Semantics and Pragmatics Questions and Answers

Answer: A

Statement (I) is true and statement (II) is false. Componential analysis, which breaks a word's meaning into semantic features, such as [+human, +male, +adult] for 'man', belongs to semantics, in particular lexical semantics.

Semiotics is the general study of signs and sign systems, and while it covers meaning, componential analysis is not a term studied under it in the standard classification. So option A is the key, and options B, C and D wrongly make (II) true.

Answer: B

Both statements are correct. Homonymy refers to cases where two different lexemes have the same shape, that is the same spelling or sound, with unrelated meanings. 'Bank' as a financial building and 'bank' as the ground by a river are the standard example, which supports the assertion as an illustration.

Options A, C and D each call at least one statement wrong, though the definition and the example are both standard in lexical semantics. Option B is the key.

Answer: A

The correct matching is a-iv, b-iii, c-i, d-ii. The maxim of manner says to be brief and orderly. The maxim of quality says to try to make your contribution one that is true. The maxim of quantity says not to make your contribution more or less informative than required, and the maxim of relation (relevance) says to be relevant.

This is code (A). The other codes pair quantity with relevance or manner with quality, which Grice's maxims do not do.

Answer: C

In 'John lives here', the word 'here' is an indexical expression, which means that its reference depends on the context of the utterance, in this case the place where the speaker is.

A predicative expression says something about a subject, a fixed expression is an idiom or set phrase, and a referring expression picks out an entity but does not depend on the speaker's situation in the way that deictic words do.

Answer: C

Both statements are true. The categories of mood and tense intersect in various ways, for example when an irrealis mood is found only in the past tense. A particular modal distinction may be drawn in one tense but neutralised in another, as the second statement says.

The options saying that only one statement is true, or that both are false, are rejected. Tense locates an event in time while mood marks the speaker's attitude to it, so a distinction of mood can be marked in one tense and lost in another.

Answer: B

The sense relation in the pairs cow : animal and rose : flower is hyponymy, where the meaning of the specific word is included in the meaning of the general one. A cow is a kind of animal, and a rose is a kind of flower.

Synonymy is sameness of meaning, antonymy is opposition of meaning, and homonymy is sameness of form with different meanings, so none describes a relation of inclusion. Its opposite, the relation of a general word to its specific kinds, is called hypernymy, so 'animal' is the hypernym of 'cow'.

Answer: C

The correct order of publication is Structural Semantics (ii), Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar (iv), Meaning and Style (i) and Semantics Volume I (iii). Lyons's Structural Semantics came out in 1963, Jackendoff's book in 1972, Leech's Meaning and Style in 1974 and Lyons's Semantics in 1977.

The other sequences put Lyons's two-volume work before the earlier ones, or Leech's book before Jackendoff's.

Answer: A

Both statements are true. The passage coheres through less formal links, such as the logical connections between rain and wearing a coat, and doors and opening them, because we draw on what we know of the world to link the sentences.

It also coheres because it fits our notions of how a first person narrative runs, with a series of actions told in order. The options calling either statement false are rejected.