Friday, 5 April 2024 ------------------------ Hello. All is well. In chapter nine, we talk about semantics, the meaning of words. Referential meaning is the shared, objective and factual meaning found in a dictionary. Associative meaning is the personal subjective meaning and feelings attached to a word. Semantic features are what the word relates to meaning wise. A sentence can be grammatical correct but nonsensical or odd. The N is flying the plane. Is N pilot or toothbrush? In componential analysis we find the smaller meaning components of a word, e.g. boy is +male -female -adult. man is +male -female +adult, girl is -male +girl -adult, woman is -male +female +adult. A word's semantic role in a sentence relates to how it participates to convey meaning. Agent (noun doer), theme (noun target), instrument (noun used by doer), experiencer (noun effected), location (in the hotel), source (from Finland), goal (to Albania). Lexical relation is how a word relates to other words in general. We'll go over five relation types: Synonym, antonym, hyponym, homonym, polysemy, metonymy. A synonym is a similar word, e.g 'like' and 'favor' are synonymous. But they're not always replaceable in sentences. For example, "what do you like/favor" works with both, but "can you do me a like/favor" works only with favor. An antonym is an opposite word. There's three versions. 1. Gradable, they're comparatively opposite on a scale, e.g. 'small' to 'big'. 2. Non-gradable, they're absolutely opposite, e.g. 'true' or 'false'. 3. Reversive, they're reversibly opposite, e.g. 'open' then 'close'. A hyponym is a word hierarchically inherits another word, e.g. 'car' is a hyponym of 'vehicle', and co-hyponym with 'van' as both share vehicle as superordinate. A category, like plane, has a prototype, the typical instance of a plane, therefore inherently subjective. As we've discussed before, the prototype will depend on function the instance is instantiated by, and I assume when we don't specify function consciously, we'll use the default. I think white, large commercial passenger plane, which is also my primary interaction with plane. I guess you could say the prototype is the most common instance in the public, which I'd assume is a commercial passenger aircraft, not a private aircraft or a military aircraft. A homonym is a word that is in same form but has an absolute different meaning dependent on context, for example a 'bat', can live in a cave or be used in a sport. There's also homophones, where the sound is in same form, like 'right' and 'write', or 'two' and 'too'. A polysemy is similar to a homonym but the meaning is relatively different, e.g. 'run': person running, water running, time running. A metonymy is a word related by a container-content relationship, e.g. "finish your plate" (plate meaning food), or a symbolic relationship, e.g. "allegiance to the flag" (flag meaning country). Play on words and riddles are commonly done by entertaining lexical or phonological relations. "Mary had a little lamb... with rice and vegetables" (polysemy). "Why are trees often confused with dogs? Because of their bark" (homonym). "Why is 6 afraid of 7? 789" (homophone). In corpus linguistics (corpus meaning a large collection of natural text), collocation is how words occur together. With a concordance, a listing of all mentions of a word, the key word in context (KIWC), and its surrounding words, we learn which words the word frequently occurs with. For example, we may find the word 'sarcastic' occurs often with words relating to negative behavior, like 'rude', inferring the word has an interpersonal dimension, where it's typically perceived as impoliteness. In the chapter three (secondary book), we look into genetic's influence on autism. From what I gather, there's a high certainty that genes play a role in autism but that it's hard to find a single cause due to degeneracy in genetic codes. Copy number variation (CNV) is repetition of sequences in the genome. Four times more likely to be passed from the father. I should look more into genetics. I'm not very familiar with it. Things to look more into is mutation of gene coding for protein, neurexin. DRD4 gene and its -7R, making one less sensitive to dopamine, linked to ADHD. I know that I was born with a build up of LCH cells above right eye that was surgically removed, though I don't believe there was more to it than that single build up of cells, and doesn't seem to have much relevance.