A discussion of what you have personally learned, -your weaknesses and your strengths. Also, discuss your plans for improving your learning experience “of some aspects in the chapters”".

GRAMMATICAL MEANING: NOUNS AND NOUN PHRASES

Chapter 13

Lexical meaning:

semantic information carried by major lexical units (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs)

Grammatical meaning:

semantic information in a sentence not carried by major lexical units.

Grammatical meaning can be treated under four major headings

LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL MEANING

The meanings carried by grammatical elements

Meanings linguistic expressions have by virtue of belonging to particular grammatical categories (noun, verb, etc.)

Meanings signaled by sequential order of elements

Meaning carried by grammatical constructions

FOUR MAJOR HEADINGS OF GRAMMATICAL ELEMENTS

One way of characterizing meanings by grammatical units:

Closed-set items

Open-set items

MEANINGS CARRIED BY GRAMMATICAL UNITS

Belong to small substitution sets

Principal function is to articulate the grammatical structure of sentences

Change at a relatively slow rate through time

Single speaker is unlikely to see loss or gain of items in their lifetime.

Inventory of items in a particular closed-set grammatical category is effectively fixed

CHARACTERISTICS OF CLOSED-SET ITEMS

Belong to relatively large substitution sets

Relatively rapid turnover in membership of substitution classes

Single speaker is likely to encounter many losses and gains in a single lifetime

Principal function is to carry the meaning of a sentence

CHARACTERISTICS OF OPEN-SET ITEMS

Both closed- and open-set items carry meaning

Different functions mean that there are differences in the characteristics of the meanings they carry

A closed-set item, as a grammatical element, has to be able to combine without anomaly with a wide range of roots

must have a meaning which is flexible, or broad enough, or sufficiently `attenuated', not to generate clashes too easily

must signal contrasts which recur frequently

CLOSED VS. OPEN-SET ITEMS

Open-set:

no limit to the particularity or richness of the meaning an open-set element

no requirements for recurrent meanings or wide co-occurrence possibilities

typically carry the burden of the semantic content of utterances.

participate in complex paradigmatic and syntagmatic structures

content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) verbs) prototypically have one open-set morpheme (usually called the root morpheme) and may also have one or more closed-set items in the form of affixes

CLOSED SET VS. OPEN-SET ITEMS (C0NTINUED)

Languages differ in the degree to which the order of elements is grammatically significant

Semantic effects changes in the order of elements produce

In English, word order goes to the heart of grammar and signals basic aspects of meaning

In Latin, word order does not signal basic grammatical relations

Change of word order in Latin can have the same sort of effect on information structure

MEANINGS SIGNALIZED BY WORD ORDER

Alternative perspective

Incorporates order information along with other types of information

Grammatical constructions are bearers of meaning independent of the lexical items

MEANINGS CARRIED BY CONSTRUCTIONS

Number:

an inflectional category of nouns or noun phrases

not found in all languages

Semantically all concerned with how many there are of some item

The number system in English has only two terms:

singular

Plural

NUMBER AND COUNTABILITY

Cannot occur in the singular without a determiner

Occur normally in the plural

Quantifiable by a few, many, and numerals, but not by much or little

COUNT NOUNS

Can occur in the singular without a determiner

Are odd in the plural

Are quantifiable by a little, much, but not by a few, many

MASS NOUNS

The vast majority of nouns in English can be found with both count and mass uses

For the majority of nouns, one use is intuitively more basic than the other

Two significant phenomena and their semantic correlates:

basic count nouns used as mass nouns

basic mass nouns used as count nouns

SECONDARY USES OF COUNT AND MASS NOUNS

Basic count nouns used as mass nouns

Basic mass nouns used as count nouns

Semi-mass use of count nouns

Singular nouns with optional plural concord

Plural nouns with optional singular concord

Pluralia tanta

SECONDARY USES

In many languages it is not possible to count things directly

A special grammatical element called a classifier is necessary

usually a separate word or an affix

Encodes some semantic property of the noun being counted

Classifiers

A classification system for nouns

Affects grammatical matters such as agreement and pronominal reference

GENDER

Many different types of gender system can be found in the world's languages

Most widespread are those which correlate to a greater or lesser degree with the sex of the referent

Used to make a distinction between natural gender and grammatical gender.

Appropriate pronoun can be predicted with a high degree of success on the basis of the sex of the referent

GENDER SYSTEMS