NYELVÉSZ

Ayers: Locke c. könyvében aláltam egy érvet, ami alátámasztja, amit már korábban is mondtam, hogy a szemantikai intuíciók nagyon különböznek az egyéb nyelvi intuícióktól. Valójában a szerző szerint nem is a nyelvhez, hanem az általános intelligenciához tartoznak. Engem ez meggyőzött, de kíváncsi vagyok, mit gondoltok róla.

For example, we can make a request or give permission by way of making a statement, say by uttering “It' s getting cold in here” or “I don't mind,” and we can make a statement or give an order by way of asking a question, such as “Is the Pope Catholic?” or “Can you open the door?” When an illocutionary act is performed indirectly, it is by way of performing another one directly. With non-literality, we mean not what our words mean but something else instead. What one is likely to mean in uttering, “My mind got derailed” or “You can stick that in your ear” is not predictable just from linguistic meaning. Sometimes utterances are both non-literal and indirect. One might utter, “I love the sound of your voice” to tell someone non-literally (ironically) that she can't stand the sound of his voice and thereby indirectly to ask him to stop singing.

Non-literality and indirection are two well-known ways in which the semantic content of a sentence can fail to determine the full force and content of the illocutionary act being performed in using the sentence. They rely on the same sorts of processes that Grice discovered in connection with conversational implicatures. Some of his examples illustrate non-literality, e.g. “He was a little intoxicated,” but most are indirect statements, e.g. “There is a garage around the corner,” used to tell someone where to get gas, and “Mr. X's command of English is excellent, and his attendance has been regular,” used to give a weak recommendation. These are all examples in which what is meant is not determined by what is said.

Én már kezdek beleszédülni. Majd egy ponton tarthatnátok valami összefoglalót, h végülis min vitatkoztok, mert a dolog már iszonyatosan szálasodik és időnként hihetetlen sebességgel pörög.

Na, várjunk egy picit... mi az, hogy "poliszém"? Mi bizonyítja egy szóról, hogy poliszém lenne?

Na, várjunk egy picit... mi az, hogy "poliszém"? Mi bizonyítja egy szóról, hogy poliszém lenne?

Ajjaj, még kéttagú nyelvészbizottságot se tudnál szerintem felállítani úgy, hogy ebben egyetértés legyen!

„Chomsky’s empirical argument has, for the most part, avoided the ’semantic’ component of the grammar in favour of the other components, the ’phonological’ and the ’syntactic’. It starts from such deviant sentences as ’What boy did he believe the claim that John made about?’, an example which Chomsky locates in the class that are ’quite impossible, although it would be clear what they meant, were they grammatically permissible.’ Here most would have an immediate ’intuition’ in something close to the modern conversational, rather than the traditional philosophical sense: as it were, a dependable sense of wrongness, without understanding why.
How we know the sentence is wrong is at first obscure, a thing to be made plain by a grammatical explanation. If the explanation is complex, involving underlying principles common to all languages, then there appears to be at least an opening for the hypothesis of innate syntactic rules. Yet such a hypothesis has nothing to do with the structure of human intelligence or rationality. That is because rules for pronominalization, the reference of relative clauses, and so forth, while they might seem in some sense natural, can hardly be rational or ’evident’. We cannot see why one such rule must hold rather than another...

(arról, hogy az innátizmust miért nem lehet kiterjeszteni a szemantikára):
...such an extension may well be impossible in principle. For a semantically deviant sentence, e. g. ’If John is taller than Mary, then Mary is taller than John’, cannot supply the same material for Chomsky’s argument as the merely syntactically deviant sentence just because our sense of wrongness is quite different in the two cases. If we talk of ’intutition’ in the semantic context the word is used more or less as Locke used it, for the intuition of the self-evident... it is evident that what the sentence would assert is impossible (in other words, we immediately ’see why’ the sentence cannot be true)...

(itt jön a lényeg):
The judgement of merely syntactic deviance is the exercise of a skill or competence, an ear for the linguistically correct, whereas the judgement of semantic deviance is an exercise of intelligence involving understanding.

(ami ezt alátámasztja):
A fairly strong distinction between grammar and logic, between the conceptual and the merely grammatical, is thus not without foundation. The judgement that a sentence is grammatical can be distinguished from the judgement that it ’makes sense’. The deviant sentence ’John is more good at puzzles than Bill is good at puzzles’, while execrable English ’makes sense’, as the Escher-like ’John is better at puzzles than Bill is better at puzzles’ does not...behind the judgement that the first, ungrammatical sentence ’makes sense’, there lies recognition of the simple possibility of comparing levels of excellence, a possibility no more due to grammar than the possibility of any qualitative comparison. If it seems empty or mysterious to talk of such recognition, consider ’John is better at reading by more than Bill is better at writing’, ’John is better at reading by more than Bill is better at reading’, and ’John is more better at reading than Bill’.
Someone hearing these sentences might easily, at first response, think that all are deviant: but only the last of three is in fact deviant, and all can be regarded as ’making sense’. To grasp that the first is not deviant it is necessary to grasp the possibility of comparing the degree to which John excels at one accomplishment with the degree to which Bill excels at another. With the second sentence, we must grasp the possibility of comparing the degree to which John’s ability at reading excels another of his abilities with the corresponding degree in the case of Bill.

(És a konklúzió kicsit másképpen):

Since it is easy to suppose that someone should, through lack or temporary failure of intelligence, be incapable of grasping or slow to grasp these possibilities, it is more than plausible that in interpreting what is said to them children have in their armoury not only linguistic intuitions, however inborn or acquired, but also their general intelligence or capacity for seeing ’what makes sense’.

Poliszém szavakat hoz példának (pl. position 'hely/elhelyezkedés'; 'állás'; 'vélemény'),

Egyébként az, hogy a beszélőknek vannak-e vagy nincsenek konzisztens intuíciói a szó szerinti jelentésről, az véleményem szerint nem az érveken múlik, hanem ténykérdés,

jelen esetben elhiszem Cruse-nak, hogy vannak ilyen (időnként erős) intuíciók - miért is ne hinnék neki, sokat foglalkozott lexikális szemantikával...

Szerintem ez általában a leggyakoribbal fog egybeesni, ami viszont egyáltalán nem szükségszerű, hogy a szószerinti legyen.

OK, én is meg szoktam tanítani, hogy mit hívunk szónak (most nem mesélem el, mer off lenne), de mit szóltak (volna) "a deskriptívek indiánjai" mondjuk a beszédhanghoz?

default meaning, that is, the one which comes first to mind when one is confronted by the word out of context

A distinction is often made between literal and non-literal meanings of (polysemous) words, the assumption being that only one of the readings is literal. While at first sight this distinction seems intuitively clear, on closer examination it is not so straightforward. One thing is clear; a literal meaning must at least be an established one; the criteria for privileging one out of the set of established readings, however, are less clear. Dictionaries often order their entries in terms of chronological order of earliest attestation in the language. However, the earliest recorded meaning of a word does not necessarily strike speakers’ intuitions as the literal meaning. There is no doubt, for instance, that the “die” meaning of expire predates the “cease to be valid” meaning, but (to my surprise) current British undergraduates, when asked to pick out the reading they intuitively feel to be the literal one, are virtually unanimous in selecting the “cease to be valid” reading. Another possible criterion is frequency in a language: one might reasonably expect the literal meaning to be the most frequent. Once again, however, this does not always accord with (strong) native speaker intuitions. For instance, few would dispute that the “have a visual experience” meaning of see is the literal meaning and “understand” an extended meaning, yet evidence from one very large corpus of English usage indicates that the latter is the more frequent. Two possibly more valid criteria are, first, the default meaning, that is, the one which comes first to mind when one is confronted by the word out of context, and, second, the reading from which the others can most plausibly be derived by standard semantic processes. The latter criterion is most reliable when there are more than two readings. Take the case of position, and three readings:

(i) location in space
(ii) job in a large firm, etc.
(iii) opinion

Starting from (i), it is easy to see how (ii) and (iii) may have arisen by means of a process of metaphorical extension; but starting from either (ii) or (iii), there is no obvious way of deriving the other two.

There are a number of strategies for deriving one reading from another. Three will be illustrated here. The first of these is metaphor. Metaphor is essentially the projection of the conceptual structure appropriate to a familiar field onto a different and less familiar field, and depends for its effectiveness on a sufficient resemblance between the two fields for the projection to be intelligible...
The second strategy of meaning extension is metonymy, which is based not on resemblances or analogies between items in different conceptual domains, but associations within a single conceptual domain. Referring to people wearing roses as roses is intelligible, not because of any structural parallels between the concept of a rose and the people designated, but because of the close association between the latter and roses in a particular situation. This usage is unlikely to become established...
A third process which produces new meanings from old ones is a change of inclusiveness, widening or narrowing down the meaning. The meaning “take alcoholic beverage” of drink is derived from the meaning “imbibe liquid” by specialization; meat has become specialized from meaning food of any kind to “animal flesh used as food”...

Nekem valami olyasmi rémlik, hogy ebben már a deskriptívek indiánjai is elég konzekvensek voltak.

Az a probléma, hogy nincs független kritériumunk arra, hogy mi a "szó" és mi a "nem-szó" (most nem fonotaktikailag rosszulformáltakra meg iesmire gondolok, hanem frázisokra stb.). Szerintem ha az emberek valamennyire konzisztensen ítélik meg azt, hogy mi a szó, az a helyesírás miatt van.