Semantics lecture 2
- 1. OBJECTIVES • — To understand the concepts of communication and language and the • relationships which hold between them. • — To understand the different types of units of analysis: words, utterances, • sentences, and propositions. • — To understand the different dimensions of meaning. • — To distinguish the different types of meaning and their extensions. • — To understand the most basic notions that affect semantic analysis.
- 2. Communication and Language Branches of the study of meaning • Lyons (1995) defines semantics as the study of meaning and linguistic semantics as the study of meaning in so far as it is systematically encoded in the vocabulary and grammar of natural languages. • Cruce, in a simpler way, divides semantics into three subfields: lexical semantics, grammatical semantics and logical semantics. • Cruse (2000:15) lexical semantics focuses on ‘content’ words (tiger, daffodil, inconsiderate) rather than ‘grammatical’ words (the, of , and). Grammatical semantics in turn, studies aspects of meaning which have direct relevance to syntax. However there is some overlapping with lexical semantics, such as how to deal with grammatical morphemes like -es, -er, etc.
- 3. logical semantics (also called formal semantics) studies the relations between natural language and formal logical systems such as propositional and predicate calculi. Such studies try to model natural languages as closely as possible using a tightly controlled,maximally austere logical formalism. According to Cruse, such studies have concentrated on the propositional/sentential level of meaning, rarely attempting to delve into the meaning of words.
- 4. Overlap between semantics and pragmatics Saeed (2001) points out that, although the semantics-pragmatics distinction is a useful one, the problem emerges when we get down to details. He further argues that one way to solve the problem is to distinguish between sentence meaning and the speaker’s meaning, suggesting that words and sentences have a meaning independently of any particular use and it is the speaker who incorporates further meaning into sentence meaning.
- 5. Another way of seeing this comes from Bennett (2002), who bases his distinction between semantics and pragmatics on concepts such as implicature and entailment. And still another perspective comes again from Saeed (2001), who links the semantics-pragmatics overlapping to the concept of presupposition. This has always been an important concept in semantics but the increased interest in it can be seen as coinciding with the development of pragmatics as a subdiscipline. The basic idea is that semantics deals with conventional meaning, that is to say, with those aspects of meaning which do not vary much from context to context, while pragmatics deals with aspects of individual usage and context-dependent meaning.
- 6. Different units of analysis: words, utterances, sentences, propositions and texts • Words: Cruce explains how most people have the intuition that meaning is intimately bound up with individual words; that this is what words are for. If we study meaning in language we are forced to consider that we are talking of different types of meaning depending on the different unit of analysis we are referring to. Even if defining a word is not an easy task and one could try and say what a prototypical word is, a word can be defined as a minimal permutable element. Words are, most of the time, separated by silence in spoken language and by spaces in writing. We can also identify words as dictionary entries.
- 7. Utterances, sentences, propositions and texts An utterance is created by speaking or writing a piece of language. It can also be said that an utterance is any stretch of talk, by one person, before and after which there is silence on the part of that person. If someone says Today is Tuesday in a room, this is one utterance; if another person in the same room also says Today is Tuesday in the same room this is another utterance.
- 8. Sentences, on the other hand, are abstract grammatical elements obtained from utterances. Sentences are abstracted or generalized from actual language use. Differences in accent or pitch do not alter the basic content of the sentence. A sentence can be thought of as the ideal string of words behind various realizations in utterances. Thus, a given English sentence always consists of the same words in the same order.
- 9. Examples: 1. Jim picked up the children and Jim picked the children up are different sentences. 2. Mary started her lecture late and Mary started her lecture late are the same sentence. 3. Went to the toilet James and Mary the put on hat are not English sentences. However, there are languages, such as Spanish, where word order is less important. 4. Mary started her lecture late and Mary started her lecture late pronounced by two different persons are different utterances.
- 10. Regarding the concept of proposition, Saeed thinks that one further step of abstraction is possible for special purposes, such as to identify the logical content of a sentence. In trying to establish rules of valid deduction, logicians discovered that certain elements of grammatical information in sentences were irrelevant, for example, the difference between active and passive sentences because active and passive sentences share the same state of affairs. Another possible definition of proposition (Hurford & Heasley, 1983) is that part of the meaning of the utterance of a declarative sentence which describes some state of affairs.
- 11. Fx (a,b) For example: brake (Mathew, glass) end (war) tell (Lucas, lie, Nicholas)
- 12. Propositions capture part of the meaning shared with other sentences. For example, the statement Lucas told Nicholas a lie, the question Did Lucas tell Nicholas a lie? and the command Lucas, tell Nicholas a lie! might be seen to share a propositional element: LUCAS TELL NICHOLAS LIE. However these different sentences make the speaker do different things with the same proposition: assert it as a past event; question it or request someone to perform it. As a result, we see that propositions capture only part of the meaning of a sentence.
- 13. • In summary, these ideas saying that utterances are real pieces of speech, and by filtering out certain types of (especially phonetic) information we can abstract grammatical elements, that is sentences. Then, filtering out again certain types of grammatical information we can get to propositions. Propositions thus are descriptions of states of affairs which some writers see as a basic element of sentence meaning.
- 14. MEANING AND THE WORLD. DIFFERENT DIMENSIONS OF MEANING • Reference, denotation and sense Denotation has to do with the human cognitive capacity of making concepts and using words to name such concepts. When a child is learning to speak and he/ she is able to differentiate and group various types of animals, he/she will be able to say cat and dog. He/she then will be denoting and saying that this particular dog is a member of that particular group of animals.
- 15. Referent: the meaning of a word is its referent, which is the thing or things in the real world that it refers to. – Jack, the happy swimmer, my friend, and that guy can all have the same referent in the sentence Jack swims. – But, some NPs do not refer to any particular individual, such as: No baby swims. – While the happy swimmer and Jack may refer to the same individual in some cases, the happy swimmer means something extra, which a tautology: • The happy swimmer is happy. • Jack is happy.
- 16. Sense: an element of meaning separate from reference and more enduring; the manner in which an expression presents the reference (two expressions may refer to the same individual but not have the same meaning.) – Barack Obama These have the same reference but – The President different senses – Michelle Obama’s husband • The word Harry Potter has sense but no reference (in the real word)
- 17. The difference between reference and denotation has to do with abstraction. Reference points to something specific and clearly identifiable at some point. For example, if someone uses the phrase “the queen”, this person is likely to be referring to Queen Elisabeth II in UK and most probably to Queen Sofía in Spain. However, its denotation is something more abstract since it will include all those individuals that could be referred to by using the word “queen”. That is classifying objects into those which come under the heading “queen” and those which don’t. For example, the referent of “yesterday’s paper” varies depending on when the expression is used and the speaker’s reading habits. The 11 a.m flight to Copenhagen is the same flight every day, although the actual aircraft used and the aircrew may be different. In other words they denote the same flight but the actual referents are different. Another example, (The cat is hungry): we can say that the class of cats constitutes the denotation of the word cat, whereas the referent of cat in this particular example is the specific cat the speaker is talking about. To sum up, denotation relates expressions to classes of entities in the world, whereas reference points to the specific entity (concrete or abstract) that the speaker is referring to.
- 18. The pair intension / extension to refer to similar concepts: the extension of the concept dog is the set made up of all possible dogs in the world, whereas its intension is made up of all the features which characterize a dog.
- 19. TYPES OF MEANING 1. Descriptive and non-descriptive meaning Descriptive meaning: THING , QUALITY, QUANTITY, PLACE, TIME, STATE, PROCESS, EVENT, ACTION, RELATION, MANNER. These represent fundamental modes of conception that the human mind is presumably innately predisposed to adopt. At lower levels of generality there are also hierarchically arranged sets of conceptual categories. For example: Living things: humans, animals, fish, insects, reptiles.. Animals: dogs, cats, lions, … Dogs: collies, alsatians, spaniels…
- 20. In addition there are also non descriptive dimensions of meaning such as expressive meaning and evoked meaning. For example, the differences between a) Gosh! and b) I am surprised shows that a) is subjective, expresses an emotional state in much the same way as a baby’s cry, and does not present a conceptual category to the hearer whereas b) represents a proposition, which can be questioned or denied and can be equally expressed by someone else or at a different place or time. In a sense both “mean the same thing” but vary in the mode of signifying.
- 21. 2. Functional meaning and content meaning. Lexical meaning and grammatical meaning • Words can be important because of what they mean, and are called lexemes (roughly nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in English), or their importance come from the role they play in the organization of the language and they can be termed function words (articles, prepositions, pronouns in English or Spanish). • A distinction can be identified between lexical and grammatical meaning in relation with whether they constitute an open class of words or a closed-set class of words. While lexical meaning is related to an open-set class of items or content words, grammatical meaning refers to closed-set class of items or grammatical words. An open-set class of words can accept a new item each time a new term is needed. For example all the new words coined in relation to the use of computers belong to an open-set class of words. However it would be difficult to “invent” a new preposition.
- 22. 3. Literal and non literal meaning If one afternoon you are feeling the effects of a missing lunch, you may speak literally as in (a) or non-literally as in (b), (c) and (d). a) I’m hungry b) I’m starving c) I could eat a horse d) My stomach thinks my throat’s cut Thus, there is a basic distinction between instances where the speaker speaks in a neutral, factually accurate way and instances where the speaker deliberately describes something in untrue or impossible terms in order to achieve special effects.
- 23. 4. Contextual meaning The fact that meaning varies from context to context is one of the most evident problems in semantics. How can any addressee clearly understand what kind of bank the speaker is referring to when he hears They swiftly rowed to the bank and She is the manager of a local bank? This is something that is intuitively solved because the context; the linguistic context in this particular case, leads you to the appropriate interpretation. That is, the context disambiguates the problematic interpretation of the word. There is no need to have an extensive variation of meanings, if their interpretation can be fixed by the context in which the word is uttered. Language, as a system of communication, maximises its resources in the most economic way.
- 24. • Ambiguity: She went to the bank (What kind of bank did she go to?) or She was wearing a light coat (was she wearing a light coloured coat or a not heavy one?). bank 1: place where money is kept / bank 2: the edge of a river and light 1: not of a strong colour / light 2: not heavy in weight.
- 25. bank 1 and bank 2 and light 1 and light 2 are homonyms. However there might be a connection between senses: I fall asleep in a very uncomfortable position. She has now been promoted to a much better position. What is your position on the death penalty? In these cases we say that the word position is polysemous or that it manifests polysemy.