CHAPTER 4: SEMANTICS & PRAGMATICS

Exercise 1: Complete the sentences

1. Semantics is the study of the _____________________ of morphemes, words, phrases, and
sentences.
2. Lexical semantics is concerned with the meanings of ____________, and the meaning
relationships among them
3. The circumstances, under which a sentence would be true or false according to your
knowledge of the world, are called _______________________.
4. Tautologies are sentences that are always ___________ regardless of the circumstances
(also ___________ sentences)
5. Contradictions are sentences that are always ____________ regardless of the
circumstances.
6. Whenever the first sentence is true the second one is also true, in all conceivable
circumstances. This meaning relation is called ________________
7. Two sentences are ______________ if they entail each other.
8. Two sentences are ____________________ if there is no situation in which they are both
true or both false.
9. _________________ ambiguity occurs when phrases (including sentences) have more than
one meaning.
10._________________ ambiguity occurs when one word in a phrase has more than one
meaning.
11.Reference is the relationship between language and the __________________.
12.The real thing that is referred to by a linguistic expression is called ________________.
13._______________ reference means the same expression can refer to different things.
14.________________ reference means the same expression always refers to the same thing.
15.Coreference means when two expressions have the same ______________.
16._________________ are words or expressions that have the same meaning in some or all
contexts.
17.Words that are opposite in meaning are ________________. There are several kinds of
antonyms: ___________________________________________________
18.Homonyms are words that have different meanings but are _________________ the same,
and may or may not be _____________ the same.
19.When a word has multiple meanings that are ______________, it is said to be polysemous
20.(Sets of) words that belong to more general terms are called ________________
21.Pragmatics is concerned with our understanding of language in _____________________
22._________________ context is the discourse that precedes the phrase or sentence to be
interpreted
23._________________ context: virtually everything nonlinguistic in the environment of the
speaker (Who? whom? When? Where?...)

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Exercise 2: Find the expressions that have the same referent with the given ones.
1. Nguyen Ai Quoc:
2. The first black president of the US:
3. The Christ:
4. Hanoi:
5. Mark Zuckerburg:
Exercise 3: For each pair of sentences, indicate which sentence entails the other.
1. a. Black Beauty was a stallion.
b. Black Beauty was male.
2. a. Mary is a widow.
b. Marry’s husband died in WWII.
3. a. John pretended to send Martha a birthday card.
b. John sent Martha a card.
4. a. Jane didn’t have enough money to buy a birthday card for Tom.
b. Jane didn’t sent Tom a card.
5. a. Tina’s mother taught her to swim.
b. Tina can swim.
6. a. My boss manage to give me a raise 7. a. Flipper is walking.
last year. b. Flipper has legs.
b. I got a raise last year.
Exercise: For each question, write some more words that can be hyponyms of the given
word. Follow the order in which each word is the hyponym of the word immediately
before it.
Example: Creature > animal > feline > tiger > white tiger
1. Vehicle >
2. Move >
3. Drink (n) >
4. Weapon >
5. Human >
6. Machine >
7. Emotion >
8. Sports >

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