Semantics

LING 200

Spring 2006

5 for further learning about semantics:

LING 442

Overview• Semantic competence

• Lexical semantics– Some meaning relationships– Cross-linguistic variation

• Reference– iconicity– protypes

• Sense vs. reference– “semantics”

• Phrasal semantics

What is semantics?

• What is semantic competence? What native speakers know about:– meanings of individual morphemes – meanings of heteromorphemic words and

sentences – relationships between meanings

Lexical semantics

• = meanings of morphemes and words– semantics overlaps with morphology

• Some meaning relations– Synonymy– Ambiguity– Antonymy– Hyponymy and hypernymy

Synonymy

• If A is synonymous with B, – A and B mean the same thing, A can be

paraphrased by B

• Synonymous lexical items– couch = sofa– get = receive– throw up = vomit– put off = postpone

Ambiguity

• Polysemy vs. homophony• Polysemous morpheme

– meaning1 meaning2

– e.g. hard • “difficult”• “durable, solid”

• Single lexical entry

Homophony

• Homophones– morpheme1 morpheme2

meaning1 meaning2

– e.g. pass (‘I’m going to pass’)• ‘abstain’

• ‘succeed’

• Distinct lexical entries

Hyponymy and hypernymy

• If B is a hyponym of A, then– the meaning of B is a special case of A

• If A is a hypernym of B, then– the meaning of A is a more general instance of B

B A

Hyponyms: nouns

Hyponymy: adjectivescolored (‘contains color’)

red green black purple blue yellow

turquoise royal blue

Hyponymy: verbs

hyponym hypernym

dance move

slice cut

drive motate

(Generally) productive ways of forming hyponyms

strategy hyponym

adjectival/ sentential modification

car

flower

Japanese car

the flower I picked last night

compounding pickle

rage

dill pickle

road rage

adverbial modification

interesting incredibly interesting

Caveats re adjectival modification

• Anti-intersection adjectives (require negation of noun with which they combine):

  is not a hyponym of:

fake $100 bill $100 bill

the former president the president (i.e. current)

phony offer offer

phony offer offer

• ‘Non-intersection’ adjectives:

is not necessarily a hyponym of:

possible solution solution

alleged thief thief

thief

alleged thiefalleged thief

?? ??

Caveat re compounding

• Exocentric compounds:

  is not a hyponym of:

instead hyponym of:

boombox box sound system

station wagon

wagon car

soap opera opera TV show

Cross-linguistic variation in lexical semantics

1. How many morphemes are required to express a concept?– ‘conifer branch’

• English: 2 morphemes

• Witsuwit’en– 1 morpheme: [l] ‘branch of conifer’ (vs. ‑[jischm]

‘branch of deciduous tree’)

2. How general is the concept expressed by a morpheme? (How many semantic features does it take to describe the concept?)

• Witsuwit’en– [tstl’s ‘paper, letter, book’– [nxw]- ‘our, your (pl.)’, [nj]- ‘your (sg.)’

Cross-linguistic variation in the encoding of kinship concepts

• e.g. ‘parent’s sibling’– Other possible concepts that might also be encoded in a

single morpheme:• sex: not specified, male, female

• side of family: not specified, maternal, paternal• 3 x 3 = 9 possible distinct concepts (in addition to ‘parent’s sibling’)

‘parent’s sibling’sex of parent’s sibling side of family

1 not specified not specified

2 not specified maternal

3 not specified paternal

4 female not specified

5 female maternal

6 female paternal

7 male not specified

8 male maternal

9 male paternal

English Witsuwit’en Sahaptin

1 ‘parent’s sibling’ -- -- --2 ‘mother’s sibling -- -- --3 ‘father’s sibling’ -- -- --4 ‘parent’s sister’ aunt -- --

5 ‘mother’s sister’ -- -aq’y/-eq’y

paXáX

6 ‘father’s sister’ -- -pits pišíš

7 ‘parent’s brother’ uncle -- --

8 ‘mother’s brother’ -- -z/E káka

9 ‘father’s brother’ -- -thaj mXa

Reference

• Iconic vs. non-iconic reference

• Does the form of a sign (expression) resemble what it refers to?– spoken languages, rarely– sign languages, more often

Iconic vs. non-iconic reference

BANANA ENGLAND

Prototypical reference• For many common nouns, the set

of possible referents are clustered around a prototype.

• E.g. ‘bird’• Prototypical exemplars of a

category are more readily processed than atypical exemplars.

Reference and prototypes• Prototypes vs. set of possible referents:

– some set overlap possible:• ‘bowl’ vs. ‘cup’

• ‘a few’ vs. ‘several’

• ‘blue’ vs. ‘green’

Reference and prototypes

Coreference• Grammatical encoding of reference• Pronoun form. Reflexive pronouns:

singular plural

1 myself ourselves

2 yourself yourselves

3 himself, herself, itself themselves

Coreference

• Joyce burped.

Julia asked if Joyce could excuse herself.• Julia burped.

Julia asked if Joyce could excuse her.

‘herself’ must be coreferential with another NP in the same sentence

‘her’ must not be coreferential with another NP in the same sentence

Sense vs. reference

1. --‘What does [kuutibkuutib] mean?’

--‘Let’s ask Joyce.’

vs. ‘Let’s ask the person who has studied Arabic.’

2. ‘I want to be the president of the U.S.’

vs.

‘I want to be George W. Bush.’

Sense vs. reference• Reference (‘extension’): identity of real

world object• Sense (‘intension’): (compositionally

determined) meaning• Same referent, unequal sense

– ‘Toshiyuki Ogihara’ • has no inherent meaning (to an English speaker,

other than “Japanese name”)

– ‘the semanticist on the faculty in the Dept of Linguistics, UW’

– Proper names characteristically have a referent but no inherent sense

Sense vs. reference

• Sense without reference is possible– ‘the first female president of the United States’– ‘the B wing elevator in Padelford Hall’

“Semantics”• To non-linguists if two expressions differ in

“semantics”, the expressions have the same referent but differ in sense– Re employee titles in business: “It's just

semantics,” says Ben Compton, president of 10-person architecture firm Architects BC (Lexington, SC). “We really don't put much emphasis on it. What's more important is what we can do to help bring (an employee's) career along.”

"One of my pet peeves is when people say the school district, instead of our school district. Maybe it's just semantics, but it makes the community sound powerless, and we're not."

Russ Wood, president of the Mountain View-Whisman School Board

Sentence (phrasal) semantics

• How do the meanings of lexical items combine? – Compositionality and lack thereof– Anomaly

• Entailment

Non-compositionality• Idioms/proverbs: literal vs. figurative

(noncompositional) meaning (‘free translation’)

idiom phrasal category

noncompositional meaning

to put one’s foot in one’s mouth

VP ‘to say something stupid, regrettable and/or insensitive’

to split hairs VP ‘to insist on minute, possibly unimportant detail’

to go down VP ‘to happen (dangerous or important event)’

More idioms

dead end NP ‘termination of street with no connection to another street’

black market NP ‘illegal trading or exchange’

dead in the water

AP ‘not going to happen’

Some Tsek’ene idioms

idiom phrasal category

literal meaning noncompositional meaning

tche/ nikl

VP ‘it wagged its tail’

‘he/she/it died’

thìtshìsIni/õ VP ‘he/she put my head in the water’

‘he/she criticized me’

thehkhahce ilà/

NP ‘frog hand’ ‘slow, clumsy hands’

Some Witsuwit’en idioms

idiom phrasal category

literal meaning

noncompositional meaning

[jX ste] VP ‘he/she stays home’

‘she is pregnant’

[njzil util/j/]

VP ‘he/she/it likes your smell’

‘he/she/it is used to you’

[c’t’xwts’y il]

NP ‘songbird backpack’

‘large wet snowflake’

[ljap t/at p jininye]

S ‘the devil fought with his wife’

‘there was a hail storm’

Anomaly• Semantically ill-formed phrases

– meanings that cannot combine with each other– anomalous expression = ‘oxymoron’

• Sign in a London department store:Bargain basement upstairs

• On a church door:'This is the gate of Heaven. Enter Ye all by this door.' (This door is kept locked because of the draught. Please use side door.)

• Outside a disco:Smarts is the most exclusive disco in town. Everyone welcome.

– source of many of Jay Leno’s “Headlines”

• Syntactic well-formedness independent of semantic well-formedness– ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’– Jabberwocky

Entailment• If X entails Y, then whenever X is true Y is

also true. – X: Last night I did the dishes and straightened

the living room.

entails:• Y: Last night I did the dishes.

– X: Mike Price was fired.

entails:• Y: Someone was fired.

Entailment• Mutual entailment = complete synonymy• ‘Put off’ is synonymous with ‘procrastinate about’

– If– The professor put off writing the paper. entails – The professor procrastinated about writing the paper.

• and– The professor procrastinated about writing the paper.

entails – The professor put off writing the paper.

– Then– The professor put off writing the paper.

• is synonymous with– The professor procrastinated about writing the paper.

Predicting entailment

1. Factive verbs: be sorry, regret, stop

Factive verbs entail the truth of their complements.

• I’m sorry you were late. entails

• You were late.

• I regret the incident. entails

• There was an incident.

• When did you stop beating your wife? entails

• You were beating your wife.

• Complements of factive verbs cannot be ‘cancelled’– Aixa is sorry the party is over (#but it’s

actually still in full swing).

• Complements of non-factive verbs can be cancelled– Aixa said the party is over (but it’s actually

still in full swing).– Aixa thinks the party is over (but it’s actually

still in full swing).

Predicting entailment

2. Dictum de Omni

If sentences X and Y differ only in that X contains a hyponym (special case) of Y, then X generally entails Y.

Dictum de Omni

dill pickle is a hyponym of pickle

X: Dave ate a dill pickle. entails

Y: Dave ate a pickle.

Japanese car is a hyponym of car

X: Anya bought a Japanese car. entails

Y: Anya bought a car.

But:celebrity boxing is a hyponym of boxingX: Darva Conger enjoys celebrity boxing.

does not entail:

Y: Darva Conger enjoys (all forms of) boxing.

Actually, Y entails X!

Predicting entailment

Predicting entailment

3. Dictum de nulloIf sentences X and Y differ only in that X contains a

hypernym (general case) found in Y, then X generally entails Y.

Syntactic conditions under which Dictum de Nullo applies instead of Dictum de Omni: – Negative sentences– Conditional sentences– Sentences containing ‘all’, ‘every’; habitual sentences

Negative sentences

• Seattle is a hypernym of Ballard

• X: ‘Bill Gates doesn't live in Seattle.’ entails

• Y: ‘Bill Gates doesn't live in Ballard.’

Conditional sentences

• sports car is a hypernym of German sports car

• X: If Bill bought a sports car, then it must be a nice car. entails

• Y: If Bill bought a German sports car, then it must be a nice car.

Sentences with 'every'

• boxing match is a hypernym of celebrity boxing match

• X: Darva Conger watched every boxing match. entails

• Y: Darva Conger watched every celebrity boxing match.

Habitual sentences

• boxing is a hypernym of celebrity boxing

• X: Darva Conger enjoys boxing. entails

• Y: Darva Conger enjoys celebrity boxing.

Entailment summary

• Possible to predict when some sentences entail other sentences.

• Depends on– whether sentence contains a factive verb or not– which sentence contains hypernym vs.

hyponym– type of sentence: positive vs. negative

/conditional / ‘every’, habitual

Semantics summary• Semantics overlaps with morphology, syntax• Semantic competence • Lexical semantics

– Cross-linguistic variation in the number of morphemes to encode concepts

– Semantic relations: antonymy, synonymy, ambiguity, hyponymy, entailment

• Reference, coreference, reference vs. sense, “semantics”

• Compositional and non-compositional aspects of linguistic meaning

• Entailment