Seth Cable Semantics and Generative Grammar Fall 2011 Ling610 1 Some Basic Questions on the Basics of Formal Semantics (1) The Principle of Compositionality Please explain what the following statement means: “The meaning of a complex linguistic expression is usually compositional.” What is the evidence for this claim? (2) The Importance of Truth Conditions Please explain (relatively briefly) the intellectual value of a formal system that can derive the truth conditions of every sentence in a given language. (3) Assertion, Presupposition, and Implicature Consider the following conversation: Person A: “Have you seen any movies by Wener Herzog?” Person B: “Well, I’ve seen his movie about Antarctica…” a. What is the assertion made by Person B? b. Are there any presuppositions made in Person B’s response? If so, what are they? c. Are there any implicatures made in Person B’s response? If so, what are they? (4) Metalanguage and Object Language For each of the Truth-Conditional statements below, please state which is the object language and which is the metalanguage: English or German. a. “Mary smokes” is true if and only if Mary smokes. b. “Maria raucht” is true if and only if Mary smokes. c. “Mary smokes” ist wahr wenn und nur wenn Maria raucht. d. “Maria raucht” ist wahr wenn und nur wenn Maria raucht.Seth Cable Semantics and Generative Grammar Fall 2011 Ling610 2 (5) The Computation of Truth-Conditions (and Cross-Linguistic Applicability) The language Nuu-chah-nulth (Wakashan; British Columbia) is a verb-initial language, as illustrated below. a. Maamuk-ʔiš c!akup-ʔi work-PRES man-the The man is working. (Wojdak 2001) Let us assume such sentences have the following structure in Nuu-chah-nulth (I’m ignoring the suffixes “-ʔiš” and “-ʔi” in order to simplify the problem). b. S VP NP V N Maamuk c!akup The object of this assignment is to develop a very basic extensional semantics for Nuu-chah-nulth. This semantics should derive the following truth-conditional statement. c. Targeted T-Conditional Statement “ S ” is T iff the man is working VP NP V N Maamuk c!akup In order to complete this assignment, here is what you need to do: • Provide lexical entries stipulating the extensions of “maamuk” and “c!akup” • Using these lexical entries and the rules discussed in class (FA, NN, TN), provide a step-by-step proof of the T-conditional statement in
View Full Document
Unlocking...