenck and M. Keane, Cognitive Psychology. Taylor & Francis, 2005)
"Syntactic ambiguity occurs when a sequence of words can be structured in
alternative ways that are consistent with the syntax of the language. For instance, . . .
[this word group] is ambiguous:
(1) a. John told the woman that Bill was dating. . . .
In 1a, "that Bill was dating" could either be a relative clause (as in 'John told the
woman that Bill was dating a lie') or a sentence complement (as in 'John told the
woman that Bill was dating a liar')."
(Patrizia Tabossi et al., "Semantic Effects on Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution" in
Attention and Performance XV, ed. by C. Umiltà. MIT Press, 1994)
Polysemy
where a word as a related number of meanings
i.e.:
mouth
1. pat of a river
2. entrance of a cave
3. part of the body
Mole
1. a small burrowing mammal
2. consequently, there are several different entities called moles (see the Mole
disambiguation page). Although these refer to different things, their names
derive from 1. :e.g. A Mole burrows for information hoping to go undetected.
Bank
1. a financial institution
2. the building where a financial institution offers services
3. a synonym for 'rely upon' (e.g. "I'm your friend, you can bank on me"). It is
different, but related, as it derives from the theme of security initiated by 1
However: a river bank is a homonym to 1 and 2, as they do not share etymologies. It
is a completely different meaning. River bed, though, is polysemous with the beds on
which people sleep.
Book
1. a bound collection of pages
2. a text reproduced and distributed (thus, someone who has read the same text
on a computer has read the same book as someone who had the actual paper
volume)
3. to make an action or event a matter of record (e.g. "Unable to book a hotel
room, a man sneaked into a nearby private residence where police arrested
him and later booked him for unlawful entry.")
Milk
The verb milk (e.g. "he's milking it for all he can get") derives from the process of
obtaining milk.
Wood
1. a piece of a tree
2. a geographical area with many trees
3. an erection
Crane
1. a bird
2. a type of construction equipment
Homonymy