Structuralism is a very general movement general movement or attitude in twentiethcentury thought which has influenced many academic disciplines It has been especially influential in the social sciences and in linguistics semiotics and literary criticism ID: 1018909
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1. Structural Semantics
2. Structuralism is a very general movement , general movement, or attitude, in twentieth-century thought, which has influenced many academic disciplines. It has been especially influential in the social sciences and in linguistics, semiotics and literary criticism -According to the positivism Structural Semantics is the study of relationships between the meanings of terms within a sentence , and how meaning can be composed from smaller elements.Structural Semantics
3. The brief account of structural semantics that is given by Lyons is restricted to what might be described, more fully, as structuralist linguistic semantics: i.e., to those approaches to linguistic semantics ,that are based on the principles of structuralism.The definition that Lyons has given of structural semantics, though deliberately restricted to linguistic semantics, is nevertheless broader than the definition that many would give it, for the following reasons:1-for historical reasons the label 'structural semantics' is usually limited to lexical semantics.This limitation is, paradoxical. One of the most basic and most general principles of structural linguistics is that languages are integrated systems, one can`t sensibly discuss the structure of a language vocabulary without explicitly or implicitly taking account of its grammatical structure
4. Structural semantics & lexical semanticsThe term structural semantics was restricted to lexical semantics in the earlier part of the last century , but that does not mean, however, that earlier generations of linguists were not concerned with what we now recognize as non-lexical, and more especially grammatical, semantics. On the contrary, traditional grammar - both syntax and morphology, was very definitely and explicitly based on semantic considerations: But the meaning of grammatical categories and constructions had been dealt with, traditionally, under 'syntax.
5. Structuralism did not have an effect on the study of meaning, either lexical or non-lexical as it did on the study of form (phonology and morphology). Once this effect came to be discernible (from the 1930s), structural semantics should have been seen for what it was: lexical semantics within the framework of structural linguistics.. By the time that the term 'structural semantics' came to be widely used in Europe in the 1950s, the more general term 'structural linguistics' had become closely associated in the United States with the particularly restricted and in many ways highly untypical version of structuralism known as Bloomfieldian or post-Bloomfieldian linguistics.
6. The controversial features of Bloomfieldian structural linguistics :its comparative lack of interest in semantics.-its rejection of the distinction between the language-system and either the use of the system (behaviour) or the products of the use of the system (utterances).The therapy of semantics in what one may think of as mainstream American linguistics did not come about until the mid-1960s, in the classical period of Chomskyan generative grammar, sentence-meaning rather than lexical meaning was of particular concern to generative grammarians,
7. there was another tradition in the United States, strongly represented among anthropological linguists in the 1950s, which stemmed from Edward Sapir, and was by no means uninterested in semantics. In other respects also, this tradition was much closer in spirit to European structuralism. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: Every language is a law unto itself; that each language has its own unique structure of grammatical and lexical categories, and creates its own conceptual reality by imposing this particular categorial structure upon the world of sensation and experience
8. approachs to lexical semanticscomponential analysis The analysis of a set of related linguistic items, especially word meanings, into combinations of features in terms of which each item may be compared with every other. -Lyons (1994)defines componential analysis as the analysis of the sense of a lexeme into its component parts ,the alternative term for componential analysis is lexical decomposition
9. manboymalewomangirlfemalewomanmanadult
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11. "man" = "human” x "male” X "adult" "woman" = "human”X "female”x "adult" boy= "human”x "male” x "non-adult" "girl" = "human” x "female” x "non-adult". The words 'boy, 'girl', 'man' and 'woman' all denote human beings. We can therefore extract from the sense of each of them the common factor "human":, we can extract from "boy** and "man" the common factor "male", and from "girl" and "woman", the common factor "female. As for "man" and "woman", they can be said to have as one of their factors the sense-component "adult", in contrast with "boy" and "girl", which lack "adult"
12. Lyons has deliberately used the multiplication-sign to emphasize the fact that these are intended to be taken as mathematically precise equation Actually, sense-components are not generally represented by linguists in the way that Lyons has introduced them. Instead of saying that "man** is the product of "human", “male”and "adult", it is more usual to identify its factors as human, male and adult. This is not simply a matter of typographical preference.
13. Now to develop the formalization a little further -First we can abstract the negative component from” non –adult”and replace it with the negation-operator, which help to distinguish the negative & positive value of the two valued variable :Now we come to an important question : which feature is more basic than the other ?Concerning English language , MALE is more basic than FEMALE, but still there is exceptions , words like nurse, secretary, are feminist terms which cant be applicable to male. (-/+ adult)Boy = +male, +human,-adult
14. Lyons as we see earlier used multiplication-sign to symbolize the operation by means of which components are combined , but he replaces them by propositional connective of conjunction &:
15. Set – theory We can assume that the compositional nature of lexical meaning could be expressed in terms of sets of & their complements and of the intersection of sets: Boy = HUMAN & MALE & -ADULTSuch analysis tells us that any individual element that falls within the extension of of the word boy is contained in the intersection of three sets ,H, M, A.Reasons behind introducing the elementary notion of set theories:1-they are implicit in more informal presentations of componential analysis.2- they are well understood and have been precisely formulated in modern mathematical logic. They play an important role in the most influential systems of formal semantics
16. `3- they enable us to give a very precise interpretation to the term “product” when we say that the sense of a lexeme is the product of its components, or factors. The shaded portion represents the intersection of H. M.A
17. Lyons replaces the term product with the more technical term compositional function ,which is widely used in formal semantics. To say that the sense of a lexeme is a compositional function of its sense-components is to imply that its value is determined by:1- the value of the components 2- the definition of the operations by means of which they are combined .The property that a language may have and may lack , namely the property that the meaning of any complex expression is determined by the meanings of its parts and the way they put together.compositionality
18. The lexemes used so far to illustrate the principles of componential analysis can all be seen as property-denoting words. They are comparable with what logicians call one-place predicates: expressions which have one place to be filled, as it were, in order for them to be used in a well-formed proposition. "John is a boy”nouns such as 'father/ 'mother/ etc. are two-place relational predicates: they denote the relations that hold between the two entities referred to by the expressions that fill the two places . *"father" = parent & male is inadequate in that it does not make explicit the fact that fatherhood is a two-place (or two-term) relation or represent its directionality."father = (xy) PARENT & (x) MALE, which expresses the fact that parenthoodis a relation with two places filled (x,y) and that x is the parent of y and x is maleJohnboyfather(x) MALExy PARENT
19. THE EMPIRICAL BASIS FOR COMPONENTIALAN A LY SIS The theoretical motivation for componential analysis is clear enough. It provides linguists with a systematic and economical means of representing the sense-relations that hold among lexemes in particular languages. much of this theoretical motivation is undermined when one looks more carefully at particular analyses. 1-There is no reason to believe that what is basic in the sense of being maximally general is also basic in the day-to-day thinking of most users of a language
20. . The English expressions 'male child* and 'female child* are not descriptively synonymous with 'boy* and 'girl*.the analysis of the sense of'boy' and 'girl' in relation to that of'man' and 'woman‘-First of all, neither the proposition "That boy is now an adult" nor "That girl is now an adult" (unlike "That child is now an adult") appear to be in any way anomalous-Second, there is the fact that, in most contexts, 'girl* and 'woman' are not used as contradictories, whereas 'boy' and 'man*, though they may not be contradictories in the strict sense, are certainly more sharply opposed to one another seman¬tically than 'girl* and 'woman* are.-Finally, none of the more obvious and relatively objective biological or cultural criteria of adulthood - sexual maturity, legal majority, economic and social independence, etc. - is relevant, except in certain con¬texts, to the use, descriptively, of'man* rather than 'boy* or of 'woman* rather than [girl*.
21. , It can be argued that, although HUMAN is an essential component of "man and "woman/ it is not an essential component of "boy", and possibly not of "girl . The male offspring of the gods (e.g., Cupid) are regularly described as boys (and their female off spring, in the appropriate circumstances, as maidens); but they do not grow up to be men, and they are not said to be human.Once again, it is unreasonable to say that, in cases like this, 'boy* or 'girl* is being used non-Iiterally. We must be careful not to import our own metaphysical prejudices into the analysis of the vocabularies of natural languages. And we must not make the distinction between literal and non-literal meaning dependent upon them.
22. In logic, an entailment is the relationship between propositions whereby one proposition will be true if all the others are also true. Entailment plays an important role in all theories of meaning, and a more central role in some than in others1-"Achilles killed Hector" (p)2-"Hector died" (q)entailment is a relation that holds between p and q -where p and q are variables standing for propositions - such that, p entails q.Entailment has been defined as a relation between propositions. . Some authors talk of entailments as holding between sentences. Others, define entailment as a relation between statements. ENTAILMENT AND POSSIBLE WORLDS
23. p^qthe double-shafted arrow. Thus will mean "p entails q". The logical relation thus symbolized can be defined,. Propositions may be either necessarily or contingently true (or false). A necessarily true (or false) proposition is one that is true (or false) in all possible circumstances:"Snow is white""Rabbits are human"might be necessarily true and necessarily falseA contingently true (or false) proposition, on the other hand, is one whose truth-value might have been, or might be, different in other circumstances (in other possible worlds)."Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo"
24. two kinds of necessary truths recognized by philosophers: analytic and logicalThe notion of analytic truth ,derives from the work of the great eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). According to Kant, a proposition is analytically true if the meaning of the subject is contained in that of the predicate and can be revealed by analysis."All girls are female”. A logically true proposition is one whose truth-value is determined solely by the logical form of the proposition: e.g.,"Every person who is female is female."All human beings are mortal".
25. -RELATIONS AND MEANING-POSTULATESSense-relations are of two kinds: substitutional and Combinatorial Substitutional relations are those which hold between intersubstitutable members of the same grammatical category;'bachelor‘= 'spinstercombinatorial relations hold typically, though not necessarily, between expressions of different grammatical categories (e.g., between nouns and adjectives, between verbs and adverbs, etc.) 'unmarried‘, women
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27. . It is important to note that certain lexemes are so highly restricted with respect to collocational acceptability that it is impossible to predict their combinatorial relations on the basis of an independent characterization of their sense. Classic examples from English are the adjectives 'rancid' and 'addled'. not addled butter* 'rancid butter', 'addled egg‘ not rancid egg* metaphorically, 'addled brain.the sense of any lexeme, whether it is highly restricted with respect to collocational acceptability or not, includes both its combinatorial and substitutional relations.
28. meaning-postulates & componential analysisthe use of meaning-postulates has been seen by linguists as an alternative to componential analysis. the advantage of meaning-postulates over classical or standard versions of componential analysis is that: 1-they do not presuppose the exhaustive decomposition of the sense of a lexeme into an integral number of universal sense-components3-They can be defined for lexemes as such, without making any assumptions about atomic concepts or universality,.2- and they can be used to give a deliberately incomplete account of the sense of a lexeme.
29. the validity of any particular meaning-postulate, 'dog 'animal', will depend upon whether the alleged entailment is in fact analytic. In this connexion, it is worth noting thepossibility of ordering the meaning-postulates associated with a particular lexeme hierarchically in terms of their degree of analy-ticity. For example, 'bachelor = unmarried bachelor = adult bachelor = man
30. Some notes 1- the synonymy may be defined as symmetrical relationship:Big = large2- Hyponymy cant be symmetrical ,it is an asymmetric relation: Animal dog * the word animals doesn’t indicate while : dog animals Complimentarity)) 3- incompatibility is the relation between two incompatible terms ~ f (e.g what is red cant be partially blue) f ~ g and g4- the difference between complementarity & antonym is a matter of gradability , some antonyms can be graded: good- better than - Bad – worse than
31. Two – place converses & three –place conversesSome expressions like more good or more bad are two place converses ,they are like active and passive verb-expressions (kill—be killed) John killed Sam __ Sam was killed by John As well as some pairs of lexemes : wife –husbandMary is John`s wife------John is Mary`s husband.There are some verbs like “buy “, “sell” exemplify the class of three – place (lexical ) converses :Buy x, y, z = sell z, y, xJohn bought a car from Peter = Peter sold a car to john
32. Thank you