DAS Semantics

Francis (フランシス) Bond (凡土) : 2024, 2025, 2026.

This is the second part of 4UJ2/5UJ2 Syntax and Semantics.

In this part, 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).

We will use concrete 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.

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/.

The textbooks is Saeed, but I try to cover the material in the lectures. As a result, you need to come to the lectures or read the textbook (and I recommend you do both). General guidelines to the course are given in the first lecture.

Course Outline

Lecture	Content (click to download)	Tutorial/Assessment	Reading
1 02-09	Introduction, Organization: Main Issues I saw a kid ️🪚🐐 / ️👀🧒	No tutorial	Saeed 1, 2
---	[NP [N Syntax]]
2 03-23	Theories of meaning and the meaning of words What is a dog-cart?	Tute 2	Saeed 3
3 03-30	Sentence meaning and compositionality the windows were blocked by old-fashioned shutters	Tute 3
04-06	🥚 Easter 🥚
4 04-13	Quantification, Truth and Sentiment Julia and I had no great pleasure in our lives (Joanna!)	Tute 4
5 04-20	Idioms and Metaphors to cross someone’s path	Tute 5
6 04-27	Pragmatics and Discourse kindly put your revolver in your pocket	Tute 6
6+ 05-07	Revision (maybe Distributional Meaning)	Online Quiz

Text Book

• Saeed, John (2009). Semantics. 4th Edition. Wiley-Blackwell.

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
• 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
  • The Baker Street Wiki
  • Sherlock Holmes & the Internet of Things
• 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

• Satisfactorily complete ALL tutorial sets (20 marks) and attend 80% of the tutorials. Students will discuss and complete the problem sets with the tutors during tutorials and hand them in at the next tutorial.
• Do the assigned readings to make sure you understand the content of the course
• One quiz (30 marks). Students must obtain 20 marks out of 30 marks to pass the course.
• People doing 5UJ2 get an extra small project (TBA).

My mind rebels at stagnation, give me problems, give me work! The Sign of Four

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I would like to use the results of your project 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).

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Course materials created are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License and are available at https://github.com/bond-lab/Semantics/.

Newt icon by parkjisun from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)