NMTS Meeting 14

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Practice

Text passage

The following passage is taken from: Irving Bacheller: A Man for the Ages. 1919, Chapter 1.
The text of the book is available via Project Gutenberg at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17237/17237-h/17237-h.htm

Sarah and Samson had been raised on adjoining farms just out of the village. He had had little schooling, but his mind was active and well inclined. Sarah had prosperous relatives in Boston and had had the advantage of a year's schooling in that city. She was a comely girl of a taste and refinement unusual in the place and time of her birth. Many well favored youths had sought her hand, but, better than others, she liked the big, masterful, good-natured, humorous Samson, crude as he was. Naturally in her hands his timber had undergone some planing and smoothing and his thought had been gently led into new and pleasant ways. Sarah's Uncle Rogers in Boston had kept them supplied with some of the best books and magazines of the time. These they had read aloud with keen enjoyment. Moreover, they remembered what they read and cherished and thought about it.

Let us take a look at them as they slowly leave the village of their birth. The wagon is covered with tent cloth drawn over hickory arches. They are sitting on a seat overlooking the oxen in the wagon front. Tears are streaming down the face of the woman. The man's head is bent. His elbows are resting on his knees; the hickory handle of his ox whip lies across his lap, the lash at his feet. He seems to be looking down at his boots, into the tops of which his trousers have been folded. He is a rugged, blond, bearded man with kindly blue eyes and a rather prominent nose. There is a striking expression of power in the head and shoulders of Samson Traylor. The breadth of his back, the size of his wrists and hands, the color of his face betoken a man of great strength. This thoughtful, sorrowful attitude is the only evidence of emotion which he betrays. In a few minutes he begins to whistle a lively tune.

The boy Josiah—familiarly called Joe—sits beside his mother. He is a slender, sweet-faced lad. He is looking up wistfully at his mother. The little girl Betsey sits between him and her father. That evening they stopped at the house of an old friend some miles up the dusty road to the north. "Here we are—goin' west," Samson shouted to the man at the door-step.

He alighted and helped his family out of the wagon. "You go right in—I'll take care o' the oxen," said the man.

Samson started for the house with the girl under one arm and the boy under the other. A pleasant-faced woman greeted them with a hearty welcome at the door.

"You poor man! Come right in," she said.

"Poor! I'm the richest man in the world," said he. "Look at the gold on that girl's head—curly, fine gold, too—the best there is. She's Betsey—my little toy woman—half past seven years old—blue eyes—helps her mother get tired every day. Here's my toy man Josiah—yes, brown hair and brown eyes like Sarah—heart o' gold—helps his mother, too—six times one year old."

"What pretty faces!" said the woman as she stooped and kissed them.

"Yes, ma'am. Got 'em from the fairies," Samson went on. "They have all kinds o' heads for little folks, an' I guess they color 'em up with the blood o' roses an' the gold o' buttercups an' the blue o' violets. Here's this wife o' mine. She's richer'n I am. She owns all of us. We're her slaves."

"Looks as young as she did the day she was married—nine years ago," said the woman.

"Exactly!" Samson exclaimed. "Straight as an arrow and proud! I don't blame her. She's got enough to make her proud I say. I fall in love again every time I look into her big, brown eyes."

The talk and laughter brought the dog into the house.

"There's Sambo, our camp follower," said Samson. "He likes us, one and all, but he often feels sorry for us because we can not feel the joy that lies in buried bones and the smell of a liberty pole or a gate post."

Exercises

Basic Notions

Exercise 1: Ambiguity

1. Identify two ambiguous sentences in the text passage.
2. Provide unambiguous paraphrases for the readings. Which reading is intended/more plausible in the context?
3. Give a linguistic characterization of what causes the ambiguity.
4. What type of ambiguity is it?

Exercise 2: Basic semantic relations

1. Identify two ambiguous words in the passage.
2. Identify a pair of synonyms and a pair of antonyms in the text.
3. The word poor is used in two different meanings in the text. Explain them and determine the meaning relation between these two readings.

Exercise 3: Presuppositions

Look at the dialogue passages from the text.

1. Identify three presuppositions from these dialogues.
2. Prove that they are presuppositions rather than entailments or implicatures.
3. Classify the presuppositions that you found in 1.

Exercise 4: Implicature

1. In the description of his children, Samson violates some conversational maxims. Illustrate this. Which maxims are violated. What is the rhetoric effect? Can any special implicatures be drawn from this?
2. Find one other implicature in the text. On which maxim is it based? Show that it is an implicature rather than a presupposition or an entailment.

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Formal encoding

The following exercises rely on a particular semantic representation language. We use the following conventions:

Convention:

• We use italic for English words, such as the word traveler.
• We use bold face for semantic predicates, such as the 1-place predicate traveler.
• We use underlined italic for semantic objects (individuals), such as samson (the individual), traveler (the set of travelers)

Exercise 9: Predicate logic

1. Define a model with four characters from the text passage. Define appropriate name constants for your characters.
   Example: if you choose samson as one of your individuals, an appropriate name constant would be samson.
2. Define two properties related to the information from the text. Which of your four indivduals have these properties? Define appropriate property predicates for your properties
   Example: if you choose traveler as one of your properties, the person samson would have this property. The predicate could be traveler. Then, you can write down the formula traveler(samson). Given your model, this formula is true.

Exercise 5: Quantifiers

1. Identify three quantifiers in the text.
2. Define their meaning.
3. Check whether the sentences in which the quantifiers occur are ambiguous.
4. Try to sketch a formal semantic representation of one of these.

Exercise 8: Sorts and types

Use the material from the text. Identify the following persons and objects:

1. types: predicates of the following types:
   a. <e,<e,t>>
   b. <e,t>
   Example: The word whistle as in In a few minutes he begins to whistle a lively tune. from the text can be translated as the predicate whistle. This predicate is of type <e,<e,t>>.
2. sorts:
   a. an event
   b. an atomic object
   c. a group object
   Example: In the sentence He had little schooling., the NP little schooling refers to a mass. The determiner little can only be used with mass nouns, not with singular count nouns (*He has little book.).

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