UTS Semantics April 2024

What is English Semantics? Give an answer based on your words!

Answer explanation

"But the obvious thing is that speakers can make their thoughts and feelings and intentions known to other speakers of the language and can understand what others say. This ability requires possession of a vocabulary and for speakers to know how to pronounce every item in this vocabulary and how to recognize its pronunciation by other speakers. They know how to use the production vocabulary in meaningful sentences and to understand the sentences produced by others. And of course they know meanings—how to choose the items that express what they want to express and how to find the meanings in what other people say."

What concept does the text above explain?

• Human Creative

• Arbitrariness of Language

• Semantics Knowledge

• Morphology

• We know that some of the following sentences is not correct:
  -Toni rides a motorcycle to school

-Toni is yawning

• -The motorcycle yawns

• -Yawn motorcycle Toni are ride
  
  What kind of semantic knowledge do you get about the example above?

• Contradictory

• Synonymy

• Paraphrase

• Anomaly

"Some sentences have double meanings; they can be interpreted in two ways."

This is the explanation about?

• Ambiguity

• Semantic Feature

• Entailment

• Anomaly

Answer explanation

The following words have some element of meaning without being synonymous or antonymous
Example: bachelor, widow, winner, married, single. You may know one word that doesn't belong to the sequence.

What kind of semantic knowledge do you get about the example above?

• Entailment

• Adjency Pair

• Antonymy

• Semantic Feeature

Pragmatics and Semantics are the two branch of linguistics that studies about meaning. Then, what is the differences both of it?

Answer explanation

While semantics is mainly concerned with a speaker’s competence to use the language system in producing meaningful utterances and processing (comprehending) utterances produced by others, the chief focus of pragmatics is a person’s ability to derive meanings from specific kinds of speech situations.

Sentence and Utterance have slight different in Semantics. What is it?

Answer explanation

An utterance is an event and involves situations/context. Sentence is a sequence of words that has meaning.

Which one is not included as linguistic elements?

• Utterance

• Apperance

• sentence

• dialect

"Within that community there are differences in the way different people use the language, chiefly of a geographical or social nature. When people who have the same native language can understand one another but still notice consistent differences in each other’s speech, we say they speak different ...... of that language."

What concept does the text above explain?

• Interpretation

• Utterance Meaning

• Dialect

• Paralanguage

Which one is not included as Conventional Sign?

• Whistles

• Horns

• Black Cloud

• Tone of Calls