Chapter 5 Semantics

Introduction to Linguistics

Instructor : Yang Bingjun

School of Foreign Languages, Southwest University

Contents

The definition of semantics Approaches to meaning Types of meaning Lexical field Questions to ponder

The definition of semantics

What is semantics? We are all necessarily interested in meaning.

We wonder about the meaning of a new word. Sometimes we are not sure about the meaning we should get from what we read or hear, and we are concerned about getting our own meanings across to others. We find pleasure in our jokes, whose humor depends on double meanings of words or ambiguities in sentences. Commercial organizations make great efforts and spend much money on naming products, devising slogans, and creating messages that will be meaningful to the buying public.

Legal scholars argue about the interpretation—that is, the meaning—of a law or a judicial decision. Literary scholars, likewise, quarrel over the meaning of some poem or story. All this is related to meaning. Meaning is fundamental to human society and language is one of the primary ways of conveying meaning. However, meaning is not a simple phenomenon. For example, for the native speakers of English, the following sentence will not be acceptable:

(1) Even Einstein could have solved the equation.

There is nothing grammatically wrong with the sentence. It has all its words in the right places, and its spelling and punctuation are all right. Why, then, doesn’t it make sense?

The difficulty with sentence (1) is that if it is true, a number of other things must also be true, including both of the following:

(2) a. The equation is fairly easy. b. Einstein wasn’t very good at

solving equations.

The two statements of (2) must be true if (1) is true, but we know that in reality Einstein was a mathematical genius and that no equation that would have been a challenge for him could have been simple. What matters here is: How, just by looking at (1), do you know that the sentences of (2) are involved? The science that attempts to answer such questions is semantics.

Semantics is the branch of linguistics which studies meaning in language. It stands at the very center of the linguistic quest to understand the nature of language and human language ability because expressing meanings is what languages are all about.

Any comments on the definition?

Meaning can be studied from different angles. As a result, there are different approaches to the study of meaning. For example, philosophers have investigated the relation between linguistic expressions, such as words and phrases, and things, persons, and events in the world to which these expressions refer. Linguists, however, have investigated the way in which meaning in a language is structured and have distinguished between different types of meaning, for example, its literal meaning and non-literal meaning. There are a number of more or less well-known theories of meaning. It is appropriate to discuss these approaches before we go into the details of semantics.

Approaches to meaning

Let us first consider two sentences:

(3)a. The word “dog” means a certain

species of mammal.

b. The red light means that you cannot go in.

Do you say the two means in them have the same meaning? We should like to know what exactly it means to mean something. The question of what the meaning of meaning is has been studied by philosophers as well as linguists. The words to mean or meaning occur in all kinds of natural sentences, such as the ones in (4):

(4) a. Those clouds mean rain. b. The Chinese word “ai” means “love”. c. His losing his job means that he will have to

look again. d. This building is meant for storage. e. What do you mean by that look? f. The opinions of critics meant little to him. g. Do you know the meaning of the word hypochondriac? h. What is the meaning of life?

Dictionaries give signify, import, denote, represent as synonyms of to mean and provide descriptions such as “to be defined or described as, to denote, to convey” for (4a), “to convey the same sense as, to refer to the same thing as” for (4b), “to imply, to result in” for (4c), “to design for a certain purpose” for (4d), “to intend to convey or indicate” for (4e), “to be of a specified importance or significance, to matter” for (4f), etc.

The noun meaning is described as “something that is signified, something that one wishes to convey, especially by language” for (4g), “something that is felt to be the inner significance of something” for (4h). C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, in their famous book The Meaning of Meaning (1923), have given a list of twenty-two definitions of the word meaning. One purpose of semantics is to distinguish these different ways in which language “means”.

Meaning as naming

If we ask someone the meaning of the word cat, we are very likely to be told that it is what the word refers to in the world. This view that the meaning of an expression is what it refers to, or names, is often called referential theory or naming theory.

The word tree, for example, names the object tree in the real world. The object tree is called the referent. The word tree stands for the properties that all trees have or for the class of trees. So, nouns name objects or events and adjectives name the properties of those objects or events. Verbs name actions and adverbs name their properties. In this view, words are “names” or “labels” for things in our mind or in our experience.

Of course, there are some problems with this view. One of them is that it is not always immediately obvious what is being named. What do conjunctions like but and and refer to? What do prepositions like for and to stand for? What do we say about names for imaginary objects or actions? Even those concrete words are not always well defined. The word tree can stand for a particular tree or any tree or all trees in the world.

Meaning as concept

One of the most usual ways to cope with some of the problems involved with the theory of naming has been to take the view that expressions actually mean the concept or idea associated with them. At its simplest, this view suggests that any particular sound image is psychologically associated with a particular concept.

So, when the word chair is spoken, the concept of chair is called up in the mind of the hearer. Every one of us who knows the word or expression has a concept or idea in his mind associated with it.

Ogden and Richards (1923: 11) have suggested a model—semantic triangle (Figure 1) illustrating the view of meaning as concept.

Thought (concept)

Symbol (the word) Referent (the object)

Figure 1: Semantic triangle

Here, the “symbol” is the linguistic element, i.e. word, sentence, etc., and the “referent” is the object in the world of experience, while “thought” is concept. According to this view, there is no direct link between symbol and referent, that is, between language and the world. The link is via thought, the concept in our minds.

This theory avoids many of the problems of naming—the classification of objects in the world, for example, need not be natural or universal, but only conceptual. However, to state that meaning is a concept does not overcome all the problems that naming theory has. We can still ask what are the concepts that and or but stand for?

Meaning as behaviour

Behaviorism: Watson, Skinner, Bloomfield

The American linguist L. Bloomfield illustrated this view by the well-known story of Jack and Jill. Jill is hungry. She sees an apple and by saying something gets Jack to fetch it for her. If she had been alone she would have first received a STIMULUS (S) (hunger) which would have produced a RESPONSE (R)—she would have made a move to get the apple. This can be diagrammed as follows:

S R

However, since Jack was with her, the stimulus produced not the response R, but a linguistic response, that of saying something to Jack, which can be symbolized by r. The sound waves resulting from this in turn created a stimulus for Jack, a linguistic stimulus (s), which results in his non-linguistic response R of getting the apple. We now have a more complicated figure.

S r…………. s R

Bloomfield argued that meaning exists in the relation between speech (that is, Jill’s speech to Jack and Jack’s linguistic response, which is shown by r…s) and the practical events (Jill’s stimulus S of hunger) and (Jack’s response R of getting the apple) that precede and follow it. The meaning of a linguistic form is thus defined as observable behaviour. Such an approach to meaning is called behaviourism, or behaviourist theory, which clearly draws on psychology.

However, there are some significant practical difficulties with this viewpoint. For example, since the practical stimulus S is not always obvious, so how to identify it? Although behaviourists attempt to account for such problems, there are no satisfactory answers to them.

Meaning as context

Suppose that we are standing by a river, and I say: “I was near that bank yesterday.” You certainly understand bank as “river bank”, not “financial institution”. Likewise, if we are on Wall Street, and I say “I was near that bank yesterday,” you do not think that I am referring to the edge of a river. Surely, then, the context determines the meaning.

The view that meaning is found in the context within which a particular expression is uttered suggests that we can derive meaning from, or reduce it to, the observable context. Such an approach to meaning clearly draws on sociology. Let’s look at the following examples:

(5) I don’t like her. She’s tall and thin and

moves like a crane. (6) I do like her. She’s tall and thin and moves like a crane.

The second parts of the two sentences are the same but in (5) we have the impression of awkwardness while in (6) we have the impression of elegance. They have taken on different meanings as a result of the different contexts supplied by the first sentence in each case.

Two kinds of context are recognized: a linguistic context and a situational context. Every utterance occurs in a particular spatial-temporal situation. Each utterance is limited by various factors of the situational context. These factors include:

(i) the setting (formal, informal, …)

(ii) the speaker and hearer (relationship, position,…)

(iii) the activities they are engaged in at the time

(iv) the presence or absence of other participants (relationship, position,…)

(v) the presence of various external objects and events

The linguistic context alone is the weaker form of contextual views. It is principally concerned with the probability of words or expressions co-occurring or collocating with each other. This is obviously an aspect of meaning.

The British linguist J. R. Firth advanced a contextual view of meaning embodying both linguistic and situational contexts. He held the view that “we shall know a word by the company it keeps”. Like Bloomfield, he was concerned with reducing meaning to a set of observable features. Unlike Bloomfield, he chose to focus on a more sociological view rather than a psychological one. However, many difficulties remain. For example, what are we actually observing in a context? How many factors are relevant and how many of those are internal to the participants that cannot be easily observed?

Representatives: B.K. Malinowski , J.R. Firth, M.A.K. Halliday, W. Labov

Meaning as truth conditions

In the history of the United States, or in the world as we know for that matter, the sentence “The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776” is true, and the sentence “The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1976” is false. We know the meaning of both sentences equally well, and knowing their meaning means knowing their sense of truth conditions.

The sense of a declarative sentence permits you to know under what circumstances that sentence is true. Those “circumstances” are called truth conditions of the sentence. The truth conditions of a declarative sentence are the same as the sense of the sentence. We compare their truth conditions with “the real world” or some historical fact, and can thus say which one is true and which one false.

Put it more simply, this means that knowing the meaning of a sentence is the same as knowing the conditions under which the sentence is true or false. And knowing the meaning of a word or expression is knowing the part that it plays in the truth or falsehood of the sentence containing it. Such an approach to meaning is called truth-conditional theory/semantics, which clearly draws on formal logic.

Statements about meaning are based on the formulation that:

(7) S is true if and only if P Here, S is a sentence. P is the set of

conditions which guarantees the truth of S. So, for example, if we assert that “Peter is married”, we need to recognize that for the statement to be true, there must be some individual called Peter, that there is a social institution called marriage and that this individual is involved in this state of marriage.

This view sounds reasonable, but it also has its problems. If we observe, for example, that “The temperature is below freezing”, then one of the truth conditions might be that any local body of water may have turned to ice. But this is not necessarily so. And even if this condition were true, is it necessary to include this fact that any local body of water has turned to ice in the semantic description of the expression?

If we adopt such a truth conditional approach, we limit semantics to being concerned principally about meaning in relation to truth and falsehood. Some linguists have objected that this is too narrow a view. For example, how can we discuss the meaning of interrogatives and imperatives? Put it more simply, how can we discuss the truth or falsehood of a question or a command? Truth conditions apply most obviously to declaratives or statements.

Meaning as cognition

Meaning is an individual’s understanding of a linguistic item.

R. Langacker R. Jackendoff G. Lakoff A. Goldberg

Philosophical and psychological bases

L. Wittgenstein E. Rosch

Problems: How to examine meaning with

specific parameters? Analysis on the textual level

Word meaning

Sense and reference

There are two terms that are often used in semantics, that is, sense and reference. Sense and reference are two different, though related, aspects of meaning. The semantic links between elements within the vocabulary system is an aspect of their sense. Since sense is to be defined in terms of relationships which hold between the linguistic elements themselves (mostly words), it is concerned with intralinguistic relations.

For example, the English words bachelor and married have the sense relationship of bachelor= never married. The sense of chair in English is defined by the existence of other words like stool. Similarly, the sense of red is defined by the other terms in the color system: brown, orange, yellow, etc.

Reference or extension deals with the relationship between the linguistic elements (words, sentences, etc.,) and the non-linguistic world of experience, e.g. things, actions, events, and qualities. For example, the word tree refers to the object tree, and the word book refers to the object book. It was pointed out that, under certain circumstances, the question “What is the meaning of the word x?” can be answered by means of obvious definition—by pointing to, or otherwise indicating, the referent or referents of the word.

Of course, it is not always possible to draw a clear-cut line between sense and reference for the reason that the categories of our language correspond, to some degree at least, to real-world distinctions. Whether language determines the shape of the world or vice versa is probably a “chicken and egg” problem. The fact that we have bull/cow and ram/ewe is part of the semantic structure of English, but it also relates to the fact that there are male and female cattle and sheep. However, we have to keep in mind that not all languages will make the same distinctions, and that there is considerable indeterminacy in the categorization of the real world. It is because of this that we can distinguish sense and reference, however, we must admit that there is no absolute dividing line between them, between what is in the world and what is in language.

Seven types of meaning What is the meaning of man in the sentence

He’s a real man? Maybe some of you would say a man is a “human, adult, male”. But most people would agree that more is being conveyed than simply “human, adult, male”. “Human, adult, male” is the conceptual meaning, which is only partially helpful here. We need to know what extra qualities the speaker judges a man to have; and we could probably hazard a guess at “bravery”, “resilience”, “strength”, “lack of sentiment”, and so on.

There is no absolute limit to what we might infer here because associative meaning is more open-ended than conceptual meaning. From this simple example, we can see clearly that words acquire considerable meanings from the situational, social, and cultural contexts in which they are used.

According to the British linguist G. Leech, meaning in its broadest sense can be classified into seven types: conceptual, connotative, social, affective, reflective, collocative, and thematic meanings. Among them, connotative, social, affective, reflective, and collocative meanings are called associative meaning.

1) Conceptual meaning

If you had to say what the words woman and man meant, one answer would be to say that a woman was a “human, adult, female”, and a man would be a “human, adult, male”. These items of information, or semantic features, serve to categorize the terms woman and man, as well as to distinguish them from related terms.

For example, man is distinguished from bull by the feature “human”, from woman by the feature “male”, and from boy by the feature “adult”. We can set out the relationships in formal terms as below:

man: [+HUMAN +ADULT +MALE] women: [+HUMAN +ADULT

+FEMALE] girl : [+HUMAN −ADULT +FEMALE] boy: [+HUMAN −ADULT +MALE] bull: [−HUMAN +ADULT +MALE]

Semantic feature analysis attempts to account for the conceptual meaning of a word according to the presence or absence of a specific semantic feature in the word. Conceptual meaning, also called denotative or cognitive meaning, is the essential and inextricable part of what language is, and is widely regarded as the central factor in verbal communication. It means that the meaning of words may be discussed in terms of what they denote or refer to.

In the English language, some words like kettle, stone stand for objects, events, or processes that exist, or are felt to exist, in the real world; some like hopeful, belief or insist refer to concepts, however unobservable they may be; others like ghosts, goblins, unicorns or centaurs, although there are no objects which they refer to in the physical world, we can quite reasonably ascribe to them a fictional or mythical existence in a certain kind of discourse. Usually conceptual meaning can be studied in terms of contrastive features or a binary feature format. For example, the word woman can be specified as +HUMAN, −MALE, +ADULT, as distinct from the word boy, which can be defined +HUMAN, +MALE, and −ADULT.

2) Connotative meaning When we study English, we usually

remember a group of words such as grin, beam, smile, and smirk. If you are asked which is the common word, your answer is surely smile. Indeed, the other words could all be defined in terms of it, that is, they are all types of smile. This is because their conceptual meanings overlap. The real differences between them lie in their connotative meanings.

For example, beam is a smile which connotes happiness, smirk, a smile which connotes gloating of some kind. Similarly, the words describing bodily shape—slender, slim, thin, and skinny, share a similar conceptual meaning based on types of thinness, but have different connotative meanings depending on the perceived relative merits of each.

Connotative meaning is the communicative value that a word or a combination of words has by virtue of what it refers to, over and above its purely conceptual content. It can vary from age to age, from society to society, and from individual to individual. For example, the word woman may have such connotative meanings as “capable of speech”, “gregarious”, “frail”, “prone to tears”, “cowardly”, “emotional”, “irrational”, “inconstant”, and so on. The word milk for many people has the connotative meanings “health” and “strength”; pig has the connotative meanings “uncleanness” and “unpleasant smells”; and the word tram may have the connotative meanings “nostalgia” or “holidays”.

Compared with conceptual meaning, connotative meaning is peripheral, and relatively unstable, that is, it may vary according to culture, historical period, and the experience of the individual. In addition, connotative meaning is indeterminate and open-ended in a sense in which conceptual meaning is not. Connotative meaning is open-ended in the same way as our knowledge and beliefs about the universe are open-ended: any characteristic of the referent may contribute to the connotative meaning of the expression which denotes it.

3) Social meaning

One of the consequences of the way in which English has developed over the past 1,500 years has been the emergence of different styles. This has been partly due to the influx of new words from other languages such as Latin and French and partly to the variety of social needs which English has had to fulfill.

If we are in a court of law, for example, we might need to use the term larceny, which is of French origin, whereas talking with our friend we would probably use the word theft, which is of Anglo-Saxon origin. In this case, there is no real difference in conceptual meaning between the two words used. The differences have to do with levels of formality. Part of being able to use the words effectively is the ability to switch between these levels when it is socially appropriate to do so.

Consider the following words for example, all of which have the same conceptual meaning: steed, horse, nag, and gee-gee. We can see they belong to different contexts of use. Steed is poetic in style, and would be appropriate in a literary work about the knights of the round table; nag is slang and is normally used on in colloquial English; whilst gee-gee belongs to the nursery and is used with children. In other words, these terms are stylistically marked. The least marked is horse because it can be used in any context.

Social meaning is that which an expression conveys about the contexts or social circumstances of its use. It chiefly includes stylistic meaning of an utterance. In fact, we rarely find words which have both the same conceptual meaning and the same stylistic meaning. True synonyms do not exist. Let’s look at some other examples:

cast (literary) diminutive(very formal)

throw (general) tiny (colloquial)

Chuck (casual, slan wee (colloquial, dialectal)

These are two groups of near synonyms, but they have different stylistic meanings. They must be used in different contexts, for example, cast must be used in literature, throw is a general word which can be used in any context, but chuck is slang, which should be used in casual contexts.

4)Affective meaning Suppose that John Smith, happily married

to Mary Smith, addresses his wife as “Mary Smith, how many times have I asked you not to flip through the TV channels?” There would be reason to look beyond the words for the “meaning” of this unusual form of address. Mr. Smith may address his wife as “Mary Smith” to show his exasperation, as in this example. By addressing her as “Mary Smith” instead of the usual “Mary”, he conveys frustration and annoyance. His choice of name thus “means” that he is exasperated. Contrast the tone of that sentence with a similar one in which John Smith addressed Mary Smith as “dear”.

The level of meaning that conveys the language user’s feelings, including his attitude or evaluation in shaping his use of language is called affective meaning or emotive meaning. It is largely a parasitic category in the sense that to express our emotions we depend on the mediation of other categories of meaning as conceptual, connotative or social. For example, nigger, originally a word denoting a certain race, has virtually become a term of abuse or contempt; and a similar development has occurred with part of the political vocabulary, such as fascist.

Some words have different affective meanings, though they have the same conceptual meaning. Take politician and statesman for example; the former has a derogatory sense while the latter has not. The sentence below is a good example to show their differences:

(8) I hope for the sake of peace and stability that Clinton will prove himself more

statesman than politician. (Time, No. 4, 1993)

5) Reflective meaning

Certain words over the centuries have developed more than one conceptual meaning, and sometimes more than one meaning is perceived by the user. As a consequence, it is often difficult when using a word with a particular meaning, to keep the other one(s) out of our minds.

When we talk of the nuclear family, for instance, we mean the small tightly knit family of mother, father and children, but it’s difficult to keep the other meaning of nuclear to do with the discovery of atomic energy, as in the nuclear age, completely at bay. This is not surprising, as the “family” sense has derived at some stage from the scientific one.

Therefore, reflective meaning is the meaning which arises in cases of multiple conceptual meanings, when one sense of a word forms part of our response to another sense. More than forty years ago, for instance, we could see such a sentence in some articles on the properties of language as “Human language is a tool of social intercourse”. Whereas, people nowadays prefer to use communication rather than intercourse because the latter can easily remind people of something about sex.

Reflective meaning is the product of people’s recognition and imagination. Different people may have different reflective meanings about the same word because of the difference of age, occupation, intelligence and cultural backgrounds.

6) Collocative meaning

If you look up the adjective clear in a good dictionary of contemporary English you will probably find it will list at least ten different meanings, depending on the linguistic context in which it is used, from clear conscience and clear sky to clear case (as in a clear case of theft). In each instance the meaning of clear is slightly different; clear conscience means “without guilt”, whereas clear in clear case means “unmistakable”.

At the same time, however, we should find it hard to say that in each instance there was a separate conceptual meaning. We can see enough commonality of meaning to assume an underlying sense. All the examples here have the same meaning “free from”, whether free from complications (as in a clear case), free from guilt (as in a clear conscience), or free from clouds (as in a clear sky). The differences between them come from the words clear is put with, or in other words, collocates with.

The associations a word gets because of the meanings of words which tend to occur in its linguistic context are called collocative meanings. Collocative meaning concerns the somewhat idiosyncratic properties of certain words like pretty and handsome. While both words share a similar conceptual meaning “good-looking”, they habitually collocate with different sets of nouns, from which they contract associations.

Thus pretty and handsome collocate with different words:

(9) a. pretty girl/boy/woman/flower/garden/colour/village…

b. handsome boy/man/car/vessel/overcoat/airliner/typewriter…

According to the words which pretty and handsome collocate with, it is clear that pretty has such collocative meanings: beautiful, charming, graceful, fine, exquisite, elegant, etc.; whereas, handsome has such collocative meanings: beautiful, smart, generous, vigorous, energetic, dignified, sedate, grand, magnificent, splendid, and so on.

7) Thematic meaning Do you feel there is a meaning

difference between “Tomorrow I plan to have an outing” and “I plan to have an outing tomorrow”? At least you would say they seem to focus on different aspects and tend to occur in different contexts. This kind of meaning arises out of the way in which the writer or speaker organizes his message. This is called thematic meaning.

It is often felt, for example, that an active sentence has a different meaning from its passive equivalent although in conceptual content they seem to be the same:

(10) a. Mr Smith donated the first prize. b. The first prize was donated by

Mr Smith.

Obviously, these two sentences have different communicative values in that they suggest different contexts: the active sentence seems to answer an implicit question “What did Mr Smith donate?” while the passive structure seems to answer an implicit question “Who was the first prize donated by?” or more simply “Who donated the first prize?”.

Thematic meaning is mainly a matter of choice between alternative grammatical constructions, as in

(10) a. A man is waiting in the hall. b. There’s a man waiting in the hall.

(11) a. They stopped at the end of the corridor.

b. At the end of the corridor, they stopped.

The sentences in the above two groups obviously have, roughly, the same meaning; but all the same, we should acknowledge that their communicative value may be somewhat different; they will not be equally appropriate within the same context.

Lexical fields

Consider the following sets of words:

(13) Set 1: cup, mug, wine glass, tumbler,

plastic cup, goblet Set 2: hammer, cloud, tractor,

eyeglass, leaf, justice

The words of set 1 all refer to concepts that can be described as “vessels from which one drinks”, while those of set 2 denote concepts that have nothing in common with each other. The words of set 1 constitute a lexical field or semantic field—a set of words with an identifiable semantic connection.

Some obvious lexical fields are sports (tennis, badminton, golf, soccer, basketball, football…), creative writings (poem, novel, short story, biography, essay…), kinship terms (father, mother, brother, sister, uncle, aunt…), and emotions (angry, happy, sad, afraid, depressed, exuberant…). It is not difficult to say what the members of each set have in common. Thus, we see that words can be classified into sets according to their meaning.

The absence of a word in a particular place in a lexical field of a language is called lexical gap. For instance, in English there is no singular noun that covers both cow and bull as horse covers stallion and mare; in English we have brother versus sister, son versus daughter, but no separate lexemes for “male” and “female” cousin.

In a lexical field, not all lexical items necessarily have the same status. Consider the following sets, which together form the lexical field of colour terms (of course there are other terms in the same field):

(14) Set 1: blue, red, yellow, green, purple

Set 2 : indigo, saffron, royal blue,

aquamarine, bisque

The colours referred to by the words of set 1 are more “usual” than those described in set 2. They are said to be less marked members of the lexical field than those of set 2. The less marked members of a lexical field will usually be easier to learn and remember than more marked members. Children learn the term blue before they learn the terms indigo, royal blue, or aquamarine.

Typically, a less marked word consists of only one morpheme, in contrast to more marked words (contrast blue and royal blue). The less marked member of a lexical field cannot be described by using the name of another member of the same field, while more marked members can be thus described (indigo is a kind of blue). Less marked terms also tend to be used more frequently than more marked terms.

For example, blue occurs considerably more frequently in conversation and writing than indigo or aquamarine. Less marked terms are also often broader in meaning than more marked terms; blue describes a broader range of colours than indigo or aquamarine. Finally, less marked words are not the result of the metaphorical usage of the name of another object or concept, whereas more marked words often are. For example, saffron is the colour of a spice that lent its name to the colour.

Componential analysis To certain linguists, the meaning of a

word seems to consist of a number of features. Boy, for instance, can be described, at least, by three features like +HUMAN, −ADULT, and +MALE. These linguists claim that all lexical items ca be analyzed into a set of semantic features or semantic components which may be universal. This semantic theory is called Componential Analysis (CA).

The aim of componential analysis is to find those components which are sufficient to describe the meaning of every lexical item in the language. In fact, the ultimate aim is to find a universal set of components which can be used to describe meaning in each and every language in the world. For example, if we consider the kinship terms such as father, mother, uncle, and aunt, we can argue for certain semantic components that will allow us to distinguish these words. In this example, the semantic components or features could be [MALE] [ASCEND] [DESCEND] [LINEAL].

[MALE] [ASCEND]

[DESCEND]

[LINEAL]

Father + + _ +Mother _ + _ +Uncle + + _ _Aunt _ + _ _Brother + _ _ +Sister _ _ _ +Son + _ + +Daughter

_ _ + +

Nephew + _ + _Niece _ _ + _Cousin +/− _ _ _

Such analysis permits us to show in which ways certain words and groups of words are related or differentiated. Father is distinguished from mother by the feature [MALE], and from uncle by the feature [LINEAL]

The attraction of CA is that it allows a highly explicit and economical account of meaning relations such as hyponymy and incompatibility. In CA terms, hyponymy is the situation in which all the features of word A are included in those of word B.

For instance, spinster is a hyponym of woman, and their semantic components might be given as follows:

woman: + HUMAN +ADULT +FEMALE

spinster: + HUMAN+ADULT +FEMALE −MARRIED

Incompatibility comes about when features have conflicting values. For instance, the words spinster, bachelor, and wife are incompatible and from a comparison of their semantic components we might suggest a definition like: Lexical items A, B, C… are incompatible if they share a set of semantic features but differ from each other by one or more contrasting features.

bachelor: +HUMAN +ADULT +MALE−MARRIED

spinster: +HUMAN +ADULT−MALE −MARRIED

wife: +HUMAN +ADULT −MALE+MARRIED

Thus, spinster is incompatible with bachelor by contrast of gender specification; and with wife by the marital specification.

However, CA has its own difficulties. It is not so easy to show relations of antonymy or oppositeness of meaning. What is the opposite of woman? Is it man or girl? Words may be contrasted in more than one way. This may lead us to doubt the idea of antonymy or doubt the value of CA. Perhaps a more significant difficulty involves the features or components themselves. How many distinguishing features are there? For the features to be significant, we should like a small and presumably universal set applicable to all languages.

But we frequently require features of such uniqueness that we end up using the word itself to differentiate it. The reader could try providing features for eat that did not have to include the feature EDIBLE. We may need as many features as we have words, which does not give descriptions of great generality. Even with the more usual examples of features such HUMAN there are problems. There does not seem to be anything wrong with saying that “That man is not human” and “I feel more human today”.

So far, we have some knowledge of lexical field, markedness, and componential analysis. Now we can turn to identify types of relationships between words. We will see how the words of a lexical field can have different types of relationships to each other and to other words in the lexicon, and we will classify these relationships.

Semantic relationships between words

Words are related to one another in a variety of ways. These relationships have words to describe them that often end in the bound morpheme -nym. Usually we have the following types of semantic or sense relationships between words.

1) Homonymy In any language there are words which have

the same linguistic form but are different in meaning. These words are called homonyms. For example, failing to tell the truth (Don’t lie, tell the truth!) and to have your body in a horizontal position (You have to lie down.) are both covered by the word lie. Some other examples are: bank (of a river)— bank (financial institution), bat (flying creature)— bat (used in sports), race (contest of speed)—race (ethnic group), pupil (at school)—pupil (in the eye). Such kind of relationships where two or more meanings share the same linguistic form is called homonymy.

Homonyms are good candidates for humor as well as confusion. For example:

(15) “How is bread made?” “I know that!” Alice cried eagerly. “You take some flour—” “where do you pick the flower?” the

White Queen asked. “In the garden, or in the hedges?”

“Well, it isn’t picked at all ”, Alice explained; “it’s ground—” “How many acres of ground?” said the

White Queen.

The humor of this passage is due to the two sets of homonyms: flower and flour and the two meanings of ground. Alice means ground as the past tense of grind, whereas the White Queen is interpreting ground to mean “earth”.

2) Polysemy When a word has two or more meanings

that are related conceptually or historically, it is said to be polysemous or polysemic. Words of this kind are called polysemic or polysemous words. For example, the word foot can mean the part of the body at the end of the leg, a measurement of length about one third of a metre or the bottom of something like the foot of a mountain. The word head can mean the object on top of your body, the part on top of a glass of beer, or the person on top of a company or department.

It should be obvious that the theoretical distinction between homonymy and polysemy is hard to maintain. The distinction is not always clear-cut. However, one indication of the distinction can be found in the typical dictionary entry for words. If a word has two or more meanings (polysemic), then there will be a single entry, with a numbered list of the different meanings of the word. If two words are treated as homonyms, they will typically have two separate entries. If you check in your dictionary, you will find that the different meanings of words like head, get, run, face and foot are treated as examples of polysemy, while bank, mail, bat, sole are treated as examples of homonymy.

3) Homophony

Words which sound alike but are written differently and often have different meanings are called homophones. Homophony is illustrated by such pairs as know/no, threw/through, rode/rowed, bare/bear, meat/meet, flower/flour, and sew/so. Homophones are a type of homonymy, so they are sometimes called homonyms.

Here, a related linguistic phenomenon is worth mentioning, that is, homography. Words which have the same spelling but differ in pronunciation and meaning are called homographs. Homography is illustrated from such pairs as wind /wind/ in “The wind rises” and wind /waind/ in “The brook winds its way”; and as lead /li:d/ in “All roads lead to Rome” and lead /led/ in “Lead is a heavy metal”.

4) Synonymy

There are not only words that sound the same but have different meanings; there are also words that sound different but have the same meaning. Such words are called synonyms, and the sense relation of “sameness of meaning” is called synonymy.

Many speakers would consider the following pairs of words to be synonyms:

answer—reply big—large broad—wide almost—nearly cab—taxi hide—conceal astonish—amaze receive—get commence—begin liberty—

freedom deep—profound

If two words have the same meaning then they should be completely interchangeable in all contexts. It is certainly true that in specific sentences one word can replace its synonym without changing the meaning of the sentence:

(16) a. The author has painted/portrayed/ delineated/sketched the character successfully. b. The spy hid/concealed the documents under the bed.

But even if two words are interchangeable in some sentences, there may still be some differences in meaning. In fact, synonymy is a matter of degree. There are no real synonyms and no two words have exactly the same meaning; they are near-synonyms. Synonyms may differ in formality, that is, a matter of style. For example, conceal is more formal than hide; commence and receive are usually used in more formal styles than begin and get. Someone who said to his guest at an informal dinner party “Let us commence dinner” would seem oddly over-formal. Similarly, “we received the news yesterday” would probably be restricted to formal contexts.

Sometimes two words may be synonymous in certain sentences only:

(17) I must buy/get a Chinese-English dictionary

at once. Here buy and get are synonyms, as it would

usually be thought that get here means buy and not steal.

The fact that there are few true synonyms in the lexicon of a language reflects the general tendency of language users to make the most of what is available to them. Although true synonymy is rare, the notion is useful because it helps describe similarities between the meanings of different terms in the lexicon.

5) Antonymy The meaning of a word may be

partially defined by saying what it is not. Male means not female. Dead means not alive. Words that are opposite in meaning are often called antonyms. And the oppositeness of meaning is called antonymy. Ironically, the basic property of two words that are antonyms is that they share all but one semantic property. Beautiful and tall are not antonyms; beautiful and ugly, or tall and short, are.

Some common examples are: pass—fail alive—dead asleep—awake male—female legal—illegal boy—girl true—false man—woman married—single present—absent In the case of each of these pairs

above, the negative of one word implies the positive of the other.

For example, if someone is not alive, then he is quite obviously dead; if someone is not asleep, he is awake. There is no midway position. Such pairs of words are called ungradable antonyms, because comparative constructions are not normally used. For example, the expression deader or more dead would sound very strange except in some set expressions like more dead than alive. But the following pairs of antonyms are quite different:

big—small old—young high—low rich—poor good—bad wide—narrow heavy—light

They can be used in comparative constructions like “A is bigger than B” or “B is smaller than A”; and the negative of one word does not necessarily imply the other. For example, if someone says “John is not old”, this does not imply “John is young”. Each of these pairs represents extreme points on a scale, but there are also intermediate points. For example, John may be middle-aged. These antonyms are called gradable antonyms because degrees may be expressed. A film can be extremely good, quite good, fairly good, pretty bad, etc.

Gradable antonyms are often found among sets of words that partition a continuum:

tiny—small—medium—large—huge—gargantuan

euphoric—elated—happy—so-so—sad—gloomy—despondent

Antonyms often do not have equal status with respect to markedness. In certain pairs of gradable antonyms, one word is marked and the other unmarked. For example, when you inquire about the weight of an object, you ask “How heavy is it?” and not “How light is it?”—unless you know that the object is light. Of the antonymous pair heavy and light, heavy is more neutral than light and is thus less marked. In the same way, tall is less marked than short, hot less marked than cold. Although there is some variation across languages as to which word of a pair is considered less marked, there is a surprising agreement from language to language.

6) Hyponymy

We know that the English words red, white, blue, etc. are “colour” terms, that is, they have the feature [+COLOUR] indicating a category to which they all belong. Similarly, lion, tiger, leopard, and lynx have the feature [+feline]. Such sets of words are called hyponyms.

The relationship of hyponymy is between the more general term such as colour and the more specific instances of it such as red, blue, and white. Thus red is a hyponym of colour, and lion is a hyponym of feline. And the general term colour or feline is called the superordinate or hyperonym.

A superordinate term can have many hyponyms. For example:

vegetable

potato cabbage carrot

Figure 2

Here, vegetable is a superordinate, while potato, cabbage and carrot are hyponyms. Two or more terms which share the same superordinate term are called co-hyponyms. So, potato, cabbage and carrot are co-hyponyms.

7) Meronymy Many objects in the world are

conceived as a whole consisting of different parts. One of the best examples of a complex object is the human body with its various parts, their subparts, and so on. Parts are not only sections of the body but defined in terms of specific functions.

The head is the part of the body that carries the most important sense organs, i.e. eyes, ears, nose and tongue; it contains the brain. The face forms the facial expression. Within the face, the mouth is used for eating, drinking, speaking, breathing, biting, kissing, smiling, etc. The tongue serves for articulation, tasting, licking, swallowing, and other purposes.

A small section of the system of body-part terms in English is given in Figure 3:

Figure 3

head neck trunk leg arm

Here, the referent of the term neck, for example, is part of the referent of the term body. The semantic relationship of this kind is called part/whole relationship or meronymy. Other important examples of meronymy include words like second and minute, minute and hour, hour and day, day and week, none of which could be described without reference to the fact that it is a subdivision of another.

A system of this type should not be confused with a hierarchy based on hyponymy. Meronymy can be expressed by the pattern “X is a part of Y”, whereas hyponymy is by the pattern “X is a kind of Y”. For example, head is a part of body, but not a kind of body, while potato is a kind of vegetable, but not a part of vegetable.

Sentence meaning

Sentence and proposition

A traditional way of defining a sentence is “something that expresses a complete thought”. This definition is a rather strange way of explaining things since it assumes that we know what a complete thought is.

But surely the procedure must be the reverse. Sentences are more knowable than thoughts. In spite of individual differences speakers of a language generally agree about what is or is not a sentence in their language. Who can say what a complete thought is?

Compare these language expressions:(1) a. We walk in the park. b. our walk in the park c. for us to walk in the park

We call the first a complete sentence, and in writing we begin a sentence with a capital letter and end with a period. We say the other two are not complete sentences. But all three expressions have the same semantic content, the same relation to an action or possible action performed in a certain place by two or more people, one of whom is the speaker or writer. The difference is grammaticality. The first expression asserts something, makes a statement.

The other two expressions can be parts of statements, as in:

(19) a. We enjoyed our walk in the park.

b. It’s not too late for us to walk in the

park. But they do not make assertions by

themselves. The formal differences among these three expressions—we, our and us, for example —are a matter of grammar, not semantics.

The semantic content shared by the three expressions (18a, b, c) is a proposition. A simple statement like “We walk in the park” expresses a single proposition, something presented as a fact. Generally speaking, one can find out whether the proposition is true or false. “We don’t walk in the park” is the negation of this proposition, and “Do we walk in the park?” is question about it.

A proposition can be expressed in different sentences.

(20) a. Helen put on a sweater. b. Helen put a sweater on. These are different English

sentences, but they convey the same message—they express the same proposition.

Semantic roles

Words and sentences are the two units of language that carry meaning. The study of sentence meaning, however, differs from the study of word meaning because the units are different in kind. In order for a sentence to have meaning, it seems that we must rely on the meaning of individual words it contains.

How we retrieve sentence meaning from word meaning is a complex question. One obvious naive hypothesis is that the meaning of a sentence is simply the sum of the meanings of its words and other constituents which compose it. But this is not true.

To see that this is not the case, consider the following two groups of sentences, in which the individual words (and therefore their sum meanings) are the same:

(21) a. My wife has a new dog. b. My new wife has a dog. c. My new dog has a wife. Obviously, the sentences refer to different

events and hence have distinct meanings. This is conveyed by the fact that the words of the sentences are ordered differently. Thus we cannot say simply that all we need to do to retrieve the meaning of a sentence is add up the meanings of its parts.

Consider the following active/passive counterparts, which, at the level of proposition, describe the same situation:

(22) a. The hunter bit the lion. b. The lion was bitten by the

hunter. These sentences differ in that (22b)

is a passive structure, while (22a) is not. Since our concern here is with meaning, we ask how to explain the synonymy between (22a) and (22b).

Furthermore, consider the sentences below:

(23) a. Peter sliced the bread with a knife. b. Peter used a knife to slice the

bread. Here is a situation like the

active/passive counterparts of (22a) and (22b), in that sentences (23a) and (23b) have the same proposition. Nevertheless we need to describe how sentences (23a) and (23b) mean “the same meaning”, or have the same proposition.

The situations presented here suggest that the crucial factor in the way sentence meaning is constructed is the role played by each noun phrase in relation to the verb. We thus need to introduce the notion semantic role of a noun phrase. By semantic role we mean such things as who did what to whom, with whom, and for whom.

In other words, the semantic role of a noun phrase is the role that its referent plays in the action, state or situation described by the sentence. The semantic role of a noun phrase differs from its syntactic role (as subject, object, and so on), as illustrated by the contrast between sentences (22a) and (22b). In both (22a) and (22b), the way in which the lion is involved in the action is the same; and the way in which the hunter is involved is the same. By contrast, despite its having the same semantic role in both, the lion is the direct object of the verb in (22a) and the grammatical subject of (22b).

Semantic role is not an inherent property of a noun phrase: a given noun phrase can have different semantic roles in different sentences, as in the following:

(24) He lived in Beijing. (locative state)(25) He went to Beijing. (locative

motion) Rather, semantic role is a way of

characterizing the meaning relationship between a noun phrase and the verb of a sentence.

The first semantic roles we need to identify are agent (the responsible initiator of an action) and patient (the entity that undergoes a certain change of state). In both sentence (22a) and (22b) above, the agent is the hunter, and the patient is the lion. That the sentences describe the same situation (and hence have the same propositional meaning) can thus be explained by the fact that in both sentences each noun phrase has the same semantic role.

The role of the subject noun phrases in the following sentences is not that of agent, because John is not really the responsible initiator of the actions denoted by the verb:

(26) John likes blueberry pancakes.(27) John felt threatened by the lion.

In both sentences, John is experiencing a physical or mental sensation. The semantic role of John is experiencer, defined as that which receives a sensory input. In English, experiencers can be either subjects or direct objects, depending on the verb.

Compare the sentences about John, in which the experiencer is the subject, with the following sentence, in which the experiencer is the direct object:

(28) John sometimes astounds me with his wit.

So far, we have identified the semantic roles of agent, patient, and experiencer. Now consider the semantic roles of the italicized noun phrases in the following sentences:

(29) John was injured by a stone.(30) John was injured with a stone.

The difference between the sentences is that (30) can imply that someone used a stone to attack John, while (29) does not acquire that implication. In sentence (30), we say that a stone is the instrument—the intermediary through which an agent performs the action; note that the definition requires that there be an agent, which is consistent with our interpretation of sentence (30). In sentence (29), a stone could be assigned the role of instrument only if there was an agent doing the injuring. If the stone that injured John were part of a rockfall, a stone would be assigned the semantic role of cause—defined as any natural force that brings about a change of state.

Instruments and causes can be expressed in prepositional phrases (as in the previous examples) or subjects:

(31) The silver key opens the door to the wine cellar. (instrument)

(32) The snow caved in the roof. (cause) That the noun phrase the silver key is

indeed an instrument and not an agent is supported by the fact that it cannot be conjoined (linked by and) with an agent, as the following anomalous example shows:

(33) * The silver key and John opened the door to the cellar.

However, an instrument can be conjoined with another instrument, and agent with another agent.

(34) A push and a shove opened the door to the cellar. (35) John and Tom opened the door

to the cellar.

In addition to agent, patient, experiencer, instrument, and cause, a noun phrase can be a recipient (that which receives a physical object), a benefactive (that for which an action is performed), a locative (the location of an action or state), or temporal (the time at which the action or state occurred).

(36) I gave John a puppy. (recipient) (37) John passed the message to me for Tom. (benefactive) (38) Beijing is cold in winter. (locative) (39) She left home the day before yesterday.

(temporal)

The point of this theory is to characterize all possible semantic roles that noun phrases can play in a sentence. Every noun phrase in a clause is assigned a semantic role, and, aside from coordinate NPs, the same semantic role cannot be assigned to two different noun phrases within the same clause.

So, for example, a sentence like the following is ruled out as being semantically anomalous because it contains two different instrumental noun phrases, namely the two italicized noun phrases:

(40) *This ball broke the window with a

hammer.

In addition, in most cases a single noun phrase can be assigned only one semantic role. In rare cases, a noun phrase can be assigned two different roles. In the sentence

(41) John rolled down the hill. If John rolled down the hill deliberately,

he is both agent and patient, because he is at once the responsible initiator of the action and the entity that undergoes the change of state. So far we can say that sentential semantics is concerned with semantic roles and with the relationship between words within a sentence.

Semantic relationships between sentences

1)Entailment If “John often beats his wife” is true,

we know that “John is married” is also true. If knowing that one sentence is true gives us certain knowledge of the truth of the second sentence, then the first sentence entails the second. So Entailment is a type of meaning-dependence between one sentence and another.

Entailment is concerned with the meaning of the sentence itself. It does not depend on the context in which a sentence is used. In terms of truth value, the following relationships exist between the two sentences if A entails B: When A is true, B is necessarily true; when B is false, A is false; when B is true, A may be true or false.

For example,(42)A. Henry murdered his bank

manager. B. ENTAILS: Henry’s bank

manager is dead.(43) A. That person is a bachelor. B. ENTAILS: That person is a

man.

2) Presupposition

The speaker or writer always assumes that the hearer/reader already knows something of what he is going to say or write. This “something” often becomes the presupposition of a sentence. So “When did John steal the horse” presupposes “John stole the horse”.

In terms of truth value, the following relationships exist between two sentences: When A is true, B is necessarily true; when A is false, B is still true; when B is true, A can either be true or false; when B is false, no truth value can be said about A.

For example,(44) A. John’s son is an engineer. B. PRESUPPOSES: John has a son.(45) A. The king of France is bald. B. PRESUPPOSES: There is a king of France. Presupposition does not just have to be

between two propositions. A popular example often used by philosophers is “When did you stop beating your wife?” which presupposes he has been beating his wife. Of course, presupposition is not just a matter of logic, because a question, a command, and an exclamation can all presuppose a proposition. A more detailed study of presupposition will be made in Chapter 6.

3) Synonymy

Two sentences may have the same meaning, that is, in terms of truth value, A has the same truth value as B: if A is true, B is true; also if A is false, B is false; and vice versa.

This can be illustrated by the following examples:

(46) A. I am an orphan. B. I am a child and have no father or mother.(47) A. The boy killed the dog. B. The dog was killed by the boy

4) Inconsistency

We can have a complex but very clear definition of inconsistency like this: A is inconsistent with B: if A is true, B is false; also, if B is true, A is false.

This can be shown by the examples below:

(48) A. I am an orphan. B. I have a father.(49) A. The earth goes round the sun. B. The earth is stationary. If the first sentence of each pair is true,

the second is necessarily false. This relationship is called inconsistency or contradiction because the truth of one sentence contradicts the truth of the other.

5) ImplicatureImplicature is also a type of semantic

relations between two sentences. For example, if we can draw conclusion B from sentence A, here B is the implicature of A:

(50) A. Few girls are coming. B. Some girls are coming.(51) A. Even Peter has dated Jane. B. Many people have dated Jane,

and of all the people who might have dated Jane, Peter is the least likely.

This is generally understood to be a relation of pragmatic implication, defined in terms of the speaker’s and the hearer’s assumptions and beliefs. We will have a more detailed discussion on implicature in the next chapter.

Questions to ponder What is semantics? Phonetics, syntax, semantics Consider the relationship between

semantics and pragmatics

What is meaning? Word, text, concept, action, or

existence/Being Consider the relationship between

meaning and semantics.

That’s all for chapter 5

Thank you !