Examples Of Compositional Semantics

We are reminded in class that our brains do amazing things. It is capable of taking in input and then providing an output. It does not matter if it the input or output is in the written or spoken form or if we are reading it or hearing it our brain is able to understand and process all the information extremely fast. We are able to determine if words have meaning or are meaningless. We can understand when a word has two meanings and when a two words have the same meaning. We are also able to tell the difference between words that refer to the real world, meaning or if they relate to the imagination. This is also true about sentences. Our brains can determine when and if a sentence is meaningful or meaningless. Or if a sentence has two meaning

In Compositional semantics the meaning of the sentence and longer utterances are studied. The meaning of the sentence to determine the meaning of the components and the way in which they are arranged into meaningful phrases and sentences. Another part of compositional semantics are anomalies in which the semantic properties of words determine what other words they can be combined with. For example, the sentence Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. This sentence follows all the English rules of semantics, but violates what we understand to be true about semantic features and is, therefore, semantically anomalous. What is anomalous about it? We are taking ideas which are an abstract thing and attributing it with an adjective of green. Interesting to think that an idea can be a color and then be colorless. Idioms are another part of compositionality. Idioms are phrases with meaning that cannot be predicted based on the meaning of the individual words. The semantic rules for combining meaning does not apply to idioms because, when you take a group of words and try to understand them exactly as they are the meaning will not be the same as that intended by the phrase. For instance, “give a piece of my mind” means tell somebody off or bawl them out. A strict meaning of the phrase would mean that you opened up your skill and broke off a piece of your mind and

Sentence meanings are based on several things, including the syntactic structure of the sentence being stated, as well as, the morphemes and words. This linguistic unit that comprises of more than one sentence is known as discourse. The main component of pragmatics is speech acts. We use language to do an astonishing wide range of activities. We use it to convey information, request information, give orders, make requests, make threats, give warnings, make bets, give advice, and many more ideas. We have established in, with a set of standards guiding our language use that protects its integrity by requiring us, to be honest in its use, to have evidence for what we say, and to make what we say relevant. The first Maxim of Quality: Truth says do not say what you believe to be false or for which you lack adequate evidence. Without following this maxim language would be useless to us. The second is Maxim of Quantity: Information saying make your contributions as informative as is required for the current purpose of the exchange, not more information than required. You want to give enough information to be relevant but not so much that it makes for an unnecessarily long and confusing sentence. The third Maxim of Relation: Relevance simply says to be relevant. With this meaning to avoid random topic shifts to keep the conversation flowing in an orderly manner. Finally the last is Maxim of