Semantics Meaning in Modern Semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning in language

Semantics deals with the meaning of words, and how the meanings
of sentences are derived from them.
In the overall structure of linguistics, semantics resides somewhere
between syntax and morphology on the one side and pragmatics,
or the study of language use, on the other. Syntax and semantics
are distinct but intertwined in many ways, and pragmatics is built
on top of semantics.
The Meaning of Meaning
The words mean/meaning can have several different meanings:
Meaning is not some kind of ‘entity’ separate from language -
any more than measures such as ‘height’ of ‘length’ have some
kind of independent existence.
→ Words have meaning means only that they are used in a
certain way in a sentence.
Sense versus Reference
The primary focus of modern semantics is on the way people
relate words to each other within the framework of their language
- on their sense, rather then their reference.

John means to write ‘intends’ Distinction between sense and reference:

A green light means go. ‘indicates’
Health means everything ‘has importance’ There are many cases where we use words, even though they do
His look was full of meaning ‘special import’ not naturally correspond to the way things are in the world.
What does capitalist mean to you? ‘convey’
What does ‘cornea’ mean? ‘refer to in the world’ • Across languages:
See for example family terms in English and the Australian
The last kind of use comes closest to the focus of linguistic
language Pitjanjatjara.
semantics. But even this is a special kind of inquiry.
• Within a single language:
Of greater importance is the study of the way in which words and We use such words as hill and mountain, cup and glass, or
sentences convey meaning in everyday situations of speech and stream and river. But when does a stream become a river, or
writing. a hill a mountain?

Linguistics 201, October 8, 2001 Kordula De Kuthy 1 2

How do we explain what a words meaning is? Sense Relationships

How are the words of a language organized?

What is, for example, the meaning of the word chair ? Paradigmatic Relations: the way in which words can substitute
for each other.
Reference:
Point to a chair. • Synonymy: the relationship of ‘sameness’ of meaning. We
can also extend this to ”graded synonymy”, in which the
Problem: How does one then know which other objects in the amount of similarity between two words may not be 100%,
world should also be called chairs. but the words do overlap to some extent.
(1) a. complete synonyms: pavement/sidewalk, ascend/rise,
Sense:
hide/conceal
Using a rough definition such as seat with four legs and a back.
b. partial synonyms: book/volume, kid/child,
→ Total reliance on the use of words to explain the sense of other sofa/couch
words. • Antonymy: the relationship of ‘oppositeness of meaning’.
– gradable antonyms, such as big/small, good/bad, which
permit the expression of degrees (very big, quite small ;
– nongradable antonyms (also called complementary terms),
which do not permit degrees of contrast, such as
single/married, male/female; it is not possible to talk
of very female, quite married, etc;
– converse terms: two-way contrasts that are
interdependent, such as buy/sell or parent/child ; one
member presupposes the other.
• Asymmetry: superordinate and subordinate terms; for
example horse is subordinate term of animal, and a
superordinate term of pony.

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 Polysemy or Homonymy Semantic Components
• Polysemy refers to the cases where a word has more than one
meaning: for example, chip can mean a piece of wood, food,
or electronic circuit. People see no problem in saying that ‘the Another way to study lexical meaning is by analysing words into
word chip has several different meanings in English’. a series of semantic features, or components.
• Homonymy refers to cases where two or more different words
have the same shape (sound identical): for example, bank is (2) man: adult human male
both a building and an area of ground. Again, people see
no problem in saying that ‘these are two different words in
Whole systems of relationships can be established, using a small
English’.
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set of components.

bear N 8< carry 9 >

=
= man adult male
polysemy >
homonymy woman
: give ; ;
adult female
bear V birth (3)
boy non-adult male
endure
girl non-adult female
Difficulties with the two terms:
• Are table(furniture) and table (arrangement of data) two
different words (homonymy), or the same word with with two
meanings (polysemy)?
• Pupil (in school) and pupil (of the eye) are usually listed as
different words - though in fact they have the same historical
origin.
• French voler ‘fly’ and voler ‘steal’: they are now thought of
as different words, but both derive from Latin volare.

→ There is often a conflict between historical criteria and present-

day intuition, in sorting out cases of polysemy and homonymy.

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Sentence Meaning In order to understand the meaning of the sentence, we need to

know two things:
Propositional meaning, truth conditions:

Anyone who knows a sentence’s meaning knows the conditions
under which it would be true; they know its truth conditions.
If we investigate only the meaning of the words, then we would
expect to get the two sentences The girl kisses everyone. and
Everyone kisses the girl. to mean exactly the same thing, since
they are formed from exactly the same words. We also would
expect to get the same meaning from the nonsensical string of
words:
*The everyone girl kisses.
1. whether it is in fact true or false given what we know about
the world ( its truth value)
2. the minimal conditions under which it will be true ( its truth
value)
Prosodic Meaning
The way a sentence is said, using the prosody of the language,
can radically alter the meaning. Any marked change in emphasis,
for example, can lead to a sentence being interpreted in a fresh
light.

The order of words in a phrase helps determine the meaning of (4) a. John’s bought a red CAR (not a bicycle).
the phrase. However, notice that these two sentences with the b. John’s bought a RED car (not a green one).
different structures have the same meaning: c. JOHN’s bought a red car (not Michael).

The girl kisses everyone = Everyone is kissed by the girl
So, there is more to be said. The relationship between meaning
and syntactic structure is often referred to as the Principle of
Compositionality:
The meaning of a sentence is determined by the meaning of
its words and by the syntactic structure in which they are
combined.
This principle is also called Frege’s Principle after the
mathematician and philosopher Gottlob Frege, who first stated it.
The prosody informs us of what information in the sentence can
be taken for granted (is ‘given’) and what is of special significance
(is ‘new’).
Pragmatic meaning
The function performed by the sentence in a discourse needs to be
considered. The meaning of the sentence There’s some chalk on
the floor seems plain enough; but in some situations it would be
interpreted as a statement of of fact (Have you seen any chalk?)
and in others as a veiled command (as when a teacher might
point out the chalk to a child in class).

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