Meaning of a Word

Needs to be 3-4 pages double spaced

Project (10%)

Each student is to conduct an investigation that bears on the meaning of a word in English and write up a report

on it. Its not that I think English is so great; its just that a restriction to English makes evaluation fairer and

simpler. The report should not exceed 5 double-spaced pages, and may be considerably shorter. It needs to do

three things: say how the investigation was carried out, present the results of the investigation (possibly in tables or

graphs), and draw some conclusions about the meaning of the word from those results. Since such an undertaking

is probably new to you, I suggest you read (and re-read) the instructions below with care.

You may either investigate the meaning of the word as it stands currently (or as it was during a particular

historical period), or you can look at how and why its meaning has undergone a particular historical change. In

most cases, I would expect you to focus on a single sense of the word (most words are ambiguous, so be careful to

isolate the sense you plan to focus on), or a single point of change. However, I would also accept a project that

simultaneously examines two or possibly more senses of the same word, or charts an extended historical period

involving multiple changes, where such an enlarged investigation could be justified (run the idea by me or your TA,

if in doubt). It is fine to discuss the meanings of other words in the course of the report (perhaps words that work

the same way, or present an illuminating contrast), but the primary subject should be a single word.

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Philos 23: Meaning and Communication Sam Cumming 12.29.25

Depending on your interests, you might prefer a word that (i) belongs to some branch of science, (ii) is connected

to some philosophical controversy, or even (iii) has had its meaning stretched by politicians, or else been ruled upon

in a legal judgment (though none of the above are required, or will by themselves lead to a better grade). A

contested meaning (as in Peter Ludlows examples of lexical warfare see his book Living Words in the Other

Resources page on the course website) will mean that there is probably more information available in published

sources and online, and is likely to make the investigation more fun to boot.

I encourage you to employ as many of the methods below as you have time for and make sense for your subject.

Consult dictionaries (plural!). They have suggestions about how to divide up the senses of a word (but

remember your ambiguity tests, too), and offer explanations some of which are more-or-less complete

attempts at definition for each sense. The OED (and perhaps others) also include historical information

(check the timeline function in the OED online), and have some other nice functions too. Remember that

separate dictionaries exist for the major dialects of English. Be sure to accurately cite your sources in the

report.

Consult the intuitions of native English speakers (including your own, if you happen to be one). Dont just ask

people what they think the definition is (remember how bad people were with planet !), but come prepared

with particular cases (Does a hotdog count as a sandwich ?) and queries about factors that may be relevant

to determining if the word applies (Does the bread in a sandwich need to be two slices fully separated

horizontally? Can the separation be vertical instead, and does it have to go all the way through, or can

there be a connective hinge of bread?). Challenge them with counterexamples (What about an open-faced

sandwich?). Since peoples answers can differ, the best way to do this is give everyone the same survey, and

then collect the answers in some sort of chart.

Search large collections of English documents (these are known as linguistic corpora) for data about usage.

The simplest way to do this is with a google search (look up techniques for improving search, and try out

the advanced features). The output of this is of course a number (of hits) and the usual list of those hits.

The number can be instructive (if you want to know whether a word or phrase is relatively rare or common),

and you can go in and look at the webpages where the word or phrase occurs for context that will illuminate

meaning. Another thing to try is Google Books ngram viewer, which searches googles mind-boggling archive

of scanned books, and prints a chart of the number of occurrences of a word or whole phrase by year from

1800 to 2006. The OED will generate charts like this too, which go back further in time, but are based on

a tiny fraction of the data. In both cases, you cannot search directly for a particular sense of an ambiguous

word, but you can do so indirectly by searching for a phrase that incorporates the word while disambiguating

it (for instance, heavy or light vs. dark or light). Finally, those who can program in Python (or similar)

are able to make any query to a corpus they can (efficiently) code (take a look at Natural Language Toolkit,

https://www.nltk.org/).

Look up legal cases, news articles, philosophy papers, and so on.

The project will be carried out in stages:

Friday, Week 4 (1/30) Register project idea

Friday, Week 6 (2/13) Submit raw data

Friday, Week 7 (2/20) Submit final write-up

Please give me some data that you have today

I was thinking of the word consent but I am not sure