Sentence semantics
Classifying meaning at sentence level
• Tense
• Aspect
• Situation type
Situation types
• Static situations– Adjectives– Stative verbs – Can you distinguish these two in Chinese?
• Dynamic situations– Other verbs, mostly
Dynamic verbs
• Durative or punctual?– John lived a long time ago– John died a long time ago
• Telic or atelic?– John baked a cake– John looked hungrily at the cake
• Look at Matrix 5.47– What situation type are the above 4 sentences?
Warning!
• Saeed’s article is vague about what applies to verbs, and what applies to situations
• Vendler and Smith are talking about situations• Be and love are stative verbs• Build and gaze are telic and atelic respectively,
but in– I’m building a house – My son is being naughty
• …progressive aspect makes the situations atelic and dynamic
Tense and aspect
• The tense used in a sentence tells us when the event takes place
- Johnny ate goulash.
- Johnny eats goulash.
- Johnny will eat goulash.
• Aspect gives extra time information
- Johnny has eaten goulash.
- Johnny is eating goulash.
Tense and aspect
• Tense is marked by morphology in English (except cut, put…)– (and then some people say there are zero morphs)
• Aspect is not always I’m looking for a burger I see it now I’m eating it I’m lovin’ it (Oh no I think I’m going to be sick!)• All those are “happening right now”
Tense: a deictic system
• Deixis mean pointing (in Greek)
• This and that are deictic pronouns (or determiners); his and her are not.
• So, question: what does deictic mean in Linguistics?– Think about who is pointing, and in which
direction
Aspect is not deictic
• It refers to an event’s “temporal distribution or contour”– 5.63: thank you, Hockett (remember him?)– So aspect can describe
• Long/short duration• Completeness/ incompleteness• Repeated/ continuous
• Tense is just the overall location in time of the event or activity
Aspect in English and other languages
• Task: How is aspect shown in
- English? - Russian? - Chinese?
(Look at pages 130-133, and write a couple of sentences about each language. Give a couple of examples from each language)
Modality tasks
• Page 135 is pretty straightforward: read it again– What is in between You are crazy and You are not
crazy?– probably, maybe, might be, must be…
• So, an epistemic modal verb– You must be crazy ( I order you to be crazy!)
• A deontic modal verb– You must not eat any more Big Macs
• How about – I can reach down and touch my toes– Can I have a Big Mac please?
Rank them!