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Sabtu, 22 Oktober 2016

Review about Discourse and Information Structure

Discourse and Information
Structure



GREGORY WARD AND BETTY J. BIRNER

0 Introduction

In addition to deciding what to say, the speaker must decide how to say it. the central premise of the study of the relationship between syntax and function of discourse is that the use of the speaker of the particular structural options limited by certain aspects of the context of the speech. Working in discourse has found a certain range of discourse functions served by the individual syntax constructions.1 More recently, in Birner and Ward (1998) we examine generalizations that apply throughout the construction, identify ways in which a given functional principles embodied in the various similar but different construction.

1 Theoretical Framework

English, like many other languages, shows a tendency to order “given” information before “new” information in an utterance. Indeed, Prince (1981a: 247) posits a “conspiracy of syntactic constructions” designed to prevent NPs that represent relatively unfamiliar information from occupying subject position (see also Kuno 1971, interalia). Chafe (1976) defines given information as “that knowledge which the speaker assumes to be in the consciousness of the addressee at the time of the utterance,” while new information is defined as “what the speaker assumes he is introducing into the addressee’s consciousness by what he says” (1976: 30). Other notions of given information have relied on such notions as predictability and shared knowledge, or assumed familiarity (see Prince 1981a). In reviewing the literature on givenness in discourse, Prince (1992) finds that three basic approaches may be distinguished, which she terms focus/presupposition, hearer-old/hearer-new, and discourse-old/discoursenew.

1.1  Focus/Presupposition

A focused constituent is realized intonationally with some kind of prosodic prominence, generally unclear accent. Presupposed information is the complement of focus: it represents the information that the speaker assumes is already part of the common ground, i.e. either salient or inferable in context. A presupposition is a proposition that is presupposed in this way.Because utterances are intended to be informative, the presupposition typically does not exhaust the information in the utterance; instead, the proposition being presupposed is “open” – that is, lacking certain information. Such a proposition is represented with a variable in place of one or more constituents. For example, the utterance in (1a) would give rise to the presupposed open proposition (OP) in (1b), in the sense that a person hearing (1a) would immediately thereafter be licenced to treat (1b) as part of the common ground: (1) a. Pat brought those cookies to the BBQ. b. Pat brought X to the BBQ.

Although only a single word, or syllable, of the focus bears nuclear accent, the focusitself can be indefinitely large; consider (2): (2) Pat brought a bag of those yummy cookies from Treasure Island to the BBQ. In a context in which the speaker has been asked What did Pat bring?, the focus in (2) would be a bag of those yummy cookies from Treasure Island. It is also possible for a clause to have more than one focus, as in the exchange in (3): (3) A: Who brought what to the BBQ? B: Pat brought cookies. The presupposition in this case is X brought Y, and Pat and cookies are foci. Notice that Pat need not represent entirely new information in order to count as new in this context. Even if Pat is salient in the discourse, Pat here is new as an instantiation of the variable in the presupposition. In effect, to say that Pat represents new information in this way is to say that the proposition Pat brought cookies is (believed to be) absent from the hearer’s mental store of propositions, despite the presence of the proposition X brought Y. Not all utterances involve presuppositions; for example, (2) may felicitously be uttered in a context in which it is not presupposed that anyone brought anything. In such a context, the entire utterance may be considered the focus (often called “broad focus”).


1.2  “New to the discourse” vs. “new to the hearer”

Noting that a two-way division of information into given and new is inadequate, Prince (1992) offers a pair of cross-cutting dichotomies which classify information as, on the one hand, either “discourse-old” or “discourse-new” and, on the other hand, either “hearer-old” or “hearer-new.” Discourse-old information is that which has been evoked in the prior discourse, while hearer-old information is that which the speaker believes to be present within the hearer’s knowledge store.2 This distinction captures the fact that what is new to the discourse need not be new to the hearer (cf. Firbas 1966; Chafe 1976; Lambrecht 1994); that is, an entity may be familiar to the hearer yet new to the  discourse. Thus, consider a simple discourse-initial utterance such as (4): (4) Last night the moon was so pretty that I called a friend on the phone and told him to go outside and look. Here, the moon represents information that is discourse-new but hearer-old, denoting an entity that has not been evoked in the prior discourse but which can be assumed to be known to the hearer; a friend represents information that is both discourse-new and hearer-new, having not been previously evoked and also being (presumably) unknown to the hearer; and him represents information that is discourse-old and (therefore) hearer-old, having been explicitly evoked in the previous clause (as a friend). The status of what Prince calls “inferable” information (e.g. the phone in (4), since people are typically assumed to have telephones) is left unresolved in Prince(1992) and will be discussed below.

We will call the linguistic or situational material that licences the inference to the anchor the trigger (Hawkins 1978).6 As we have seen, this inference may be based on a poset relation (as in (6a)), but it need not be (as in (7)). The inference may be triggered by one or more items, one of which may be the link itself. Thus, in (6a),
mention of the kitchen alone does not give rise to the poset {elements of a house}, since, if it did, every utterance of an NP would give rise to a cognitive explosion of instantaneously constructed part/whole relations in which the referent participates (Fraurud 1990). Rather, it is not until the speaker utters on the counter that mention of
the kitchen and the counter combine to evoke the poset that relates the two. Notice, finally, that it is entirely possible for the trigger, anchor, and link to all represent the same information, as in (8):(8) On one of September’s last blast furnace days, Emil Peterson parked his car along a quiet street in the tiny Delaware County burg of Eddystone and pulled a yellow plastic bucket from the back seat. In it he had expertly wedged an assortment of brushes and cans of cleanser, a hollyberry room deodorizer, knives, scissors, a couple of no-slip no-crease pants hangers and a box containing a boulder-sized zircon ring. (Philadelphia Inquirer, October 2, 1983) Here, the trigger a yellow plastic bucket evokes a singleton set containing the bucket as its only member. This set is the anchor, which in turn is related (trivially) to the link it via a linking relation of identity.7 Thus, even cases where the machinery of posets Gregory Ward and Betty J. Birner and linking relations may not seem necessary are nonetheless consistent with this account, allowing the development of a unified theory. With these theoretical primitives in hand, we can now proceed to see how they apply to some of the noncanonical constructions of English. Our analysis is based on a combined corpus consisting of several thousand naturally occurring tokens collected over a period of approximately ten years. The data can be described as more or less standard American English and were drawn from a wide range of sources. Whenever possible, the prior and subsequent context was noted for each token. Data were collected from both speech and writing; the written sources include newspapers, magazines, novels, nonfiction books, academic prose, and portions of the Brown Corpus (Kucera and Francis 1967). Spoken data were drawn from personal conversations, films, interviews from Working (Terkel 1974), transcripts of the 1986 Challenger Commission meetings,8 and a variety of television and radio programs.

2        Preposing

As we use the term, a “preposing” is a sentence in which a lexically governed phrasal constitutent appears to the left of its canonical position, typically sentence-initially (Ward 1988).9 Extending the theory of preposing presented in Ward (1988), we claim that felicitous preposing in English requires the referent or denotation of the preposed
constituent to be anaphorically linked to the preceding discourse (see Prince 1981b, 1984; Reinhart 1981; Vallduví 1992). The information conveyed by the preposed constituent can be related to the preceding discourse in a number of ways, including such relations as type/subtype, entity/attribute, part/whole, identity, etc. These relations can all be defined as partial orderings, and in Ward (1988) it is argued that the range of relations that can support preposing are all poset relations:(9) Customer: Can I get a bagel? Waitress: No, sorry. We’re out of bagels. A bran muffin I can give you. (serviceen counter) Here, the link (a bran muffin) and trigger (bagels) stand in a poset relation as alternate
members of the inferred anchor set {breakfast baked goods}. The link could also have been explicitly mentioned in the prior discourse, as in (10):(10)
A: Can I get a bagel?
B: Sorry – all out.
A: How about a bran muffin?
B: A bran muffin I can give you.
Here, although the link a bran muffin is coreferential with the trigger explicitly evoked in A’s second query, the salient linking relation is not identity. Rather, the link is related via a type/subtype relation to the anchoring set {breakfast baked goods}, of which both bagels and bran muffins are members. Some types of preposing also
permit links to anchors with a single member.

In addition, Ward (1988) shows that certain types of preposing constructions require a salient or inferable open proposition in the discourse (see also Prince1981b, 1984). The variable in the OP is instantiated with the focus, which must be a member of a contextually licenced poset. Preposings can be classified into two major types based on their intonation and information structure: “focus preposing” and “topicalization.” The preposed constituent of focus preposing contains the focus of the utterance, and bears nuclear accent; the rest of the clause is typically deaccented.10
Topicalization, on the other hand, involves a preposed constituent other than the focus and bears multiple pitch accents: at least one on the preposed constituent and at least one on the (nonpreposed) focus.11 Nonetheless, both types of preposing require a salient or inferable OP at the time of utterance for felicity. Consider first the focus preposing in (12), where the focus is contained within the preposed constituent: (12) A: Where can I get the reading packet?
B: In Steinberg. [Gives directions] Six dollars it costs. (two students in conversation) The preposed constituent in this example, six dollars, contains the nuclear accent, which identifies it as the focus of the utterance:
(13) OP = It costs X, where X is a member of the poset {prices}.“It costs some amount of money.” Focus = six dollars
Here, six dollars serves as the link to the preceding discourse. Its referent is a member of the poset {prices}, which is part of the inferable OP in (13). The OP can be inferred on the basis of the prior context; from mention of a reading packet, one is licenced to infer that the packet costs some amount of money. While the anchoring
poset {prices} is discourse-old, the preposed constituent itself represents information that has not been explicitly evoked in the prior discourse. In the case of focus preposing, then, since the anchoring poset must be discourse-old yet the link is the focus (and therefore new), it follows that the poset must contain at least one other member in
addition to the link.


3        Postposing

As used here, the term “postposing” denotes any construction in which a lexically governed phrasal constituent appears to the right of its canonical position, typically but not exclusively in sentence-final position, leaving its canonical position either empty or else occupied by an expletive (Birner and Ward 1996). The postposing constructions we will concentrate on are those in which the logical subject is postposed and the expletive there appears in the canonical subject position – i.e. what have
traditionally been known as existential and presentational there-sentences, as in (16a) and (16b), respectively: (16) a. “There’s a warm relationship, a great respect and trust” between [United Air
Lines]’s chairman, Stephen M. Wolf, and Sir Colin Marshall, British Air’s chief executive officer, according to a person familiar with both sides. (Wall Street Journal, August 23, 1989) b. Not far from Avenue de Villiers there lived a foreign doctor, a specialist, I understood, in midwifery and gynecology. He was a coarse and cynical fellow who had called me in consultation a couple of times, not so much to be enlightened by my superior knowledge as to shift some of his responsibility on my shoulders. (Munthe, A. 1929: 143. The Story of San Michele. London: John Murray).

3.1  English existential there-sentences

As noted by Prince (1988, 1992) and Ward and Birner (1995), the postverbal NP of existential there-sentences is constrained to represent entities that the speaker believes are not familiar to the hearer:
(17) What can happen is a hangup such as Rocky Smith ran into, as the independent hauler was traversing Chicago with a load of machinery that just had to get to a factory by morning. “There was this truck in front of me carrying giant steel coils, and potholes all over the place,” he remembers. (Wall Street Journal, August 30,1989).a. I have some news you’re going to find very interesting. #There was on the panel your good friend Jim Alterman. b. President Clinton appeared at the podium accompanied by three senators and the Speaker of the House. #There was behind him the vice president.

The PVNPs in these examples represent entities that are new to the discourse, but presumably familiar to the hearer, and the existential there-sentences are unacceptable. Now consider there-sentences whose PVNPs are not only hearer-old but also discourse-old.
.

4        Argument Reversal

While preposing involves the noncanonical leftward placement of a constituent, and postposing involves the noncanonical rightward placement of a constituent, argument reversal incorporates both.
.
4.1  Inversion

In inversion, the logical subject appears in postverbal position while some other, canonically postverbal, constituent appears in preverbal position (Birner 1994), excluding cases where expletive there occupies syntactic subject position (which are both formally and functionally distinct). We will refer to the noncanonically positioned constituents as the “preposed” and “postposed” constituents for convenience, although again we wish to remain neutral with respect to the syntactic analysis of the
construction.

Thus, even in cases where both constituents have been previously evoked, the post posed constituent nonetheless represents less familiar information, where familiarity is defined by prior evocation, inferability, and recency of mention. Therefore, what is relevant for the felicity of inversion in discourse is the relative discoursefamiliarity of the information represented by these two constituents.




4.2 Passivization

Like inversion, English by-phrase passives reverse the canonical order of two constituents, and like inversion, they are also constrained pragmatically in that the syntactic subject must not represent newer information within the discourse than does the NP in the by-phrase (Birner 1996). We claim that passivization and inversion represent distinct syntactic means for performing the same discourse function in different syntactic environments.

Based on an examination of the first 200 by-phrase passives appearing in the Brown Corpus, Birner (1996) shows that the syntactic subject of such passives consistently represents information that is at least as familiar within the discourse as that represented by the by-phrase NP. Moreover, when the information status of the relevant NPs is reversed, infelicity results. Consider again example (26), repeated here as Given that passivization, like inversion, places relatively familiar information before
relatively unfamiliar information, it too can be viewed as performing a linking function (see section 1.3). That is, in passivization as in inversion, the information represented by the preverbal constituent generally stands in a poset relationship with a previously evoked or inferable anchor.

5        Left-dislocation

Here, the direct object pronoun them is coreferential with the sentence-initial constituent gallstones. Left-dislocation is also functionally distinct from preposing. As we have seen, preposing constructions constitute a functionally unified class in that the preposed constituent consistently represents information standing in a contextually licenced poset relationship with information evoked in or inferable from the prior context. No such requirement holds for left-dislocation, however.
Prince (1997) argues that there are three types of left-dislocation (LD), distinguishable on functional grounds. Type I LD is what Prince calls “simplifying LDs”: A “simplifying” Left-Dislocation serves to simplify the discourse processing of Discourse-new entities by removing them from a syntactic position disfavored for Discourse-new entities and creating a separate processing unit for them. Once tha unit is processed and they have become Discourse-old, they may comfortably occur in their positions within the clause as pronouns. (1997: 124).

6        Right-dislocation

Like existential and presentational there-insertion, right-dislocation involves the noncanonical placement of an argument of the verb in postverbal position. However, in contrast to both existential and presentational there-insertion, right-dislocation (RD) does not require the postverbal NP to represent new information. Consider the rightdislocations in : a. Below the waterfall (and this was the most astonishing sight of all), a whole mass of enormous glass pipes were dangling down into the river from somewhere high up in the ceiling! They really were enormous, those pipes. There must have been a dozen of them at least, and they were sucking up the brownish muddy water from the river and carrying it away to goodness knows where. (Dahl, R. 1964: 74–5 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. New York: Knopf.)

In each of these examples, the sentence-final constituent represents information that has been evoked, either explicitly or implicitly, in the prior discourse. The functions that previous researchers have posited for RD, in fact, have generally assumed that the dislocated NP must represent information that is given or inferable within the discourse. For example, Davison (1984) argues that RD marks the referent of the dislocated NP as a topic, and thus also as having a “discourse antecedent” (1984: 802).
Similarly, Ziv and Grosz (1994) argue that RD identifies a situationally or textually evoked entity as the most salient entity available for subsequent reference.18 Indeed, our corpus-based study shows that, in every case, the dislocated NP represents information that is both hearer-old and discourse-old. Thus, right-dislocation cannot be viewed as marking information that is new in any sense, and in this way differs from existential and presentational there-insertion on functional grounds. As we argued in previous work (Birner and Ward 1996), the difference in function can be attributed to the anaphoric pronoun of right-dislocation. Given that the marked NP in a right-dislocation is coreferential with the pronoun, and that the pronoun is anaphoric and therefore represents a discourse-old entity, it follows that the marked NP must also represent this same discourse-old entity. Thus, it is not accidental that
right-dislocation does not require the marked NP to represent new information; the presence of the pronoun in fact precludes such a possibility.

7. Conclusion

We have suggested that a complete functional account of the noncanonical constructions of English requires reference to open propositions, discourse- and hearerfamiliarity, and linking relations. By now it should be clear that these constraints are not randomly assigned to the various construction types, but rather that broad generalizations can be made regarding the correlation of syntax and discourse function. Specifically, we have argued that: • preposing constructions require the preposed constituent to represent information that is old in some sense, while postposing constructions require the postposed constituent to represent information that is new in some sense; • the constraints on preposing and postposing are absolute, while those placed on argument reversal are relative; • the functional constraints observed for the classes of preposing and postposing constructions do not hold for superficially similar constructions in which the marked constituent’s canonical position is filled by a referential pronoun (i.e.right- and left-dislocation). Although we have found no necessary correspondence between particular constructions and specific functional constraints, discourse functions nonetheless correlate with syntactic constructions in a principled way. Our research indicates that the range of discourse functions a given construction may serve is constrained by the
form of the construction; within that range, however, there is room for arbitrary variation. This approach reconciles both the strong correlations we have found among construction types and function types and the equally strong evidence of variation inthe correlation between form and function.

Although the various studies utilizing these terms have by and large used them in very simila ways, these studies have failed to draw the (in our view) crucial distinctions among the linguistic items being related, the poset relation connecting the information represented by these items, and the poset itself.

7 In this example the preposition in does not constitute part of the link, unlike the preposition in (7a). The difference between the two types of links correlates with distinct preposing constructions; see
Ward (1988) for discussion. 8 This corpus consists of over 1.3 million words of transcribed oral data drawn from the official transcripts of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident (1986). We are grateful to Julia Hirschberg for making an on-line version of these transcripts available to us. 9 For convenience, we will use terms like “preposing” and “postposing” to
refer to the noncanonical placement of syntactic constituents, although we wish to remain neutral with respect to their actual syntactic analysis. 10 By “accent,” we mean “intonational prominence” in the sense of Terken and Hirschberg (1994): “a conspicuous pitch change in or near the lexically stressed syllable of the word” (1994:126); see also Pierrehumbert (1980). 11 Of course for both topicalization and focus preposing, other constituents may bear pitch accents. Intonationally speaking, the difference between focus preposing and topicalization is that only the former requires that the nuclear accent be on the preposed constituent.12 As noted in Ward (1988), there is one preposing construction – “locative

1. We use the term “construction” in the conventional sense, to refer to each of the various grammatical configurations of constituents within a particular language. See Fillmore (1988), Prince (1994), and Goldberg (1995), inter alia, for alternative views of what constitutes a linguistic
construction.

 2. What is relevant here is the presence of information within the hearer’s knowledge store, not the hearer’s beliefs regarding its truth (in the case of a proposition), existence (in the case of an entity), attributes, etc. That is, what matters for hearer-status is the hearer’s knowledge of, rather than about, the information.

3. Strictly speaking it is the information itself that possesses some information status (and not the constituent representing that information), but where no confusion will result we will speak of constituents as being discourse-old, discourse-new, evoked, etc. for convenience.

4 Thus, the “discourse-old” link need not itself have been explicitly evoked within the prior discourse; as long as it stands in an appropriate relationship with previously evoked information, it is treated by speakers as discourse-old.

5 Higher-value preposings are actually quite rare, and are usually explicitly designated as such, as with the quantifier.


REFERENCES

Aissen, J. (1975). Presentational-there
insertion: a cyclic root transformation.Chicago Linguistic Society, 11, 1–14.
Birner, B. J. (1994). Information status andword order: an analysis of Englishinversion. Language, 70, 233–59.Birner, B. J. (1996). Form and function inEnglish by-phrase passives. Chicago
Linguistic Society, 32, 23–31.
Birner, B. J. and Ward, G. (1996). Acrosslinguistic study of postposing indiscourse. Language and Speech: Special
Issue on Discourse, Syntax, andInformation, 39, 111–40.
Birner, B. J. and Ward, G. (1998).Information Status and NoncanonicalWord Order in English. Amsterdam
and Philadelphia: Benjamins.Chafe, W. (1976). Givenness,contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects,topics, and point of view. In C. Li(ed.), Subject and Topic (pp. 25–55).New York: Academic Press.Davison, A. (1984). Syntactic markednessand the definition of sentence topic.Language, 60, 797–846.
Erdmann, P. (1976). There Sentences in
English. Munich: Tuduv.
136 Gregory Ward and Betty J. Birner
Fillmore, C. (1968). “The case for case.”In E. Bach and R. Harms (eds),Universals in Linguistic Theory(pp. 1–90). New York: Holt.Fillmore, C. (1988). The mechanisms of“construction grammar.” Berkeley
Linguistics Society, 14, 35–55.
Firbas, J. (1966). Non-thematic subjects incontemporary English. Travaux
Linguistiques de Prague, 2, 239–56.
Fraurud, K. (1990). Definiteness and theprocessing of noun phrases in naturaldiscourse. Journal of Semantics, 7,395–433.Garrod, S. C. and Sanford, A. J. (1994).Resolving sentences in a discoursecontext: how discourse representationaffects language understanding. InM. A. Gernsbacher (ed.), Handbook
of Psycholinguistics (pp. 675–98).
New York: Academic Press.Geluykens, R. (1987). Tails (rightdislocations) as a repair mechanism inEnglish conversations. In J. Nuyts andG. de Schutter (eds), Getting One’s
Words into Line: On Word Order andFunctional Grammar (pp. 119–30).
Dordrecht: Foris.Goldberg, A. (1995). Constructions: A
Construction Grammar Approach toArgument Structure. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.Gundel, J. (1974). The role of topic andcomment in linguistic theory. PhDdissertation, University of Texas.Gundel, J. (1985). “Shared knowledge”and topicality. Journal of Pragmatics,9, 83–107.Halliday, M. A. K. (1967). Notes ontransitivity and theme in English.Part 2. Journal of Linguistics, 3, 199–244.Hawkins, J. A. (1978). Definiteness and
Indefiniteness. Atlantic Highlands NJ:
Humanities Press.Hirschberg, J. (1991). A Theory of Scalar
Implicature. New York: Garland.
Horn, L. R. (1972). On the semantic

Minggu, 02 Oktober 2016

Discourse analysis

**Discourse is generally used to designate the forms of representation, codes, conventions and habits of language that produce specific fields of culturally and historically located meanings. Michel Foucault's early writings ('The Order of Discourse', 1971


**Discourse is a conceptual generalization of conversation within each modality and context of communication.

**Discourse refers to how we think and communicate about people, things, the social organization of society, and the relationships among and between all three. Discourse typically emerges out of social institutions like media and politics (among others), and by virtue of giving structure and order to language and thought, it structures and orders our lives, relationships with others, and society.

** A discourse is an instance of language use whose type can be classified on the basis of such factors as grammatical and lexical choices and their distribution in

**The prevailing sense of "discourse" is defined by the OED as "A spoken or written treatment of a subject, in which it is handled or discussed at length; a dissertation, treatise, homily, sermon, or the like." While previous, archaic definitions of discourse have been "process or succession of time, events, actions, etc." or "the act of understanding," discourse is most simply understood today as a sort of unit of language organized around a particular subject matter and meaning.



**analysis
-A systematic examination and evaluation of data or information, by breaking it into its component parts to uncover their interrelationships. Opposite of synthesis.

-An examination of data and facts to uncover and understand cause-effect relationships, thus providing basis for problem solving and decision making.

-Analysis is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts in order to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), though analysis as a formal concept is a relatively recent development.

-This verb analyze comes from the noun analysis. The noun analysis was in turn borrowed from Greek, from analyein, or "to dissolve." If you go into analysis, it means that you will be examined and helped by a mental health professional — who will analyze your particular problems and help you find solutions.

-analysis is The examination and evaluation of the relevant information to select the best course of action from among various alternatives


**Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyze written, vocal, or sign language use, or any significant semiotic event.
The objects of discourse analysis (discourse, writing, conversation, communicative event) are variously defined in terms of coherent sequences of sentences, propositions, speech, or turns-at-talk.

**Discourse Analysis is the area of linguistics that is concerned with how we build up meaning in the larger communicative rather than grammatical units; meaning in a text, paragraph, conversation, etc, rather than in a single sentence.

** Discourse analysis is a term used for a variety of processes that examine or deconstruct the underlying meanings in speech or other form of communicative text

** Discourse analysis is a broad term for the study of the ways in which language is used in texts and contexts. Also called discourse studies.

**Discourse analysis is sometimes defined as the analysis of language 'beyond the sentence'. This contrasts with types of analysis more typical of modern linguistics, which are chiefly concerned with the study of grammar: the study of smaller bits of language, such as sounds (phonetics and phonology), parts of words (morphology), meaning (semantics), and the order of words in sentences (syntax). Discourse analysts study larger chunks of language as they flow together.

Jumat, 10 Juni 2016

My best comments




















homonymy,homograp

homonymy

homonym is a word that is said or spelled the same way as another word but has a different meaning. "Write” and “right” is a good example of a pair of homonyms

Homonym traces back to the Greek words homos, meaning “same,” andonuma, meaning “name.” So a homonym is sort of like two people who have the same name: called the same thing but different. A homonym can be a word that sounds the same as something else — like by (“near”) and buy (“purchase”) — or it can be spelled exactly the same way and pronounced differently — like minute(unit of time) and minute (“tiny”).

homograp
Use the noun homograph to talk about two words that are spelled the same but have different meanings and are pronounced differently — like "sow," meaning female pig, and "sow," to plant seeds.

The word homograph merges homos, the Greek word for "same," with graph, "to write." If two words are written identically but don't share a meaning, they are homographs. Some examples are close ("to shut") and close("nearby"); and bass ("deep") and bass("the fish"). Homographs are confusing at first glance, but once you read them in the context of a sentence or hear them spoken aloud, you'll easily figure out which word is intended.

homophone

homophone is a word that sounds the same as another word but has a different meaning and/or spelling. “Flower” and “flour” are homophonesbecause they are pronounced the same but you certainly can’t bake a cake using daffodils.

Other common homophones are writeand rightmeet and meatpeace andpiece. You have to listen to the context to know which word someone means if they’re spoken aloud. If they say they like your jeans (genes?), they’re probably talking about your pants and not your height and eye color — but you’d have to figure it out from the situation!

This word set can be confusing, even for word geeks. Let's start with the basics. A homograph is a word that has the same spelling as another word but has a different sound and a different meaning:
lead (to go in front of)/lead (a metal)
wind (to follow a course that is not straight)/wind (a gust of air)
bass (low, deep sound)/bass (a type of fish)
homophone is a word that has the same sound as another word but is spelled differently and has a different meaning:
to/two/too
there/their/they're
pray/prey
Not so bad, right? The ending –graph means drawn or written, so a homograph has the same spelling. The –phone ending means sound or voice, so a homophone has the same pronunciation. But here's where it gets tricky. Depending on whom you talk to, homonym means either:
A word that is spelled like another but has a different sound and meaning (homograph); a word that sounds like another but has a different spelling and meaning (homophone)
OR
A word that is spelled and pronounced like another but has a different meaning (homograph and homophone)
So does a homonym have to be both a homograph and a homophone, or can it be just one or the other? As with most things in life, it depends on whom you ask.
In the strictest sense, a homonym must be both a homograph and a homophone. So say many dictionaries. However, other dictionaries allow that a homonym can be a homograph or a homophone.
With so many notable resources pointing to the contrary, are we losing this strict meaning? What then will we call a word that is spelled and pronounced the same as another but has a different meaning? If homonym retains all these meanings, how will readers know what is actually meant?
The careful writer would do well to follow the strict sense, ensuring his meaning is understood immediately.

Homonyms, homophones and homographs can bring confusion to even adults and teachers! VocabularySpellingCity can help anyone master these word groups. For clarity, we've brought them all together on one page. It makes it easier to learn the difference among the three types of words using the definitions and homonyms, homophones and homographs examples below.

Homonyms

Homonyms, or multiple meaning words, are words that share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings. For example, bear.
  • bear (the animal) can bear (tolerate) very cold temperatures.

  • The driver turned left (opposite of right) and left (departed from) the main road.
Homophones, also known as sound-alike words, are words that are pronounced identically although they have different meanings and often have different spellings as well. These words are a very common source of confusion when writing. Common examples of sets of homophones include: to, too, and two; they're and their; bee and be; sun and son; which and witch; and plain and plane. VocabularySpellingCity is a particularly useful tool for learning to correctly use and spell the soundalike words.

Homographs

Homographs are words that are spelled the same, but have different meanings and are often pronounced differently as well. Some examples of homographs are:
  • bass as in fish vs bass as in music

  • bow as in arrow vs bow as in bending or taking a bow at the end of a performance

  • close as in next to vs close as in shut the door

  • desert as in dry climate vs desert as in leaving alone.
Currently, VocabularySpellingCity cannot distinguish between homographs, as we are unable to have two pronounciations for the exact same word. We are looking for possibilities in the future.

HomonymsHomophonesHomographs
Multiple meaning wordsWords that sound alikeSame spelling,
different pronunciation,
different meanings
 the spruce tree...
 to spruce up...
 addition for math
 edition of a book
 desert = abandon
 desert = area of land
 suit yourself...
 wore a suit...
 I want to go
 I like it too
 One plus one is two
 bass = fish
 bass = instrument
 weigh on the scale...
 scale the wall...
 capitol building
 state capital
 close = nearby
 close = to shut
 the price is fair...
 go to the fair...
 pick a flower
 bake with flour
 bow = to bend down
 bow = ribbon