SoSe21: Semantics 1

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General information

Please register at the olat course before the first meeting to get the information on the virtual meeting room!

Course description

Semantics is the study of the (literal) meaning of words and sentences. The meaning of a sentence is usually predictable from the words in the sentence and its syntactic structure. Yet, this relationship between form and meaning is not a simple one-to-one mapping. Instead, it is rich in ambiguities, pleonastic marking and elements without any identifiable meaning contribution. We will work on an account that is founded on classical tools of semantic research but still directly addresses these empirical challenges. After the class, the participants will be able to identify - and partly analyze - interesting semantic phenomena in naturally occurring texts. They will have acquired a basic working knowledge in formal logic, which they will be able to apply in the description of meaning

Time and place

  • Tuesday 08:15-9.45
  • Starting: 3.11.2020
  • online via zoom

Olat course

Direct link: https://olat-ce.server.uni-frankfurt.de/olat/auth/RepositoryEntry/8836120582
Password: Sailer-WiSe2021

Modules

  • Lehramt Englisch (L2/5, L3): FW 2A, FW 2B
  • BA English Studies: 3.4(1)
  • BA Empirische Sprachwissenschaft: K 6.1

Contact

Manfred Sailer
e-mail: sailer@em.uni-frankfurt.de
office: IG 3.214
office hours: contact via e-mail!
www: http://user.uni-frankfurt.de/~sailer/index.htm

Course requirements

L1

you cannot get any credits in this course

L2/L5

  • Modules: FW 2A.1, FW 2B.1
  • 3 CP (=75h) for Teilnahme- and Leistungsnachweis (TN, LN)
  • TN: active participation
  • LN: pass take home exam
  • Modulprüfung (optional): (not ideal)
  • + 2CP (50h)
  • short term paper (9-11 pages), Deadline: 9.8.2021

L3

  • Modules: FW 2A.1, FW 2B.1
  • 3 CP (=75h) for Teilnahme- and Leistungsnachweis (TN, LN)
  • TN: active participation
  • LN: pass take home exam
  • Modulprüfung (optional): (not ideal)
  • + 4CP (100h)
  • long term paper (19-21 pages), Deadline: ???

WiPäd

  • Modules: FW 2A.1, FW 2B.1
  • 3 CP (=75h) for Teilnahme- and Leistungsnachweis (TN, LN)
  • TN: active participation
  • LN: pass take home exam
  • Modulprüfung (optional): (not ideal)
  • + 2CP (50h)
  • short term paper (9-11 pages), Deadline: 9.8.2021

BA English Studies

  • Module: BAES 3.4 (1) Vertiefungsmodul Sprachwissenschaft 1
  • 4 CP = 100 hours
  • Teilnahmenachweis: active participation and additional task
  • Leistungsnachweis: pass take home exam
  • Modulprüfung: not possible!

BA Empirische Sprachwissenschaften

Module K 6.1

  • Module K6.1
  • 2.5 CP = 62.5 hours
  • Teilnahmenachweis: active participation
  • Modulprüfung: graded take home exam

Module En 4.1

  • Module: En 4.1 Vertiefungsmodul Sprachwissenschaft 1
  • 4 CP = 100 hours
  • Teilnahmenachweis: active participation and additional task
  • Leistungsnachweis: pass take home exam
  • Modulprüfung: not possible!

Erasmus

Contact me directly!

Example course requirements: 6 CP, graded

  • active participation
  • critical summary of a chapter from a semantics textbook
  • graded take home exam (Klausur) => will determine the grade!

Others?

Contact me to talk about your requierments.

Meeting 2

Our literary scenario

Literary scenario for this course: XXXXX

Why it is too difficult to go directly from language to the world

The following properties of natural language make it useful to use the intermediate step of a logical language:

  1. The same expression can have different meanings (ambiguity).
  2. Different expressions can have the same meaning (synonyms, paraphrases)

Find examples for the above-mentioned properties (ambiguity, synonymy, paraphrases).

Check your answers

1. one form, two meaingns: Ambiguity: (see earlier in this meeting and the slides of last week's meeting)

1.a Ambiguous words: date (fruit or point in time); bank (financial institute or bank of a river)

1.b. Ambiguous sentences: Sycorax and Prospero were stranded on the island with their children.

2. two forms, one meaning:

2.a Synonymous words: couch - sofa; instant - moment

2.b Paraphrases:

  • active-passive pairs: Prospero set Ariel free. - Ariel was set free by Prospero.
  • cleft sentences: Prospero set Ariel free. - It was Prospero who set Ariel free.
  • different ways to express a possessor: Sycorax was the first inhabitant of the island. and Sycorax was the island's first inhabitant.

Towards a formal model

First steps

The following material is an adapted form of material created by student participants of the project e-Learning Resources for Semantics (e-LRS). Involved participants: Lisa, Marthe, Elisabeth, Isabelle.

You can think of building a formal model like being the producer of a film who has to collect everything that should be included in the film.

Here is a very simple story from which we can derive an example model.

Mark those elements that we need in a model.

relations
individuals
nouns
properties
relatives


What is the status of the following entities in the video on Little Red Riding Hood?

individualpropertyrelation
Red Riding Hood
lives in the forest
Grandmother
is afternoon snack for
has a red hood
has a big mouth
is grandmother of


The universe and name symbols

Task: Assume three individuals from our Harry Potter-scenario.

Formally we collect the individuals of our model in a so-called universe (U). For the fairy-tale story, we can define the universe as follows:

U = {Redridinghood, Grandmother, Wolf}

Do a similar definition for your own scenario.

We can introduce name symbols for some of our individuals. For example: redridinghood, grandmother, wolf.

We link the name symbols to the individuals in our modal. To do this, we introduce the interpretation function. We will written the interpretation function as as I.
This function can be defined in the following way:

I(grandmother) = Grandmother
I(redridinghood) = Red Riding Hood
I(wolf) = Wolf


Properties and predicate symbols

A property is a specification that either holds of an individual or not. In the little story, having a big mouth is a property of the Wolf, but of noone else in the story. Being female holds of both Little Red Riding Hood and the Grandmother.

We can think of a property as the set of individuals that have this property. Under this view, the property of being female would be the set {Redridinghood, Grandmother}.

Alternatively it is convenient to think of properties as 1-place relations. Under this view, the property of being female would be a set of lists of length 1. This is what the property of being female then looks like: { <Redridinghood>, <Grandmother> }

Task: Using your Game of Thrones universe, define two properties in the format of 1-place relations.

Just like before, we want to have symbols that we can use in the logical language. For our example, let's take the predicate symbols female_1 and has-big-mouth_1. There interpretation is defined as follows:

I(female_1) = { < x > | x is female } = { <Redridinghood>, <Grandmother> }.

Task: For each of your properties, invent an appropriate predicate symbol. Define its interpretation.


Meeting 1

Course requirement

Challenging phenomena at the syntax-semantics interface