(Margarita) Well good morning to everybody
I'm glad to introduce Adrienne Lehrer
professor emerita at the University of Arizona
Who's going to be here with us for a couple of lectures one today another one in a week time
first of all I'll be
Telling you something about her biography, and then I'll tell you about what she's going to do today
Adrienne Lehrer first read her PhD at the University of Rochester in
1968 what she taught for about seven years, and then she moved to the University of Arizona
where
She's been a professor ever since she also
Spent a year at Edinburgh studying with John Lyons who you should have heard of and
Some of his staff is a compulsory reading in this course
Her first book on Semantic Fields and Lexical Structure was published in 1974
Then she got interested in wine language precisely
Where she worked
In this topic for over
ten years
Then she published Wine and Conversation
with a University of Indiana Press
and
For a period of 10 years she walked over
wine language and
Then she did her second edition of Wine and Conversation which was really a new book that
Got published again in 2009
published by Cambridge University
(Adrienne) Oxford University Press
(Margarita) then
Finally she got interested in
word formation especially in neologisms and in the creativity of new words
What she's going to do today is talk about semantic fields and lexical structure
And this is something which is closely related
with the contents of lesson six on your textbook, so
If the [...] Adrienne Lehrer, thank you for joining.
(Adrienne) Thank you, and thank you very much. I am very indebted to
Professor Goded and to
UNED for inviting me
what I want to talk about today is the structure of the vocabulary of
vocabularies and languages
And there are two important parts to this
One is semantic fields and this has to do with how words are related to other words in the language and the other is
polysemy and this is the
topic of the fact that most words in English and I assume in most languages have a whole range of related meanings and
These two things interact in very complex ways as we'll see
Now going to semantic fields there are two important parts here one has to do with the idea of
conceptual fields these are
things in the mind ideas thoughts images
whatever
We think about and the other thing is the lexical items
these are words phrase it is idioms and so forth and the challenge is to map the
words or lexical items of a language on to the conceptual material and an easy example
To illustrate this is with color words, so if you can imagine a color spectrum
which
Would appear the same or similar to most people all over the world unless they're colorblind or blind
But what's interesting is that words in different languages
Divide up that spectrum in different ways so a language like English has a divided up into
many words
Red orange yellow and so forth and then there were even subdivisions like red can be divided up into shades of red like a scarlet
Crimson where there are other languages *donny* is one
language in that
That [...] worked on by Eleanor Roche that has only two basic words
That we would translate roughly as light, or dark now. This isn't to say that speakers can't make the stations
They would do it in a way that we can too. Which is to say it's the color of saying a specific kind of tree
I'm going to just talk about a few of the
Lexical relationships some of the principal ones that are paradigmatic and by paradigmatic
We're talking about words that can appear in the same syntactic slot these would be
synonymy similar or similar meanings and antonymy
opposite meanings of various types
hyponymy or classic inclusion and meronomy part-whole relationships
And of course there are many others as well
I'm not going to say a whole lot about synonymy. It's certainly interesting, but conceptually it's similar
If synonyms are defined as words that have the same meaning and the same distribution
Actually it turns out that languages have relatively few synonyms where words can be substituted in all contexts
However, there are many words with similar meanings, so that some substitutions are possible. I have a
couple examples here small and little are
Quick synonyms so he has a small house and a little house have the same meanings
You can put that's what I've done here of substitutes small for little or little for small
But little and big also have other meanings
not only for size, but also for age so something like my little sister meaning my
younger sister is cute is not the same as my small sister is cute, so we see here an interaction of
polysemy and synonomy
I want to talk a little bit more about hyponymy and incompatibility
hyponymy is the kind of relationship
so an example would be
a rose is a kind of flower
So rose is a hyponym the technical word and flower is a superordinate
sometimes called a hypernym
hypernyms typically form sets of
cohypernyms and are incompatible unless you're dealing with
synonymy course so if you have the set of flower names like rose tulip
violet daisy and so forth they're all hyponymys of flower the word flower, so if you say that X is a rose
You are also
implying
Because of the structure of the language that it's not a daisy it's not a violet or any other flower
Here's a very simplified taxonomy obviously a scientific taxonomy would have many many levels
When I was a child you started with kingdoms, vegetable and animal and now it's even more general than that to take care of
bacteria and virus
So this is just to give you an idea of a very simple one so
you can divide animals into mammals birds fish and
Reptiles so forth and then mammals have subdivisions of canine and feline and a canine
it has examples like dog wolf and feline tiger lion
And so forth so if I told you that I bought a dog
You know lots of things you know that I have a canine
That I have a mammal that I have an animal that it's a living thing and so forth so you don't have to say oh
You bought a dog does it do you have an animal as well
I mean if you understand English and the structure, and then you get all that for free
Now scientific taxonomies are not fixed forever in time because
we have hybrids so that if you go to the
grocery store you can buy for the fruit monger you can buy a *plumcot* which is a hybrid of a plum and apricot and
Scientists every now and then we classify these things when I was a child a rabbit was considered a rodent
But it's not considered that anymore and of course with
DNA as a
very powerful tool many kinds of things are being reclassified
I want to show you a very different kind of
hyponymy however
This is animal divided in a rather different way
So we could divide them into domestic animals and wild animals and then domestic animals could be further divided into
Livestock and pet or a pet while the animal is in game and other sorts of things
Now this is very different because you really have to look at the definitions
With a scientific taxonomy you can you can make lists
with these you cannot make lists so a pet is an animal that you have a special relationship to
And dogs and cats are popular pets so are different kinds of birds and maybe horses for some people
but
Do not you have skunks in Europe?
(Margarita) No, I don't think
(Adrienne) okay but probably people know what skunks are because you see them in zoos skunks are really cute little animals
They live in the wild
They're all black with a nice
stripe down a long fluffy tail
Most people would not think that skunks make very good pets, and they're good reasons for that one is
they carry rabies and the second thing is they have an interesting way of defending themselves they have a
Gland that for which they can squirt out a very unpleasant
stinky smell
on the other hand there are some states in the US where it is legal to have a
Skunk for a pet and in fact they actually wrote pet and it
hadn't been
[...] they still have this
gland
But it was a very
Friendly
laid-back animals she would put a harness on him and take him along for walks
behaved himself very well
So the whole point of this story is that
What you put into your
hyponymy for pet is going to vary from
Time to time from place to place and it's going to be very culturally
Oriented so when my
Children were very young they at least one of them had some lizards and chameleons for pets
But many people would not really want to have those around the house. We even have a snake for a while
We got rid of that one
Okay, so that's the point of this example that you have different kinds of
hyponymies I want to give you one more example
too just to show you and this it just
reiterates the last point that not all
homonymies are taxonomy
Because there are like in the case of animals many ways of classifying those categories, so you can say well
What kinds of books are there?
Well there are paperbacks and ebooks or you can have a very different way of dividing that up. You can say
Fiction or nonfiction and then fiction can be divided up into
Novels and short stories and nonfiction can be divided up into history and the science and cooking and so forth
What you shouldn't be doing is this what kinds of books are there well is fiction and hardbacks and nude photos and first editions
This this structure is very
Confusing because you're confusing the categories although books can be classified in many different kinds of ways
Ok let's move on to antonymy I worked on antonymy a lot because I think it's one of the most interesting
of the lexical
semantics field categories and there are many kinds of opposition's and I only want to talk briefly about
two of them the first one non gradable antonymy where you're dividing a domain into two categories
so and it has to be relevant so
people can either be
married or single
And if they're married then they're not single if they're single they're not married
Or
For living things that are alive, so I mean the category has to apply
So it doesn't make any sense to say well is that chair over there is that married or single is it dead or alive?
Well because it's dead, but there's something strange about
Classifying furniture as dead. I mean it's not living, but it's weird to say that it's dead
Now gradable
antonymy it's much more interesting because it's scalar and allows four degrees
so you have a pair of antonyms like big and little and
You can
Make them talk about something the more little we'd say it's littler or more big would be bigger and
You can also say it's less
When you're talking about more you're moving outward from the center toward the end of the scale
If you're talking about less you're moving in closer toward the middle of the scale
and
gradable antonyms interact with comparative structures, so I can say Mary's house is bigger than Sally's house and
That's equivalent in meaning to Sally's house is smaller than Mary's house
And I just have one example here to show you that non
Gradable antonyms don't allow comparative so to say Jason is better or more dead than Sally
There's something wrong with that or if Sally is more married than Jason
Now you can make sense of these because people are always able to stretch meanings, but you have to tell a story
And everybody's going to have a different story about how Sally can be more than Jason you know, okay?
You could make up your own story. I don't have to do that for you
Now
sometimes you have a
pair of antonyms where
One is marked or committed. Well the other one is neutral and
Examples would be better
Worse cleaner dirtier so we can say Sally's novel is better than Bill's novel but both are bad
Okay
But to say Bill's novel is worse than Sally's novel but both are good
There's something wrong with that and that's because although better is neutral
Something and something can be better than something else without being good something can't be worse than
Something else without being bad, and so that's a difference and sometimes both terms are committed
So we can say things like this the gazpacho is colder than the vichyssoise but both are hot
Or the vichyssoise it's hotter than the gazpacho but both are cold
But there's something wrong with that. for something to be hotter than
Something else it has to be hot and similarly with cold
Now
What's interesting about temperature words is that you have a very complex structure here
where tepid it is
A name for the middle part of the scale this is very unusual usually a middle of
The scale is just the middle of the scale
good point and
Warm and cool are completely reversible because they're toward the middle
so
My sweater is warmer than your sweater. No that would make sense okay
Today is warmer than yesterday, but both days have been cool or yesterday was cooler than today both days were warm
But it doesn't work with hot and cold, and it doesn't work with burning and freezing so the farther you get away
from the middle
the harder it is to find a words that are that are neutral and
One cast
That can be used I think for things at the end of the scales but not very good for things that aren't at the end
are
words like
Absolutely very is a word you can use
Where you have comparison so it's warmer today than it was yesterday
This soup is hotter than that soup, but it's it's very burning
You know it's very warm as fine. It's very hot as finding. It's a very burning
This is strange
But you can say it's absolutely
Burning or it's absolutely freezing so when you get out to the end of the scale then you can use absolutely
And when you're not out at the end
and you have the scaler possibility then you can use very so there are interactions with these kinds of modifiers and
Another set is clean and dirty so clean is neutral and dirty is marked my room is cleaner than his room, okay?
But both are dirty there were dirty people his room is dirtier than my room but both are cleaned
That's really weird, but you can say it
Both our rooms are absolutely spotless or absolutely filthy just I just have said
That movie was absolutely dreadful
For me if I don't like absolutely excellent
Or I don't like very excellent, but I do hear people using it I would prefer
The treating excellent as being at the end of a scale of goodness
People don't always agree, and that's fine
meronymy is another one of the paradigmatic relationships. I don't have too much to say about that
Because there are it's a very complex one too because there are various types of
meronymies so
Relationship between chin and face for example the chin is a part of a face or you can say
Faces have chins arm is a part of a body or part of a chair
Handle is interesting because it goes with a whole lot of different kinds of objects
That has something that you use your hand for part of a cup part of a suitcase part of a knife and so forth
And then it can also be used for
Events activities and so forth so what's interesting in English is that if you have a you're talking about a player in opera
the various parts of it are considered acts and
if there's a
something in between cause in between that's called an intermission if you're talking about a baseball game each one of the
Periods of activity is it is an inning
And if you're talking about football American football
Each part is a half and in the middle is a halftime if it's not an intermission so languages
I think are interesting in the way they
Map the the words available onto the conceptual structure because if you think about the pause of an opera and the pause of a football
Game well, it's just time when other things are going out and not
Not the singing or not that knocking people over
There are also some syntagmatic relationships now when we talk about syntagmatic relationships, we're talking about words that
Don't necessarily
Even have to belong to the same part of speech
But even if they do belong to the same part of speech in order to get paraphrases you have to do some syntactic
Manipulation as well so examples here would be that
the noun surgeon has something to do with verbs like
operating and
Patients also have thinks something to do with operating the verb cook is related to
Chef and also, there's a noun cook as well and
Bark is the verb that goes with dogs and seals
Play is a verb that goes with many things including games or instruments
Of course in Spanish you have two different words
before for play 'tocar' and 'jugar'
Drive yesterday with vehicles
and then of course
For different kinds of sensory experiences they are connected to particular
organs of the body so we see with our eyes actually that's kind of redundant people wouldn't normally say anything like that because
You know if I say I went to the Prado yesterday
And I saw some great pictures and somebody said oh really did you use your eyes to see them? That's something
redundant about that and
also cause and effect
So you have terms like he'll die and dead and you have if I say Sam is dead
Then you know he died. You don't know how he died
I'd say Pat killed Sam
Then you know that Pat died and you know that Sam is dead, so these are
These are implications that just fall out of the relationship of the semantic structures order drop and fall
The base fell because I dropped it
Converseness this is another kind of syntagmatic relationship
You have examples like husband and wife buy and sell
give and take and
so you could get paraphrases like Jason is the husband of Sally and
paraphrase is Sally as the wife of Jason or Pat sold the book to Bill, Bill got the book from Sally and
So their opposition's, but they're different from the kinds of antonyms that I talked about earlier
I'd like to give you now some examples
This is a partial exact analysis of a semantic field and it submit a semantic field of cooking words in English now
This is just a very
Pared down analysis because English is amour words and some of the words have various senses
So this was one that had worked about work done in like earlier book
Semantic Fields and Lexical Structure, and what's nice about the semantic field of cooking is that it's just sort of the right
Amount of complexity so it's not really simple like an animal taxonomy
and it's not really complicated like philosophical words that are extremely hard to define and
It's something in the middle
So you have a general word cook which is the
Hypernym or the the general term for the other things in this field and there are
Five very general categories in which this is divided one is boil
Which is cooking with water, one is fry
Using oil and in there in the US we use the word broiled whereas in
the UK they tend to use grill as same meaning we do is grill too
and it
you slightly different it overlaps a little bit with broil and sometimes with fry, and then you have roast and you have baked and
You'll notice that boil is there twice and that's because there's a general sense and a specific sense
So boil one is any kind of cooking with water or some other liquid
And
The reason for putting the second one is that simmer is to cook with water and a very low heat
So you just help with little bubbles whereas
Boil - is a full boil where you have a lot of bubbles coming up, and then a simmer also has some hyponyms
Poach which is to cook something carefully in a little bit of water
Or stew, which is to cook something with liquid for a very long time
fry also has
Some hyponyms one is saute
Which is to cook with those a small amount of fat or oil in a saucepan or
and that contrasts with deep fry which is to cook something in a lot of fat, so the food is submerged and
Also, at least in the US we use a french fry
as a synonym for that
and
There are some other things we need to know
If not just enough to have the structure you have to have definitions
So it's not just enough to know that if I fry something. I'm not boiling it
I need to tell you how they're different well cook you prepare food by heating
Boil you cook with water, fry you cook with fat, bake you cook in an oven
Broiled or grilled you cook under a flame or it could be over a flame and poach cook carefully in water or liquid
So another thing would be the instruments for cooking so nowadays we use modern stoves with an oven and with burners
for
Cooking things in pots and pans gives a grill can use a spit
Cook something over an open fire
Use some sort of a barbecue advised and of course when I did my work earlier this was in the 60s and 70s
Microwaves existed, but people didn't have them and now they're very common most everybody has a microwave and so
to be
up to date
I would have to go back and redo everything because you can use you can do a lot of different things in a microwave
You can boil things in the microwave
And then sometimes they're part of a convex oven too, so maybe you couldn't roast in them, but anyway
Maybe some of you want to get interested in this and redo my analysis of cooking words to see what the new word microwave
Does to the whole thing
There are also selection restrictions or collocation, collocation are words that they go together and
selections restrictions are semantic
Constraints that tell you what you can put with other things
So poaching in English usually goes with something like eggs or fruit or the idea is you want to preserve the shape of it?
So you want to cook something very carefully
Now
What we roast is meat and most hyponyms of meat
But also more often than that
There's a difference between I should have put broiling here there are difference between
broiling me where you're cooking it under a
Flame say we're under something really hot and roasting meat
Where you're cooking it in the oven and the question is
And then it contrasts with ham people bake hams where you put them in the oven and yet you put meat
with them with modern cooking devices if you want I have
Say a big hunk of roast beef you put that in the oven so why don't you say
I'm making the roast beef why do we say
I'm roasting it well
It goes back actually to an earlier period when big hunks of meat were put on spits and cooked over open
Flames and so even though the technology has changed a lot. We still have this collocation of
Roasting meat and baking hams which were I suppose smoked and then put into enclosed spaces to be
cured
So sometimes there are historical explanations rather than just the selection restriction that
Determines what can go
So here are some applications
Of semantic field keypad theory one of them is comparative lexicology where you're comparing different
Languages to see how they map onto
the conceptual space
another one is pedagogy where you're using it for teaching methods actually 1 & 2
Are basically the same thing because you have to do a comparative analysis to know how to teach the foreign language
to a non-native speakers a third application is metaphor and
A fourth one that I'm just going to mention is
philosophical semantics
so I've done some comparative lexicology by looking at cooking words in other languages or
Mostly, I've had my students do it for me, so I'm going to give you a very small number of other examples
One is in German so in German we have a general word 'kochen', which I've labeled as
'kochen eins'
The general word, but also you have 'kochen zwei'
the little subscript 2 which is used for boil and
Of course in German you use 'kochen' for both of these
'kochen' also the
class
inclusion term
'kochen' one has 'braten'
Translated as fry or grill and 'backen' translated as a bake
Now we also have more hyponyms here, so
'kochen' 2 to boil, has 'sieden' for simmer or 'dünsten' for stew
'backen' is a more general term than either fry or grill would be in English
But it has some hyponyms
'rösten' for roast or panfry and 'grillen' for broil or grill
Now the fact that a language doesn't have a word doesn't mean that people don't have the concept
You just express it in terms of a phrase so if you want to use
'rösten' and
specify you'd say yeah, you know in a pan in fauna or
You often something like that so
The lack of a word is it's not a handicap to anybody you just need to use more words to talk about it
And this is Polish
Polish is like German in having a
Very general word for cooking in general and also using that word with the specific word
boil
It also has two other hyponymys of the word what we want to translate is to cook
Fry
I don't know how to pronounce this, they word is a
semantic
translated is fry and *BS* translated as bake or roast, and then there's also a hyponym
for the
specific use of the word
boil
'dusic' meaning stew
Now Japanese is interesting
Because it has a general word for cook and it has a word for
boiling rice noodle
Word for boil [...] it has a specific word a hyponym of noodle
taku used for boiling rice and
It has a separate word for steamed *misu*. I didn't have steam in my English, but it's a word
I've worried about a lot because I didn't exactly know where to put it it goes somewhere in your
Boil when I'm not sure if that would be a more
(Margarita) is a kind of boiling
(Adrienne) I call it *hyponym*
And that Japanese also has a word for deep-fry and what's interesting is has the general word 'yaku' here
Which includes
baking roasting frying and broiling basically
Everything other than frying and boiling, but again it is hyponyms for
Making distinctions, so this is just a little sample of showing how different languages different cultures
Using the same kinds of cooking techniques, maybe they have special instruments special
Things to use but
Organize the lexicon in slightly different ways
and
I've recently since I've been
Working on Spanish not working on Spanish learning Spanish was interested in
Translations so the way to read these is down vertically
Don't don't try to read them across because they don't match that well, and what's interesting is how
English and Spanish words for coverings don't exactly match up so in English we have skin
for humans and animals and
certain kinds of fruits and vegetables like apples and carrots
We have peel that can also be used for
some of those fruits and vegetables
But that's sort of what you use for it for citrus fruit, so
oranges and
rind is used for something that's kind of thick so
Melons have rind oranges have rind or peel. I don't melons have peel
Bark is very specific. It's not related to the barking of dogs. It's a covering for a tree and
I can't think of any other kind of covering that you would call bark
shell is
restricted to
things like
Shellfish nuts and eggs these things you have the shells
And then
These are some words that I found in Spanish
'piel' translated the skin
'cascara' 'corteza' and
'borde', and the only thing that was listed
Where you could use 'borde' which is usually translated as edge
is
Bacon like where we would say in English the rind and
I just tried to list some of the translations from my online
favorite online resource called wordreference.com and
So for skin you could translate it as 'piel' or 'cascara'
for rind you could translate into 'cascara' or 'corteza'
I guess you're gonna say 'corteza'
peel
For apples potatoes oranges translated as 'piel' 'cascara'
And
Bark as I said it for for trees and
let's look at the
back translations, then after I found these other words I went back to them into the the Spanish English and
'piel' could be that translated as skin or rind
'cascara' as
Skin, rind, bark or shells so that's a much more general word
and 'corteza' as either rind or crust and 'borde' it's bacon and then a
specific one in both languages is
Well, okay
Skin if you think of boiling milk, and you'll get a covering on the top that's skin in English
But it's not that in Spanish
Now it's it. What's interesting here is that some of the English verbs some of the English words are not only nouns
But there are also verbs and so you can you can skin
Well actually
My intuition is the only things you would skin would be animals
and if you want to take if you want to take the skin off of
apples potatoes or oranges you peel it and
rind doesn't have a verb at all so you can I mean it could make up one you could be rind something
But that's not a standard word
And the other things also you can shell eggs and
You can shell nuts and I don't know what to do with shrimp. I think maybe you peel shrimp
Okay, so it's kind of an interesting area of
mapping the different words onto
The nouns and verbs of the language
Okay another application of semantic field theory has to do with metaphor in general when a word in one semantic
Field is transferred to another domain the words in that field are available for transfer
With the same kinds of lexical relationships
Not always, but in many cases, so let's go back to our set of temperature words where we have hot warm cool cold
So we talk about the weather
Okay, it's hot. It's warm. It's cool. Too cold, you talk about
How you feel. I'm hot. I'm warm. I'm cool and cold
then you talk about anger and
You say somebody that was really really angry he's hot he's hot under the collar and there's a contrast with
Cool, and actually when a person is angry their body temperature really does rise and they get rid of the face
and so forth
but
When a person is not angry when you expect that person to be angry. You'd say oh, he's really cool
No his temperature doesn't go down
But the point is it's a contrast in the semantic field with hot because it's at the other side of the middle point
also
We find with sex love passion hot
is a
very
Strong state
He's really hot for her. It could be doesn't have to be sexual passion couldn't just be a love relationship, or
I have a very warm feeling toward all my cousins or
That relationship is really cool these days meaning
oh, they're not on bad terms, but they don't have a whole lot to do with each other or
If that person is really cold, or it's a very cold relationships something like that
And when we were children we used to play a guessing game when somebody would hide something
Where a person who had to find it was out of the room when it was
Being hidden, and then that person would come in and people in the room would give them
clues
If they were close to the hidden object. Oh, you're you're warm. They got closer. Oh, you're really hot they got farther away
You're colder you're cold and the same thing with the scent of the trail. I mean it's basically the same content content
Now you have hot and cool with both jazz and media and these
Operate a little bit interesting and here it helps to know what the etymology is so
We think of hot jazz is basically Dixieland where they've been Dixieland jazz where there's a strong rhythm a strong melody and
After World War two there was another kind of somewhat more abstract jazz that was developed and this was called
Cool Jazz
And it was used for a particular kind of music and it was only later that it came to be used with a sense of
Positive
Evaluation or
Approval and in media Martin
McLuhan
Used these as sort of technical terms. He talked about
Media as being either hot or cool
I don't think it would work nowadays with the computer, but he said that the hot media were those that gave you all the information
like
Newsprint or
Movies the cool media were those where you had to work hard to to get something out of it like
Television which before you had high-def television was a lot of little dots so it was kind of fuzzy
But anyway that the whole point of showing you this is that when you use one word in the semantic field
Then you have available to you other words in the semantic field, and if you go to an
Unabridged dictionary and look out any of these words. You'll find up to 30 entries and you'll see that it's things appear
one of these words that
Appears you'll find that
Something else in that semantic field can be used also
Here's a good example what I like this field of
Temperature so much if I ask people tell me what you understand by a cold car. They say well
it's cold to touch or maybe the engine doesn't start something like that
I say
What do you think of when you think of a hot car?
Well a hot car in addition to being hot to touch
Could be a stolen car or it can be a fast car and like a Porsche
Put these together in a sentence like he created his hot car for a cold car
And cold picks up two totally new meanings
So it can mean he traded this fast car for a sedan. You know he traded his Porsche for a
Volkswagen or
He traded a stolen car for one
That's not stolen so you can you can make sense of this because hot has meanings that
In isolation that cold doesn't have in isolation and you
give
Speakers the appropriate context, and then you get some new items there
I'm not gonna analyze this poem for you. I just want to call it to your attention. It's a word
It's a poem that even keep tell you and I worked on
When we were looking at the application of semantic field theory to literature
This is called On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic by William Wordsworth
I'll just read it without [...]
Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee and was the safeguard of the West
the worth of Venice did not fall below her berth
Venus the eldest child of Liberty
she was a maiden City bright and free no guile seduced no force could violate and
When she took them to herself a mate. She must dispose the everlasting sea and
What if she had seen those glories fade those titles vanish and that strength decay
Yet shall some tribute over deep breath be paid when her long life have reached its final day
Men, are we and must grieve when even the shade of that which once was great is passed away
what's Wordsworth is doing here of course is taking the semantic field of the life of a woman and
Mapping the history of the city of Venice onto it so there's a birth
It has to happens to be a noble birth
Period of childhood and maidenhood marriage and
Though there could have been childbirth at birth which I suppose could be mapped into something like
The fine arts that were produced in
Venice
Wordsworth chose not to do that then you get old age and finally death
And then the last implication is one that I only want to mention because it's too big a topic to go into is that a
Semantic field are a good compromise between
The atomism is among philosophers who treat each word independent without any relationship to any other words in the language
other than maybe
Class inclusion and
Holism where for some philosophers like [...]
The vocabulary is a unity and any change in one word will
Potentially change everything so in semantic fields if you do have a change in the field
Like maybe you find if you were to put microwave into the cooking
Something what happens to some of the other words or at least you'd have a new word that would divide things up differently
so
So there are differences in changes in the semantic field possibly
But it's not going to affect other words that have nothing to do with cooking
So to summarize what I want to remind you of is that lexical items are connected to each other in a variety of ways
These types of words can be mapped onto content
And different languages often map them in different ways
Which I think is a very interesting phenomenon and of course it has practical
implications
and
Finally semantic field theory plays an important role in understanding
metaphor and semantic extension
And thank you for your invitation
(Margarita) Thank you very much. It's been really a pleasure to have you here today, and I'm sure my students
are gonna find a lot of interesting suggestions in your talk today
particularly these kind of comparative analysis between
cooking words in different languages
I think it's a fascinating field, and I'm sure that they'll find some stimulating
suggestions and
And possibly questions that they can post to us, and I can transfer the questions to you
For you to answer
Because there's not a video conference here today, but conferences have been
Put into the web, so thank you again
(Adrienne) thank you for having me I enjoyed this a great deal. Thank you