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52. Semantic scope of negation.

Sentiment words behave very differently when under the semantic scope of negation. The goal of this section is to present and support a method for approximating this semantic influence. The rules of thumb for how negation interacts with sentiment words are roughly as follows: Weak (mild) words such as good and bad behave like their opposites when negated: bad ≈ not good; good ≈ not bad. Strong (intense) words like superb and terrible have very general meanings under negation: not superb is consistent with everything from horrible to just-shy-of-superb, and different lexical items favor different senses. These observations suggest that it would be difficult to have a general a priori rule for how to handle negation. It doesn't just turn good to bad and bad to good. Its effects depend on the words being negated. We could capture the effects of negation fairly exactly if we had accurate semantic parses and were willing to devote extensive time and energy to implementing the relevant principles of semantic scope-taking. Though I myself love such projects, I suspect that it would not be worth the effort. The approximate method I develop next does extremely well.

53.The role of preposition in combining words into sentences.

A preposition describes a relationship between other words in a sentence. In itself, a word like "in" or "after" is rather meaningless and hard to define in mere words. For instance, when you do try to define a preposition like "in" or "between" or "on," you invariably use your hands to show how something is situated in relationship to something else. Prepositions are nearly always combined with other words in structures called prepositional phrases. Prepositional phrases can be made up of a million different words, but they tend to be built the same: a preposition followed by a determiner and an adjective or two, followed by a pronoun or noun (called the object of the preposition). This whole phrase, in turn, takes on a modifying role, acting as an adjective or an adverb, locating something in time and space, modifying a noun, or telling when or where or under what conditions something happened. In the role of prepositions may make a combination of words consisting of a preposition and a noun or adverb, for example, absent due to an illness, in contrast to many, according to the order, along the shore. Is it any wonder that prepositions create such troubles for students for whom English is a second language? We say we are at the hospital to visit a friend who is in the hospital. We lie in bed but on the couch. We watch a film at the theater but on television. For native speakers, these little words present little difficulty, but try to learn another language, any other language, and you will quickly discover that prepositions are troublesome wherever you live and learn. This page contains some interesting (sometimes troublesome) prepositions with brief usage notes. To address all the potential difficulties with prepositions in idiomatic usage would require volumes, and the only way English language learners can begin to master the intricacies of preposition usage is through practice and paying close attention to speech and the written word. Keeping a good dictionary close at hand (to hand?) is an important first step

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