Adrienne Lehrer

Markedness and antonymy

Standard treatments of antonymy regularly state that of a pair of antonyms, one member is marked while the other one is unmarked. Certain semantic and syntactic properties are predicated of the unmarked (or in some cases of the marked) member of the pair. A few examples are given, usually 20 or so, which bear out the predictions.

Remembering and Representing Prose: Quoted Speech as a Data Source.

Experiments involving memory for prose have shown that subjects remember meaning better than form and that memory for prose is better in natural environments than in the laboratory. In even the most favorable circumstances, however, verbatim recall is faulty. Words that are not tightly integrated into the clause are remembered less well than those that are not, e.g., hedges and intensifiers, conjunctions, and modifiers. The data have implications for a language of thought.

English classifier constructions

Abstract Although not a classifier language, English has an open class of words that are functionally similar to classifiers: a head of lettuce, a herd of cattle, a box of candy . For some words the lexical and collocational properties must be directly represented in the lexicon. Pride would be listed as the collective classifier for lion . Classifiers are not without meaning, however, as is evident in extended senses of these words. Compare a herd of linguists with a flock of linguists . In many cases the classifier meaning follows from the normal meaning and no special information need be included in the lexicon. Novel uses of words in classifier constructions ( a board of statues ) require pragmatic rules of interpretation which depend on the prior existence of conventional classifiers. The appendix, on the syntax of classifiers in English, shows that all the syntactic tests which purport to distinguish among measure phrases, partitives, pseudo-partitives, and complement PPs ultimately fail.

Understanding classroom lectures

After hearing three lectures as part of a regular university course, students were asked to summarize the lectures. The lectures were graded for accuracy and completeness. Each one was taped, transcribed, and coded, using a coding system based on work by van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) and Meyers (1975a, 1975b). The hypotheses to be tested were: (1) The percentage, but not the number of propositions would correlate positively with the accuracy scores in the summaries. (2) Completeness scores would correlate positively with the total number of propositions, but the number and percentage of propositions coded as macropropositions would correlate even more highly. (3) Signaled propositions would be better remembered than nonsignaled ones. Hypothesis 1 was confirmed in the summaries of all three lectures; Hypotheses 2 and 3 were confirmed only in two of the lectures. Analyses of the errors, lexical substitutions, discrepancies in the grades assigned by the two coders, and differences in the students’ scores for t...

Between Quotation Marks.

,Accuracy has always been a concern of journalists, including accuracy in quoting sources. However, most of the studies of quotation accuracy rely on the memory of the sources or of the reporters. There has been little research where the quotations could be checked with a tape or video of what the sources actually said. In this paper I will address (1) The accuracy of quotations, (2) sources’ evaluations of articles quoting and paraphrasing them, and (3) suggestions for improving accuracy. It is a journalism dogma that what appears between quotation marks must repeat exactly what the speaker said. The possible exceptions involve profanity or grammatical errors. The following is typical of what journalism texts advocate:

The language of taste

Abstract This is a jointly written paper. It has two parts: an empirical part and a theoretical one. Part one, the empirical part, is written by Adrienne Lehrer and describes the language of taste, illustrated by the vocabulary for wine language. The language of the taste of wine often has both a descriptive and evaluate element. Using wine talk as an example, one wine may be described as fruity, acidic, and light, and another as sour, unbalanced, and thin. The second uses highly evaluative terms not found in the first. We analyze the structure of the semantic field of wine descriptors, both literal and metaphoric. A heavy wine uses a deal metaphor, but recent wine writers have expanded the vocabulary by terms such as brawny and muscular. The authority of experts, the advantages and pitfalls thereof, in the description of wine is considered as an instance of delegation of semantic authority. Part two, written by Keith Lehrer, deals with the theoretical implications for a theory of meaning. The theory of word meaning we developed earlier consists of two parts: reference and sense, where reference is how the word is applied to the world and sense to the relationships between words. The theory is stochastic and is based on the respect that speakers assign to the usage of each other. Although reference and sense are closely related in language use, neither can be reduced to the other because how words are applied to objects might conflict with how words are related to each other in the usage with a speech community.

The Empirical Investigation of Synonymy and the Implication for Science

Philosophers, linguists, and psychologists have long been interested in synonymous expressions, often for rather different reasons. The philosopher’s interest in synonymy is related to its interest in logical truth; if two expressions are synonymous, then a sentence in which one expression is exchanged for a synonymous expression will retain the same truth value. Traditional philosophical problems like analyticity, contradiction, etc. are tied up with this problem. Linguists, especially lexicologists and lexicographers, have been interested in synonymy. The task of the lexicologist is to show what the relationship is between expressions in a language, and synonymy is one of these relationships. Psychologists have been interested in similarity of meaning rather than synonymy per se in order to determine how people learn, store, and use information, including information about speakers’ knowledge of their language. Notions like generalization and concept formation often refer to perceived similarity, and similarity of meaning is thought to reflect perceived similarity of stimuli.