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Semantics

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Semantics

The branch of linguistics that is concerned with how meaning is expressed in language is called semantics

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Semantics

• The study of the linguistic meaning of words, phrases and sentences

• The study of the relationship between symbol and meaning

• The study of meanings

• The study of meaning in human language

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Semantics

• The word semantics originates from the Greek verb semeion which means mark, sign.

• The word was coined in the late nineteenth century

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What is language for?

• most people would say that the function of language is to express and communicate meanings

• certainly, this ability to express meanings is an indispensable aspect of language

• most other functions of language would scarcely be available to us if our utterances were NOT capable of carrying meanings

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How do we recognize a meaning when we see one?

What is meaning?

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Meaning

• meaning is not an easy concept to deal with partly because we are dealing with abstractions

• (one person’s idea of ‘goodness’may differ radically from another’s)

• meaning is so intangible ( that one group of linguists, the structuralists,

preferred not to deal with it or rely on it at all)

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Meaning

• The analysis of meaning has proved to be one of the most difficult and elusive tasks in linguistic description

• It involves investigating the relationship between language and everything that we use language to talk about

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Meaning

• Philosophers have long puzzled over what words mean, or what they represent, or how they relate to reality

• Contributions towards the understanding of meaning, i.e. semantics, have come from a diverse group of scholars, ranging from Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece to Bertrand Russell in the twentieth century

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Meaning and the World

• if you have ever tried to translate a text from one language into another, you will know that translation is far from easy

• one big reason is that words in different languages do not match up one to one

• English, for example, makes a clear difference in meaning between ape and monkey, while French has only the single word singe to cover both creatures

• on the other hand, English has only ball to cover the six French words boule,boulet,boulette,balle,pelote and ballon, all of which have different meanings

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Word Meaning

• The basic repository of meaning within the

grammar is the lexicon, which provides the

information about the meaning of individual words relevant to the interpretation of sentences

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Word meaning

• words can be regarded as symbols• for example, the word cat in English, or chat in

French, or Katze in German, functions as a symbol of the real world animal; or rather, it might be more accurate to say, as a symbol of the mental concept that we have of a cat

• we can do this because there are agreed conventions among language users about the interpretation of the word. Without this communication would not take place

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Word meaning (contd.)

• the relationship between a word and the entity that it symbolizes, however, is much more complex than for other symbols

• words may be symbols, but they are very flexible symbols, whose meaning shifts in different contexts -sometimes a considerable distance from what we might think of as their ‘usual’ meaning

• this is particularly true of poetry, to give an extreme example

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Semantic Analysis

• semantic analysis has to try to account for how we are able to use the words in the vocabulary of a language to talk about anything in the world

• semantic analysis has also to explain how we are able to use words in all kinds of different ways -- jokingly or sarcastically, for instance, as well as straightforwardly

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Semantic Analysis

• a very simple approach to the analysis of word meaning sees words as ‘naming’ or ‘labeling’ things in the world

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Reference, Denotation and Connotation

• one well-known approach to semantic analysis attempts to equate the meaning of a word or phrase with the entities to which it refers-- its denotation or referents

• a distinction can be drawn between denotation and reference

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Reference, Denotation and Connotation(contd.)

• denotation is used for the class of things indicated by a word

• reference is used for a particular thing that is indicated when the word is used

• e.g.. the word cat denotes the class of all cats in the sentence A cat makes a good pet, but it refers to a particular cat in the sentence A cat scratched her arm

This approach, however, takes no account of the flexibility of word meaning. Cat in the phrase cool cat denotes a different thing than cat in the two sentences above. The sentence That girl is a real cat is also different.Therefore this approach is difficult to apply to all words in the vocabulary. Also consider words like until, love,job.

• this approach does allow a useful distinction to be made between these ‘naming’ types of meaning(referential meaning) and a second

type of meaning referred to as connotation

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Reference, Denotation and Connotation(contd.)

• connotation refers to the associations that words have for us

• psychologists have long been aware that in addition to ‘naming’ things, words carry overtones of meaning which color our reaction to themeven the most innocent of words can conjure up associations that may affect our attitude and our response to an utterance which contains them

For example, the word winter evokes thoughts of snow, bitter cold, short evenings, frozen fingertips. These associations make up the word's connotation, but they cannot be its meaning (or at least, not its entire meaning) The word winter does not become meaningless just because it is a mild winter year

• we must therefore look beyond connotation for our understanding of what meaning is

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Dictionary entries

• dictionaries are produced as part of the process of language standardization

• besides givng syntactic, phonetic and (sometimes) historical information, dictionary makers, or lexicographers, try to make explicit the conventions that language users share about the meanings of the words in the language

• they however do not normally try to deal with connotative meaning

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Some proposals to determinemeaning

• One well-known approach to semantics attempts to equate a word’s meaning with the entities to which it refers -- its referents

• The impossibility of equating a word’s meaning with its referents has led to a distinction between extension and intension

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Extension and Intension

• whereas an expression’s extension corresponds to the set of entities that it picks out in the world (its referents), its intension corresponds to its inherent sense, the concepts that it evokes

• thus the extension of the word woman is a set of real world entities (women), while its intension involves notions like ‘female’ and ‘human’

Similarly, the phrase Prime Minister of Singapore has its extension an individual (Goh Chok Tong), but its intension involves the concept ‘leader of the governing party’

One suggestion is that intensions correspond to mental images. This is an obvious improvement over the referential theory since it is possible to have a mental image of a unicorn, although there is no such entity in this world. However, problems arise with the meanings of words like dog, which can be used to refer to animals of many different sizes, shapes, and colors. If the meaning of this word corresponds to a mental image, that image would have to be general enough to include Chihuahuas and St.Bernards., yet still exclude foxes and wolves. If you try to draw a picture that satisfies these requirements, you will see just how hard it is to equate word meanings with images in such

cases.

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More attempts to define meaning

• Still another approach to meaning tries to represent a word’s intension by breaking it down into smaller semantic components

• this is sometimes referred to as componential analysis or semantic decomposition

• this approach has long been used to analyze the meaning of certain types of nouns in terms of semantic features.

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Componential Analysis or Semantic Decomposition

• an obvious advantage of this approach is that it allows us to group entities into natural classes

e.g.. the words man and boy could be grouped together as [+human,+male] while man and woman could be put in a class defined by the features [+human, +adult]

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Componential Analysis or Semantic Decomposition

• componential analysis is most useful for uncovering and representing similarities among semantically related words

• however, there are limits on the insights into word meaning offered by componential analysis

• Do we say the meaning of the word blue consists of the feature [+color] ? Isn’t it blueness ? If this is so , we have not broken the meaning of the word blue into smaller components

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More attempts to define meaning

• The meaning of a word is an idea associated with it in the mind (mentalism)

• The meaning of a word is our disposition to respond in a certain way to that word as a result of our past experiences

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Even more attempts at defining meaning

• The meaning of a word is the characteristic that is common to the set of things named by the word

• The meaning of a word is its relation to other features of the verbal and situational context in which it occurs

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Semantic relations among words

Despite the difficulties associated with determining the precise nature of meaning,it is possible to identify a number of important universal semantic relations relevant to the analysis of word meaning

• Foremost among these are the relations of

synonymy, antonymy, polysemy and homophony

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Synonymy

• Words or expressions that have identical meanings are called synonyms

• Synonyms are words or expressions that have the same meanings in some or all contexts

e.g.. Some English synonyms

youth adolescent

automobile car

remember recall

purchase buy

big large

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Synonymy (contd.)

• although it is easy to think of contexts in which both words in each pair have essentially the same meaning I spent my holidays/vacation in Kedah, there are also contexts in which their meanings diverge slightlye.g.. Deepavali and Hari Raya are holidays, but they are not necessarily part of one’s vacation

Similarly, although youth and adolescent both refer to people of about the same age, only adolescent has the meaning of ‘immature’ in a phrase such as What an adolescent!

Many linguists believe that it would be inefficient for a language to have two words or phrases whose meanings are absolutely identical in all contexts, and that complete synonymy is therefore rare or non-existent

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Antonymy

• Words or phrases that have opposite meanings are called antonyms

• Antonyms are words or phrases that are opposites with respect to some component of their meaninge.g.. Some English antonyms

dark light

male female

hot cold

up down

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Polysemy and Homophony

• When a word has two or more meanings that are at least vaguely related to each other, this is called polysemy

e.g.. iron a type of metal

an instrument made of iron for pressing clothes

• Homophones are words that have a single phonetic form but two or more entirely distinct meanings

e.g. bat a mouse-like flying animal

a piece of equipment used in baseball

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Polysemy and Homophony(contd.)• polysemy is where a single word has two or more

separate meanings,e.g. bright ‘shining’, ‘intelligent’

• homophony is where two or more separate words, with separate meanings, have the same form, e.g.. club

‘a social organization’ ‘a blunt weapon’

• polysemy and homophony create lexical ambiguity in that a single form has two or more meanings e.g.. Liza bought a pen

pen a writing instrument

a small cage

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Semantic Relations InvolvingSentences

• Like words, sentences have meanings that can be analyzed in terms of their relation to each other -- paraphrase, entailment, and contradiction

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Paraphrase• Two sentences with identical meanings

are said to be paraphrases of each othere.g.. The police chased the burglar.

The burglar was chased by the police. e.g.. I gave the cake to Kamal.

I gave Kamal the cake.• however, there are subtle differences

• as with synonymy, many linguists feel that languages do not permit two or more structures to have absolutely identical meanings and that paraphrases are therefore never perfect

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Entailment• A relation in which the truth of one sentence

necessarily implies the truth of another is called entailment

e.g.. The park warden killed the bear.

The bear is dead. ( if it is true that the park warden killed the bear, then it must be true that the bear is

dead.However, the reverse does not follow since the bear could be dead without the park warden having killed it)

e.g.. Ahmad is a man. Ahmad is human. (if it true Ahmad is a mad, then it is also

true that Ahmad is a human. Once again, the reverse does not hold)

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Contradiction

• In contradiction, the truth of one sentence entails the falsity of another

e.g.. Charles is a bachelor.

Charles is married. If it is true that Charles is a bachelor, then it cannot be true that he is married.

• When two sentences cannot both be true, we say that there is contradiction

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Summary

• Semantics is the study of meaning in language

• while semantics has traditionally focused on referential meaning, language also conveys social meaning

• referential meaning is often called denotation, while social and affective meaning is termed connotation