DAS Semantics
This is the second part of 4UJ2/5UJ2 Syntax and Semantics. In this elective we will detect how language conveys meaning, using examples taken from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories and Karel Čapek's Válka s Mloky "War with the Newts". The course considers meaning from the smallest levels of words and morphemes, up through sentences to the stories as a whole.
In this, the second half of the course, we will look at how words convey meanings and how they can be combined to express richer meaning (semantics). We will show that meaning does not only come from the words themselves, but also from our own understanding of them, and that words can convey much more than simple truth-conditional meanings (pragmatics).
Course Content
This part of the course introduces basic skills in semantic analysis, such as:
- Distinguishing word senses
- Understanding how meaning is built up compositionally
- Understanding how words can convey feelings
- Understanding how meaning can be conveyed indirectly
- Understanding how meaning changes in context
Course Page: https://bond-lab.github.io/Semantics/.
There is no set text-book, all the material is covered in the lectures. As a result, you need to actually come to the lectures. General guidelines to the course are given in the first lecture. You must one short story, and will carry out detailed analysis of the meaning at various levels — this course has homework. However, it is designed to be as interesting as possible, and the stories are some of the most popular in the world.
Course Outline
| Lecture | Content (click to download) | Quiz | Assessment |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Introduction, Organization: Main Issues | ||
| 1 | Theories of meaning and the meaning of words
What is a dog-cart? |
Project 1: Annotation Task
Let me know your language, I will give you the link by next week, a day before class. |
|
| 3 | Sentence meaning and compositionality
the windows were blocked by old-fashioned shutters | Sentence | |
| 3 | Quantification, Truth and Sentiment
Julia and I had no great pleasure in our lives |
Quantification |
Project 1: Annotation Task
Finish by 2024-11-23 23:59 (Sat) |
| 4 | Idioms and Metaphors
to cross someone’s path |
Start Comparison Task
|
|
| 5 | Pragmatics and Discourse | Pragmatics | Project 2: Write up
Due: 2025-01-10 23:59 (Fri) |
| 6 | Review and Feedback |
Project 3: Write up Due: 2025-01-10 23:59 (Fri) |
Required Reading
- Čapek, Karel (1892)
Válka s Mloky (vsm) - Čapek, Karel (1892) translated by David Wyllie (2006)
The War with the Newts (twwnt)
Original (some typos)
Other Resources
- Semantics and Lexicography
- Christiane Fellbaum, ed. (1998) Wordnet: An Electronic Lexical Database. MIT Press
- Kroeger, Paul (2022) Analyzing meaning: An introduction to semantics and pragmatics. 3rd. edn. (Textbooks in Language Sciences 5). Berlin: Language Science Press.
- Sidney I. Landau (1989) Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
- Lyons, John (1977) Semantics. Cambridge University Press
- Saeed, John (2009). Semantics. 3rd Edition. Wiley-Blackwell.
- Simple Writer
- Stylistics
- Geoffrey Leech and Michael H. Short (2007) Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose 2nd Edition. (London: Longman)
- Ling 131 Language & Style: a Stylistics course within the Department of Linguistics and English Language (LAEL) at Lancaster University.
- Sherlock Studies and Detective Fiction
- Baring-Gould, William (1967). The Annotated Sherlock Holmes. New York: Clarkson N. Potter. ISBN 0-517-50291-7.
- Drake, David (2009) Crime Fiction at the Time of the Exhibition: the Case of Sherlock Holmes and Arsène Lupin Synergies Royaume-Uni et Irlande (Gerflint)
- Jay Finley Christ (1947) An Irregular Guide to Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street Argus Books (Canonical Abbreviations)
- Doyle, Arthur Conan (1982) How I Made My List Strand Magazine (August)
- Klinger, Leslie (2005). The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-05916-2.
- Ronald A. Knox (1929) The Best English Detective Stories of 1928, 1929, Introduction. Horace Liveright
- McCaw, Neil (2016) Who IS Sherlock Holmes? TEDEd Animation
- Donald A. Redmond (1990) Sherlock Holmes among the Pirates : copyright and Conan Doyle in America 1890–1930 Greenwood Press.
- Dorothy L. Sayers (1947) Unpopular Opinions: Twenty-One Essays. Harcourt, Brace and Company (New York).
- John Scaggs (2005) Crime Fiction (The New Critical Idiom) Routledge,
- Tzvetan Todorov (1971) The Typology of Detective Fiction in The Poetics of Prose Translated by Richard Howard pp 42–52
- Holmes in Translation
- Cheung, Martha P.Y. (2006) An anthology of Chinese discourse on translation/edited with annotations and commentary Brookland (Vol 1 From earliest times to the Buddhist project.; pages 42-48)
- Hao, Ruijuan (2012) Transnational Negotiations and the Interplay Between Chinese and Western Detective Fiction at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, PhD UC Riverside
- Hung, Eva (1998) Giving Texts a Context: Chinese Translations of Classical English Detective Stories 1896-1916 in David E. Pollard (ed.) Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China John Benjamin's
- Seago, Karen and Lei, Victoria (2014) ‘Looking East and Looking West’: Crime Genre Conventions and Tropes in Comparative Critical Studies, 11(2-3) 315-335
- Şehnaz Tahir-Gürçağlar (2008) Sherlock Holmes in the interculture: Pseudotranslation and anonymity in Turkish literature. In Anthony Pym, Miriam Shlesinger, and Daniel Simeoni, editors, Beyond descriptive translation studies : investigations in homage to Gideon Toury, chapter 10, pages 133–151. John Benjamins.
- Ping, Zhang (2005) SHERLOCK HOLMES IN CHINA Perspectives 13(2), 106-114 (full text available through the proxy)
- 钟文苓 (1934) 《关於福尔摩斯二三事》 万象(1934年) 1942年第2年第4期
- 程 小情 [Cheng Xiaoqing] (1946) 論探偵小説
- 范 伯群 [Fan Boqun] (1985) 论程 小青的 《霍桑探案》
- Wikis and more
- Courses on Sherlock Holmes and Detective Fiction
- Sherlock Holmes: Teaching English Through Detective Fiction, by Pamela J. Greene (Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute)
- GEH1005/GEK1021: Crime Fiction in English and Chinese by Dr Zhao Zhen Xing (NUS)
Assessment
My mind rebels at stagnation, give me problems, give me work! The Sign of Four
At the start of the semester you will be given a short passage from one of the stories that will be used by you throughout the course to study meaning. In the three projects you will examine and annotate different levels of meaning using on-line tools provided. This may be slightly harder if you are not a native speaker of English, but we will try to link to translations of the stories in as many languages as possible.
People doing 4UJ2 do both projects 1 and 2.
People doing 5UJ2 do projects 1, 2 and 3.
Project 1: Disambiguation (20%: individual work)
Identify and annotate word meaning for your own passage of one of the stories using wordnet as the sense inventory.
Project 2: Comparison (20%: group work)
Compare and contrast your annotations with other annotators; re-annotate based on your discussion and write a short paper.
Project 3: Non-compositional meaning (10%: individual work)
- Identify interpretations that are not strictly compositional: idioms and metaphors
I would like to use the results of your analysis in projects 1–3 to help further in research on meaning. If you would like me not to use your input, you may email me at any time up to one week after you get your results for this semester. If you do so, I will discard your input. Otherwise, I will use it to find out more about meaning, and you will be credited as 'students of DAS Syntax and Semantics'. I will also make it available for others to use under the same license as the materials I create (CC BY 4.0).
Course
materials created by us are licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 International License and are
available
at Detecting Meaning with Sherlock Holmes.
Computational Linguistics Lab
Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies
Nanyang Technological University
Level 3, Room 55, 14 Nanyang Drive, Singapore 637332
Tel: (+65) 6592 1568; Fax: (+65) 6794 6303