Supplementary Exercises to Chapter 5 Semantics I. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False:
1. Dialectal synonyms can often be found in different regional dialects such as British English and American English but cannot be found within the variety itself, for example, within British English or American English.
2. Sense is concerned with the relationship between the linguistic element and the non-linguistic world of experience, while the reference deals with the inherent meaning of the linguistic form. 3. Linguistic forms having the same sense may have different references in different situations. 4. In semantics, meaning of language is considered as the intrinsic and inherent relation to the physical world of experience. 5. Contextualism is based on the presumption that one can derive meaning from or reduce meaning to observable contexts. 6. Behaviourists attempted to define the meaning of a language form as the situation in which the speaker utters it and the response it calls forth in the hearer.
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7. The meaning of a sentence is the sum total of the meanings of all its components. 8. Most languages have sets of lexical items similar in meaning but ranked differently according to their degree of formality. 9. “it is hot.” is a no-place predication because it contains no argument. 10. In grammatical analysis, the sentence is taken to be the basic unit, but in semantic analysis of a sentence, the basic unit is predication, which is the abstraction of the meaning of a sentence.
II. Fill in each of the following blanks with one word which begins with the letter given:
11. S________ can be defined as the study of meaning. 12. The conceptualist view holds that there is no d______ link between a linguistic form and what it refers to. 13. R______ means what a linguistic form refers to in the real, physical world; it deals with the relationship between the linguistic element and the non-linguistic world of experience. 14. Words that are close in meaning are called s________.
