Current Lectures
2023 Ivan A. Sag Lectures
Free and open to the public.
Some Concepts and Consequences of a Theory of Word Meaning
Professor John Beavers, Chair and Robert D. King Centennial Professor of Liberal Arts, Linguistics, The University of Texas at Austin
Location
Bausch & Lomb Hall 109
University of Rochester
Interactive map
Printable map
Visitor parking
Times
October 6, 13, and 20, 2023
Noon-2 p.m.
Shareable link
bit.ly/Sag-23
Downloadable tabloid-size PDF poster
October 6—Lecture One
A Lexical Semanticist’s Apology
What is the meaning of a word? Is it some unanalyzable blob that you simply memorize, or is it broken down into more basic pieces? If so, what are those pieces, which are unique to each word and which are shared across words, and how are those pieces put together to make up the full meaning of a word? Are any combinations of pieces ruled out, i.e. is there any such thing as an impossible word? And how does a word’s meaning determine how it’s used in the grammar of a language? Lexical semantics is the study of all of these questions, and in this talk I survey various case studies — mostly drawn from the study of verbs — that justify that word meanings are broken down into pieces and that a theory of what those pieces are is necessary as part of a larger theory of language, and I explore what some of the most basic and widely accepted ingredients of such a theory are. By the end of the talk we will have set the stage for exploring some central aspects of lexical semantic theory in more depth in the following lectures.
October 13—Lecture Two
Lexical Representation, Lexical Semantics, and Syntax
Theories of verb meaning usually assume that verbs are organized in a language’s vocabulary either in terms of the kinds of events or states they describe, or else in terms of the kinds of entities that participate in those events and states. These basic semantic concepts are furthermore assumed to be organized into semantic structures — events that are broken into subevents, or coherent casts of participants — that determine what sorts of prefixes and suffixes a verb takes and what sorts of other phrases it combines with, i.e. its grammatical properties. In this talk I explore the ins and outs of such theories. I suggest that in many cases the proposed semantic structures are not motivated by anything other than the grammatical properties they were meant to explain. I show instead that a theory of a verb’s grammatical properties can instead be based on the actual meanings of the words, i.e. what must be true of the world to even use the word, and the ways word meanings contrast with one another. I also explore several other factors that govern how words are used grammatically, including pragmatics and common conventions of word usage. The case studies I explore come from data on English, Colloquial Sinhala, Bahasa Indonesian, and the Uto-Aztecan language O’dam. I ultimately suggest that the relationship of word meaning to grammar is governed by a soup of factors, but with actual meaning at the heart of it all.
Octiber 20—Lecture Three
Regular and Idiosyncratic Meaning in The Roots of Words
One of the most widely accepted facts about word meaning is that many words share meaning in common, grouping words into classes, but that within each class there’s something unique and idiosyncratic about each word. It is commonly assumed that the grammar of a language only “sees” the regular bits — the idiosyncratic parts of a given words meaning are not really linguistically very significant, so much so that studying their individual content is not likely to be very fruitful. In this talk I explore this issue in detail, and suggest that hidden within the idiosyncrasies of individual words are types of regularity — sometimes the very same regularities that define whole word classes — that are significant for how the word is used grammatically. I draw on two primary case studies, one a broad, typological study of the ways subtly different cause/effect scenarios are described across a balanced sample of languages, and one on the diverse patterns of expressions of giving in English and the Bantu language Kinyarwanda. I conclude by suggesting that regularity and idiosyncrasy are not so different from one another, and form more of a continuum than a sharp division.