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Cassie and Mitch are newly engaged, and it's time to meet the in-laws. When environmentalist Herb Flores turns up dead beneath a sand castle, though, they have to balance investigative work with family obligations.
With suspects like a board president, a female bodybuilder, and the Chief of Police, identifying Herb's killer is a risky business. Throw in their families, a high-maintenance cat, and sand sculptures, and the town of Fatmire, Florida, just got more interesting. Check your local Dymocks store for stock.
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Send us an email. Locate a store. In order to grasp what somebody says, we must first of all perceive the utterance—hear a spoken utterance, see a written one. But hearing alone is not enough, nor is seeing. Of course there can be different degrees of commonality in the common ground. Speaker and hearer may speak different dialects of the same language, so that their pronunciations differ to some degree and there is some divergence in the ways they express themselves.
One—or both—may be a foreigner with only partial mastery of the language they are using. Suppose we hear an utterance, know the language, know the meanings of the words and the sentences formed with the words. On the other hand, when communication is successful, we, as hearers, interpret correctly because we derive some information from what has been said previously the discourse context and from knowledge of the speaker and from a grasp of conditions and circumstances in the environment the physical-social context.
When we listen to someone talking, we first take in a sequence of sounds, a phonetic event, but our understanding is not a matter of grasping one sound after another, nor even one word after another. We organize the message into sense-groups Clark and Clark — But conversational speech is not usually so neatly organized. Listeners—and readers—use their implicit knowledge of the language to grasp the message they are dealing with.
For instance, if we encounter the verb put in an utterance, we are prepared to find three expressions telling us who puts, what is put, and where it is put. With the verb travel we unconsciously recognize that there will be information about the person s traveling and perhaps about the starting point, the goal, the route taken, and the duration of time.
The verb buy must be accompanied by an expression that names the buyer and item s bought and there is likely to be information about seller and price, as well. One part of semantic analysis, therefore, is concerned with describing the kinds of expressions which usually accompany various verbs—what roles these expressions play with respect to the verb and to each other—the who, what, where and when.
Our study of such roles begins in Chapter 5. People frequently give an accurate account of something that has been said but almost always they re-tell it in words that are different from the original message. The account is not an exact repetition of what was said unless the message is fairly short. Thus, as listeners, we begin by identifying the phonetic message and through the phonetic message identify the semantic message. So much for perception and identification.
Now consider interpretation. Comprehension is not just taking in words or even sense-groups. As listeners we use our background information to interpret the message. As Fillmore puts it, we need to know not only what the speaker says but also what he is talking about, why he bothers to say it, and why he says it the way he does.
We have to relate what is being said to what was said previously— relate new information that is coming at us to the information that preceded it. The listener has to decide if the speaker is joking, being sarcastic, or is entirely serious, and such judgements and interpretations have to be made within a brief span of time. From the other side, speakers who make themselves understood have to have some notion of what their addressees already know and what the addressees can infer and fill in.
Writers have to decide for what potential audience they are writing and how much these potential readers can contribute to the process of comprehending. Can you recall an instance in which you did not fully understand what someone said but figured out from the context what he or she meant—what the speaker was trying to do, what the circumstances seemed to require, etc.?
If not, maybe you can invent a possible situation. An utterance happens just once; a spoken utterance happens and then, unless it is recorded electronically, it ceases to exist; a written utterance is intended to last—for a short time in the case of a shopping list, for instance, or much longer, as in the case of a book.
A sentence, on the other hand, is not an event; it is a construction of words in English or whatever language in a particular sequence which is meaningful in that language. In our illustration each of the three utterances contains the meaning of the sentence, and each utterance has an extra meaning or meanings because of the circumstances in which it occurs. The meaning of a sentence is determined by the language, something known to all people who have learned to use that language.
It is the meanings of the individual words and the meaning of the syntactic construction in which they occur. The meaning of an utterance is the meaning of the sentence plus the meanings of the circumstances: the time and place, the people involved, their backgrounds, their relationship to one another, and what they know about one another. All these circumstances we can call the physical-social context of an utterance. Why distinguish between sentence and utterance?
Because it is important to recognize what meanings are communicated to us in language and which meanings we derive from the contexts in which language is used. Because it is important to distinguish between linguistic meaning, what is communicated by particular pieces of language, and utterance meaning, what a certain individual meant by saying such-and-such in a particular place, at a particular time, and to certain other individuals.
The sentence Our visit to the factory was a wonderful experience has none of these meanings in itself—or, to put it differently, it has potentially any of these meanings. An utterance is often part of a larger discourse—a conversation, a formal lecture, a poem, a short story, a business letter, or a love letter, among other possibilities.
A spoken discourse is any act of speech that occurs in a given place and during a given period of time. The linguistic context of an utterance can make a difference of meaning, as well as the social context. Does it seem to have the same meaning in both of them? The phrase quick recovery also occurs in both stories.
Does it have the same meaning in both? Listeners—and to a lesser extent readers—often have to fill in information that the speaker or writer takes for granted. The stage was over here on the right and the lobby over there on the left. A bit of information inserted in such a context is called an implicature—a conversational implicature, to be precise. An implicature is a bridge constructed by the hearer or reader to relate one utterance to some previous utterance, and often the hearer or reader makes this connection unconsciously.
In this case the bridge is easy to construct; our knowledge of the world lets us take for granted the fact that a theater has a stage and a lobby. It had a stage and a lobby. Our engine is making strange noises. Laura: We have guests coming from out of town. If so, what is her answer? If so, what is the question? However, a spoken utterance consists of more than words.
In speech meanings are communicated not merely by what is said but also by the way it is said. Read these four brief dialogues. B: Sorry. What did you say? D: Oh? F: And you? H: Oh? Individual speakers may vary somewhat in just what they pronounce, but the four renditions can be represented as follows, where the most prominent syllable is indicated with capital letters and the rising or falling of the voice is indicated by letters going up or down.
We produce all our spoken utterances with a melody, or intonation: by changing the speed with which the vocal bands in the throat vibrate we produce rising or falling pitch or combinations of rise and fall. Intonation and accent together constitute prosody, the meaningful elements of speech apart from the words that are uttered. Within each sense-group one word more accurately, the stressed syllable of one word is more prominent than the rest of the group, giving special attention or focus to that word.
Thus, the more numerous the divisions made, the more points of emphasis there are. Typically, when speech is represented in print, italics are sometimes used to indicate the accent, but this is done only sporadically and unevenly; our writing system largely neglects this important element of spoken communication. A written transcript of a speech can be highly misleading because it is only a partial rendition of that speech.
In speech there is always an accent in some part of an utterance, and placement of accent in different parts of an utterance creates differences of meaning. In the English language accent is mobile, enabling us to communicate different meanings by putting the emphasis in different places. The usual place is on the last important word, for instance: My cousin is an ARchitect. If the utterance is broken into two or more sense groups, each group has its own accent.
The last accent is ordinarily the most prominent of all because the pitch changes on that syllable. Thus the speaker can highlight one word or several words in an utterance and give special focus to that word or those words.
The placement of accent on different words ties the utterance to what has been said previously. Here my cousin Edward is new information and the stressed syllable of the name Edward is accented. The phrase an architect now represents given information and is de-accented. Accent, by giving special focus to one word, can create contrast with other words that might have been used in the same place.
Moving the accent to different words creates different meanings in what would otherwise be a single utterance. Each of the following utterances has an emphasis that makes a contrast. What is the contrast, in each case? Alex phoned EDna last Sunday. ALex phoned Edna last Sunday. Thus what effect prosody has in an utterance—what meanings it carries— depends on the total context in which the utterance occurs.
In a tone language such as Chinese or Thai differences of relative pitch or differences in the change of pitch have a lexical function; words with different meanings are distinguished only by the difference of pitch. Intonation does not have the function of differentiating lexical meanings. Intonation is achieved by different vibrations of the vocal cords. Greater frequency of vibration results in what we call higher pitch. Intonational changes of pitch may occur at various places in an utterance, but observation shows that changes at or near the end of the utterance have more prominence and are more likely to be meaningful than utterance-internal changes.
In general, as Allan Chapter 5 points out, a falling tune suggests that the speaker is confident of what he or she is saying and the utterance is delivered with finality; it shows speaker dominance. A rising tune is more oriented toward the addressee. Naturally, individual speakers differ: some are more assertive in their speech, others more attuned to the feelings of the addressee.
And there are dialect differences; it is a common observation that some speakers have a rise where others would end an utterance with a falling tune. Leaving aside the individual and dialectal differences, we can say that a rise is customary when the speaker is asking the addressee to repeat; it is likely to suggest interest in what the addressee may have to say but it is also used to contradict what has just been said.
On the other hand, just limiting ourselves to simple contrasts between fall and rise it is easy to show that intonation plays an important part in the way people communicate with one another. Here are some common distinctions made with intonation in utterances that have the same verbal material. Other uses of intonation will come up in later chapters. With rising tones the speaker seeks confirmation or information from the addressee. The falling intonation in such utterances is a request for information that has not yet been given.
Fall on sister—typically a long fall—and a short rise on Ellen denotes lack of correlation, so that Ellen can only be the name of the addressee, a short vocative attached to an utterance. A yes-no question will have a rise. The alternative question has a rise on the first of the alternatives and a fall on the second.
A fall expresses agreement with what has been said; a fall and short rise expresses only partial agreement, agreement with reservations. Yes, it is. We interpret an utterance according to its position in a discourse, our knowledge of the speaker, our recognition of how things are in our world Couper-Kuhlen Consider first the standardized noises we make, which are written this way not very accurately : ps-st sh-sh huh?
On the whole they are known to all or at least large portions of a language community and indeed may be used by speakers of several different languages. In general, the maker of the sign and those who hear it attach the same meaning to that sign; communication occurs. These seven audible signs indicate, respectively, a request for attention; a call for silence; a request for repetition or clarification; a signal of agreement; an expression of pleasure or enjoyment; an indication of coldness; and an expression of shame or shock.
Then there are other ways of using the voice, as part of the spoken utterance, which cannot be considered either signs or part of language. These ways of using the voice cannot be considered signs—they do not signify—but they may be expressive, communicative in a secondary sense.
Speakers may want to create a particular effect with their ways of using the voice; listeners may interpret what they hear in particular ways because of vocal features; but if intentions and interpretations coincide, the coincidence is fortuitous.
All these ways of using the voice are together called paralanguage. The failure to use language—silence—at a particular juncture can likewise be expressive. The former, the visible signs, have the capacity to communicate in much the way a word communicates; the latter could only be said to communicate in a secondary sense.
Combinations of paralanguage and gestures can communicate something about the mood of the speaker—anger, boredom, nervousness, elation, for instance—and actors work hard to achieve such effects in interpreting the characters they play. But each actor strives to do so differently. We are not impressed by a budding starlet who uses the same inventory of mannerisms as a seasoned actress.
Other facets of appearance—clothing, hair style, jewelry, cosmetics, facial hair and what is done with it—have an effect on others, intentional or not. The distance between interlocutors and whether they touch each other or not depends on tacit standards that each of us learns from the culture in which we grow up.
What is meaningless or mild in one culture may be rude, obscene, or otherwise over-effective in another. Then compare your interpretations with those made by other members of your class. In a class composed of students from different countries it will be interesting to compare the signals made in the following situations: a Two people who are acquainted see each other at some distance and greet each other with a gesture.
The elements of language are similar to natural signs and, more especially, to conventional signals. A sign is meaningful to us only if we perceive it, identify it and interpret it. Pieces of language, like other signs, depend on context for what they signify.
We recognize social context and linguistic context. We distinguish between sentence, a language formation and utterance, what is produced in a particular social context. The meaning that speakers extract from an utterance is often more than the linguistic message itself; knowledge of reality, the situation, and the participants in the communication event enables the individual to fill in.
A conversational implicature is the information that is not spoken but is understood in tying one utterance meaningfully to a previous utterance.
Prosody is an important carrier of meaning in spoken utterances and consists of two parts, accent and intonation. Accent is the comparatively greater force and higher pitch that makes one part of the utterance more prominent than other parts.
It has a syntagmatic function, giving focus to the accented word and indicating that other parts of the utterance, especially those that follow, are given information. Paradigmatic focus is an emphasis on one word as opposed to other words that might have been used. Intonation is the set of tunes that can differentiate meanings of utterances with the same verbal content. Intonation patterns are falls and rises in pitch and combinations of falls and rises. Generally a fall indicates speaker dominance or termination.
A rise is hearer oriented and suggests continuance. In speech situations some meanings are conveyed by nonlinguistic matters. These include paralanguage, appearance, gestures and silence. Suggested reading 1 Clark , Chapters 1—— , develops the notion of language use as joint action and joint activity by people who possess a common ground. A more thorough description is Cruttenden , Chapter — which provides descriptions of tunes and their semantic functions; Chapter 5 —74 surveys dialect differences in the use of tunes.
Linguistic expressions may be of various length. We recognize three units of meaning: morphemes which may be less than a word , lexemes roughly, words and idioms , and sentences. In this chapter we introduce a distinction between lexemes, which have semantic relations outside of language, and function words, which contribute grammatical meanings to utterances.
A lexeme may consist of one or more meaningful units, called morphemes, and we discuss different kinds of morphemes. Every lexeme is a combination of form and meaning. Two lexemes that have the same form pronunciation, spelling are homonyms; a single lexeme with a wide range of meanings is polysemous; but it is not always easy to decide if apparently different meanings for one form represent a range of meanings belonging to a single lexeme or meanings of different lexemes, which are homonyms.
Children learning their native language first learn words in association with observable items and situations and events. We are likely to think that a language consists of a large number of words and each of these words has a direct correlation with something outside of language, which is its meaning.
But the idea of a mental picture is misleading. What mental image do you form for DOOR? A revolving door? A folding door? A sliding door, moving horizontally? An overhead door which moves vertically? A door turning on hinges? Is it in a wall, or on a cabinet, or part of a car? You can picture all of these in sequence but not simultaneously. Clearly the meaning of door or dog is more than what is included in a single image, and your knowledge of these words is much more than the ability to relate them to single objects.
You can use these words successfully in a large number of situations because you have the knowledge that makes this possible.
Reference is the relation between a language expression such as this door, both doors, the dog, another dog and whatever the expression pertains to in a particular situation of language use, including what a speaker may imagine. Denotation is the potential of a word like door or dog to enter into such language expressions.
Reference is the way speakers and hearers use an expression successfully; denotation is the knowledge they have that makes their use successful. How can we ever know that we all have the same mental images? If semantics is a science, it cannot operate scientifically by starting with things that are not observable and not comparable.
Furthermore, words are not the only semantic units. Meanings are expressed by units that may be smaller than words—morphemes see below, section 3. Furthermore, meaning is more than denotation. People not only talk and write to describe things and events and characteristics; they also express their opinions, favorable and unfavorable.
Language furnishes the means for expressing a wide range of attitudes; this aspect of meaning is called connotation. Another aspect is sense relations: the meaning of any expression varies with context, what other expressions it occurs with and what expressions it contrasts with. But how do you feel about dogs? How does a particular society value dogs? It would be wrong to think that a purely biological definition of the lexeme dog is a sufficient account of its meaning.
Part of its meaning is its connotation, the affective or emotional associations it elicits, which clearly need not be the same for all people who know and use the word. A denotation identifies the central aspect of word meaning, which everybody generally agrees about. Connotation refers to the personal aspect of meaning, the emotional associations that the word arouses. Connotations vary according to the experience of individuals but, because people do have common experiences, some words have shared connotations.
Languages provide means of expressing different attitudes. The referring expressions that violin and that fiddle can have the same referent—can refer to the same object on a particular occasion— but they do not have the same meaning. They differ in connotation. Violin is the usual term, the neutral one; fiddle-is used for humor or to express affection or lack of esteem.
We also need to note here that car, building, and fire have larger denotations than automobile, edifice and conflagration respectively. The expression of attitudes can be quite subtle.
We choose to use one word rather than another. We might, for example, say that Linda is thin, or slender, or svelte, or skinny. Why is Caterpillar a good name for an earth-moving tractor but not for a sports car? How would you rank the following as possible names for a sports car?
What a word means depends in part on its associations with other words, the relational aspect. The meaning that a lexeme has because of these relationships is the sense of that lexeme. Part of this relationship is seen in the way words do, or do not, go together meaningfully. It makes sense to say John walked and it makes sense to say An hour elapsed. Part of the meaning of elapse is that it goes with hour, second, minute, day but not with John, and part of the meaning of hour, second and so forth is that these words can co-occur with elapse.
Part of the relationship is seen in the way word meanings vary with context. A library is a collection of books Professor Jones has a rather large library and is also a building that houses a collection of books The library is at the corner of Wilson and Adams Streets.
We can say: 4 A window broke. Adjectives, too, can have different senses. If you come across some object which you have never seen before, and you wonder about its origin and its purpose, we can say that you are curious about it. But we can also call the object a curious kind of thing.
The same term is used for your subjective feelings and for the supposedly objective properties of this item—a curious person, a curious object. Take these phrases with the adjective happy. The meaning of a lexeme is, in part, its relation to other lexemes of the language. Each lexeme is linked in some way to numerous other lexemes of the language. First, there is the relation of the lexeme with other lexemes with which it occurs in the same phrases or sentences, in the way that arbitrary can co-occur with judge, happy with child or with accident, sit with chair, read with book or newspaper.
These are syntagmatic relations, the mutual association of two or more words in a sequence not necessarily right next to one another so that the meaning of each is affected by the other s and together their meanings contribute to the meaning of the larger unit, the phrase or sentence.
Another kind of relation is contrastive. Instead of saying The judge was arbitrary, for instance, we can say The judge was cautious or careless, or busy or irritable, and so on with numerous other possible descriptors.
This is a paradigmatic relation, a relation of choice. We choose from among a number of possible words that can fill the same blank: the words may be similar in meaning or have little in common but each is different from the others. Since we are used to a writing system that goes from left to right, we may think of syntagmatic relations as horizontal and paradigmatic relations as vertical.
A compound expression, such as book and newspaper, cautious but arbitrary, read or write puts two lexemes that are paradigmatically related into a syntagmatic relationship. Slowly we learn from other members of our speech community and from our personal experiences what associations are favorable and which are not connotation. And we acquire an implicit knowledge of how lexemes are associated with other lexemes sense relations. An asterisk inserted before a phrase or sentence in the text indicates that that this is not an acceptable English construction.
Each verb below is fairly limited as to the kind of referring expression that can occur as object. Name one or two nouns that can occur in the object. What colors does red contrast with in these collocations? The above is a meaningful sentence which is composed of smaller meaningful parts. We call this phrase a referring expression. A referring expression is a piece of language that is used AS IF it is linked to something outside language, some living or dead entity or concept or group of entities or concepts.
Most of the next chapter is about referring expressions. The entity to which the referring expression is linked is its referent. Another meaningful part is the verb bark, which is also linked to something outside of language, an activity associated, here, with the referring expression a dog. We call this meaningful part a predicate. The use of language generally involves naming or referring to some entity and saying, or predicating, something about that entity.
The sentence also has several kinds of grammatical meanings. Every language has a grammatical system and different languages have somewhat different grammatical systems. We can best explain what grammatical meanings are by showing how the sentence A dog barked differs from other sentences that have the same, or a similar, referring expression and the same predicate.
The grammatical system of English makes possible the expression of meanings like these: statement vs question: A dog barked. Did a dog bark? A dog did not bark.
No dog barked. A dog barks. Some dogs barked. The dog barked. Grammatical meanings, then, are expressed in various ways: the arrangement of words referring expression before the predicate, for instance , by grammatical affixes like the -s attached to the noun dog and the - ed attached to the verb bark, and by grammatical words, or function words, like the ones illustrated in these sentences: do in the form did , not, a, some, and the.
Their meanings are not grammatical but lexical, with associations outside language. They are lexemes. All the lexemes of a language constitute the lexicon of the language, and all the lexemes that you know make up your personal lexicon.
Four or one? There are four forms and the forms have four different meanings, but they have a shared meaning, which is lexical, and other meanings of a grammatical nature added to the lexical meaning.
We say that these four forms constitute one lexeme—which, for convenience we designate as go. Group b presents a different sort of problem. The expression put up with combines the forms of put and up and with, but its meaning is not the combination of their separate meanings.
Arm, chair, happy, guitar, lemon, shoe and horn are all morphemes; none of them can be divided into something smaller that is meaningful. They are free morphemes because they occur by themselves.
The elements un-, -ist and -ade in unhappy, guitarist and lemonade respectively, are also morphemes; they are bound morphemes which are always attached to something else, as in these examples. The form is fairly easy to determine: in writing it is a sequence of letters, in speech a sequence of phonemes. But meaning is more difficult to determine. In other pairs, numerous in English, such as steak and stake, pronunciation is identical but spelling is different, reflecting the fact that the words were once different in their phonological form.
English also has pairs of homographs, two words that have different pronunciations but the same spelling; for example, bow, rhyming with go and referring to an instrument for shooting arrows, and bow, rhyming with cow and indicating a bending of the body as a form of respectful greeting.
Lexicographers and semanticists sometimes have to decide whether a form with a wide range of meanings is an instance of polysemy or of homonymy. A polysemous lexeme has several apparently related meanings. The noun head, for instance, seems to have related meanings when we speak of the head of a person, the head of a company, head of a table or bed, a head of lettuce or cabbage. If we take the anatomical referent as the basic one, the other meanings can be seen as derived from the basic one, either reflecting the general shape of the human head or, more abstractly, the relation of the head to the rest of the body.
Dictionaries recognize the distinction between polysemy and homonymy by making a polysemous item a single dictionary entry and making homophonous lexemes two or more separate entries. Thus head is one entry and bank is entered twice.
Producers of dictionaries often make a decision in this regard on the basis of etymology, which is not necessarily relevant, and in fact separate entries are necessary in some instances when two lexemes have a common origin. Two lexemes are either identical in form or not, but relatedness of meaning is not a matter of yes or no; it is a matter of more or less.
Examine the different occurrences of the verb ask in the following sentences: 6 Fred asked Betty where his golf clubs were. Sentences 6 and 7 are about questions, requests for information. Sentence 8 is not a request for information but a request for a kind of action. A request for information has no such relation to the information sought; it is about what the addressee may know at the time of asking.
Now, do we have two homonymous verbs ask, or is there just one verb which happens to have two meanings? Before deciding, it may be useful to look at the correspondences in six languages related to English, three Germanic and three Romance. The context in which ask occurs determines whether information or a favor is being requested.
Therefore, there is no lexical ambiguity. Is this a single lexeme? If you think it should be considered as more than one lexeme, how would you divide? Several nouns are listed below. Each is followed by two or more illustrations of how the lexeme is used or by two or more short definitions. A following utterance, for example, is likely to carry information about depositing or withdrawing money, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, fishing or boating. For instance, seen is a form of the verb see while scene is an unrelated noun; feet is a plural noun with concrete reference, feat is a singular noun, rather abstract in nature; and so on.
Ambiguity occurs also because a longer linguistic form has a literal sense and a figurative sense. Two points are obvious. First, the meaning of a sentence derives from the meanings of its constituent lexemes and from the grammatical meanings it contains. So if you know all the lexical and grammatical meanings expressed in a sentence, you know the meaning of the sentence, and vice versa.
Second, at least if the sentence is a statement, if you know the meaning of the sentence, you know what conditions are necessary in the world for that sentence to be true. You know that if this sentence is true, the sentence Albert Thompson did not open the first flour mill in Waterton is false a contradiction.
Truth-conditional semantics is based on the notion that the core meaning of any sentence any statement is its truth conditions. Any speaker of the language knows these conditions. If a given sentence is true, does this make another sentence also true, or does it falsify the other sentence, or is there no truth relation?
Matters of truth and logic are of more importance in truth-conditional semantics than meanings of lexemes per se. Chapter 5 contains more about truth-conditional semantics.
We are not yet finished with the dimensions of meaning. Often we derive more meaning from what we hear or read than what is actually in the message. Perhaps this is due to an intuition we have or to the fact that the speaker or writer infers something—hints at some further meaning. In semantics we are not interested in intuitions or hints but we are interested in the instances when the language of the message implicates some additional meaning that accounts for our inference.
We understand what it means even though we are unfamiliar with Felman College if such an entity exists because we know the lexical and grammatical meanings of the components and we can deduce that Felman College names an entity similar to some that we do know.
And we can infer more than this. From the phrase one team we infer that the larger discourse contains information about at least one other team. Is this in the meaning of the lexeme team? Is a team composed of people necessarily in competition with another team or other teams? Does our inference come from the fact that one team is paradigmatically related to a second team, another team, and so on?
Next, compare: 12 One team consisted of the six students from Felman College. Sentences 11 and 12 tell the same thing about the composition of the team but 12 is more informative—has more meaning—about students from Felman College.
From 11 we can infer that there were at least six students from Felman College. Sentence 12 says that there were only six students from Felman College.
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