ENG302 -- Topic: Semantics and Pragmatics - Assignment 8 James Madison University

Instructions: [Your answers to this assignment should be written out clearly (or typed :) ). As an "ungraded" assignment, your work will be collected but will be marked only as an acceptable or unacceptable effort.]

• Practice with the "Assumed Familiarity" Hierarchy -- a fairly simple example. For the following little paragraph, find all the referring expressions (specifically noun phrases) in this excerpt and then attempt to determine the level of assumed familiarity for each one (except that you may exclude the same exceptions that Prince 1981 excludes):

  A mouse has invaded my house. It has been nibbling at the bread in my kitchen. I am thinking of inviting a cat that belongs to a friend of mine to come visit me for awhile. I have searched the internet for other measures I can take, but I have not found a way to let the mouse know that I think its behavior is rude!

• And more practice with the "Assumed Familiarity" hierarchy -- The following excerpt is taken, with slight modification, from a book of linguistics-related blogs entitled Far from the Madding Gerund. (Note that the linguistic content of this example is just for fun, not for studying :) ). Find all the referring expressions (specifically noun phrases) in this excerpt and then attempt to determine the level of assumed familiarity for each one (except that you may again exclude the same exceptions that Prince 1981 excludes):

  "A student in my Linguistics 001 class asked me a hard questions: why doesn't "reverse sarcasm" work?
  We can use any positively evaluated word to mean its opposite, given a halfway appropriate context and performance: "how wonderful!", "how delicious!"
  But the opposite direction rarely works: "how horrible!", "how disgusting!"
  There are specific reversals, like 'bad' for 'good', but they are much more culturally, lexically, or situationally restricted.
  All the obvious Gricean accounts that I can think of seem to be invertible, which is not consistent with these facts. So I did what I usually do in such cases. I asked Ellen Prince. She came back with a connection to a classic observation by Edward Sapir."