Starter: consider these sentences. How are the underlined words being

used?

1. She put the cake on the table.

2. The executive tabled the motion to lower the prices.

3. She used plenty of cosmetics.

4. Some people have cosmetic surgery.

Learning Objectives: to understand the concept of

symbols and referents; semantic fields; denotation and

connotation; metaphor; synonyms, hyponyms and

antonyms; collocations, lexemes and fixed expressions.

SEMANTICS• Semantics is the study of meaning and is one of the largest branches of linguistics.

• It is important for understanding language in social contexts, as these are likely to affect meaning, and for understanding varieties of English and effects of style.

• It includes several areas, and today we will be exploring the following:

• symbols and referents

• semantic fields

• collocations, lexemes and fixed expressions.

• denotation and connotation

• synonyms, hyponyms and antonyms

• Metaphor.

You will need to have your glossaries ready and be jotting down notes about

new terminology.

WHY SEMANTICS IS IMPORTANT• Write a definition for ‘dog’.

• Imagine you are Martian and you have never seen a dog before. You look in the dictionary to see what they are, and come across the following definition:

• dog n. 1. a domesticated canine mammal, occurring in many breeds that show a great variety in size and form. 2. any other carnivore of the family Canidae, such as the dingo and coyote.

• You now stumble across an unfamiliar animal. How do you decide whether it is a dog or not?

• How helpful do you think such a definition would be?

• Is your definition any more helpful?

• Semantics is the study of how meanings work, and exploring issues such as the above is important for our understanding of language.

PROTOTYPE THEORY• Due to the problematic nature of neatly defining words, (some birds are more ‘birdy’ than

others, for example), in the 1970s Eleanor Rosch established pioneering ideas about how we can think about meaning while taking into account the subjectivity and flexibility of meaning.

If you see in this diagram, the bird species which look most like our prototypical bird are towards the centre; birds which are less ‘birdy’, such as flightless birds, are placed around the edge, and examples which are even less ‘birdy’ would be in a further ring around the edge.

SIGNS• Signs are essentially things that can be interpreted as having a meaning, which is something other

than themselves. E.g. a road sign.

• ‘Don’t overtake’ is know as the referent, what the sign is referring to.

• The referent for ‘green’ is ‘go’, and ‘red’ is ‘stop’, or ‘no’.

• Signs like this are known as symbolic signs: we know what they mean because of cultural consensus. Of course, in other cultures, symbolic signs might have different referents to the UK.

• Portraits and diagrams are known as iconic signs: they bear a closer resemblance to their referent.

What does this sign mean?How do you know?

REFERENTS IN LANGUAGE• In a sentence, the referent is the thing to which the word is referring.

• The farmer stopped working, for he was hot. The sun was shining brightly and he felt exhausted after his long labour. It had taken all day.

• Can you work out the referent for each of the pronouns in this sentence?

• Identifying what the referents are for a pronoun is part of the skill of reading: it’s an essential part of textual cohesion and a way of linking different ideas in a sentence together.

SEMANTIC FIELDS• Semantic fields are groups of words to do with a particular subject, or which have similar meanings.

• For example:

• ball, player, team are all part of the semantic field of sport.

• Depending on the words in the field, they can become more or less specific:

• ball, player, team, striker, Arsenal, off-side are all part of the semantic field of football.

This should be familiar from GCSE!

COLLOCATIONS AND LEXEMES• As a lexical unit may contain more than one word, David Crystal has coined the term lexeme. This is usually a single word, but may be a phrase in which the meaning belongs to the whole rather than its parts, as in verb phrases tune in, turn on, drop out or noun phrase (a) fry up.

• Words which are often found in pairs are called collocations – cosmetic surgery, Christmas Eve, director’s cut.

• Collocations which become so frequently used that they are accepted as one long structure, rather than single words, are known as fixed expressions – see you later, at the end of the day.

DENOTATION AND CONNOTATION

• What a sign denotes is the precise match between a sign and its referent, more like a dictionary definition.

• What a sign connotes is ideas and associations which are connected with the sign.

• For instance, a red rose.

• The denotation is a red-coloured, many-petalled flower, with thorns.

• The connotation of a red rose are manifold: passion, love, sacrifice, the England Rugby Team (where the rose is used as a symbolic sign), the red rose of York…

SYNONYMS AND ANTONYMS• Synonyms (as you know!) are words which have roughly the same meaning as each other.

• However, this is enormously simplified as often one word will have very different connotations or will be used in a very different register: pal, friend, mate, companion, playmate, ally.

• Antonyms (as you should also know!) are words with opposite meanings as each other. Antonyms can be:

• Complementary – e.g. alive v. dead – you can only be one or the other!

• Graded – e.g. long v. short – you have varying degrees of length or shortness.

DYSPHEMISMS AND EUPHEMISMS• Sometimes, due to the needs of an audience, a writer may choose to use a euphemism rather than a

more blunt, taboo word, known as a dysphemism.

• Consider the word ‘toilet’. Can you think of other synonyms? Which are euphemisms and which are dysphemisms? In what ways would your audience or form of writing (mode) dictate your semantic choices here?

HYPONYMS AND HYPERNYMS• Hypernyms are more general ways of referring to things.

• Hyponyms are more specific ways of referring to things.

• In the diagram below, electronics is a hypernym of hardware, its hyponym; hardware is a hypernym of computer, its hyponym, and so on.

Electronics Hardware Computer Laptop

Thinking point: When might you choose to make use of more or

less specific terms?

METAPHOR• One final way we might think about semantics is metaphor. The linguistics definition of metaphor is ‘a

structure that presents one thing in terms of another’.

• We use many metaphors in everyday speech without really thinking about it:

• “I’m heading in the right direction.”

• “I’m moving on after that breakup.”

• “It’s like she’s going sideways.”

• “He was on a high.”

• “Mum was feeling so low.”

• Metaphorical frameworks like this are helpful to give us a structure to understand key ideas. Consider the metaphor of love as a container: I’m in love, I’m out of love…

part of a broad metaphor of ‘life as a journey’

part of a broad metaphor of emotions on a vertical scale

SO WHAT?• Semantics is an important field of language as it helps us negotiate the relationship between text

producer, text receiver and the text itself. It is also important to help us identify and analyse the purpose and audience of the text.

HOMEWORK (DUE NEXT LESSON)

• Referring to as many different semantic concepts as you can, explore how this advertisement works and how the reader relates to the ideas, and what associations the reader is expected to make.

• You may annotate the advertisement as your response to this task, or write up your ideas in full.

• Please also read the chapter on phonetics and phonology that I have emailed to you in preparation for our next lesson. Write down any questions or anything you don’t understand for us to go through in the following lesson.