Term paper in Semantics

[Laura_86]

Hello everyone!

 

I’m a university student from Bonn, Germany, and have to write a linguistic term paper for my semantics class. My topic is: Meronymies in English - Is a cap part of a bottle? So I’m dealing with the subfield lexical semantics. The most important thing to mention is that it has to be an empirical term paper, and we are obliged to use questionnaires and dictionary entries to get results.

My problem is that I cannot think of any useful questions for my questionnaire right now. I would be very happy if you could help me a little bit, and maybe come up with a few ideas J

 

Thanks in advance!

 

 

Laura

[fuzzylogician]

One thing that comes to mind: try reading about 'bridge anophora' or 'bridging anaphora'. It's basically sentences like (1) below. It's anaphora that picks out not a word that was mentioned in the previous context but something semantically close in some relevant way that conjures it up. I think most people give examples similar to (1) to illustrate this phenomenon, where we have lexical items with a part-whole relation. Try relating this phenomenon to your topic -- there are interesting questions and experiments you could do here (but it's your homework assignment and you should work it out yourself). Good luck! 

(1) My car broke down this morning. The engine wouldn't start.

[Laura_86]

I have finished my questionnaire, and it would be really helpful to find a few participants here as well

Here is the link: http://www.surveymethods.com/EndUser.aspx?AF8BE7FEABE5F8FDAB

Thanks

Laura

Edited August 8, 2013 by Laura_86