Fichier de travail :
- ../DUMP-TEXT/Anglais/2_Meaning/49.txt
Forme voulue :
- (meanings?|significations?|senses?(\b))
Définition :
- Signification, ce que quelque chose veut dire.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
What is Meaning?
--
* The process of creating and interpreting symbols, sometimes called
signification, is far wider than language. The general study of
the use of sign systems is called semiotics, and the study of
linguistic meaning is part of semiotics. Semiotics studies the
relationship between a signifier (a sign) and the signified (the
--
three such different relations.
* Semantics investigates linguistic meaning.
--
* The definitions theory: to give the meaning of a linguistic
expression we need to define the meaning of words.
* The problem of circularity
* The question of whether linguistic knowledge is different from
general/encyclopaedic knowledge: meaning is kind of knowledge, and
it may require exact definitions.
* The problem of the contribution of context to meaning: how can we
include features of context in our definitions. Separate
conventional meaning from that contributed by context, which
belongs to the study called pragmatics.
--
semantics <---> thought
* Word meaning and sentence meaning (Krifka 1998, lecture notes (1,
2, 3, 4, 5))
Linguistic expressions are first related to meanings, and meanings
may be related to objects in the world. Hence the relation between
--
then is to see develop theories about the relation between
expressions, meanings, and the objects these meanings stand for.
This is expressed in the following quote of the commentary of
--
In this course we will be mostly interested in meanings and how
meanings and natural-language expressions relate to each other.
* How to represent meaning? (Krifka 1998, lecture notes)
The entities that semantics deals with, meanings, cannot be
observed directly (they are, as Al-Farabi put it, `within the
soul'). And hence the proper nature of meanings constitute a
serious problem, perhaps the most serious problem, for philosophers
--
We don't have to know what meanings really are! As linguists, we
are interested in the relation between linguistic expressions and
meanings
* Two basic aspects of the investigation of linguistic meanings:
paradigmatic and syntagmatic aspect. The question of how the
meanings of words like sparrow and bird are related to each other
illustrates the paradigmatic aspect of semantics. The question of
how the meaning of a complex expression is related to the meanings
of the parts illustrates the syntagmatic aspect.
--
--- syntagmatic relations: meaning relations between complex
expressions and their parts
--
3. Meaning and Compositionality (Krifka 1998, lecture notes)
--
possible world (the so-called "actual" world).
* The basic idea is that the meaning of a complex expression, like
Austin thrives, should be computable from the meanings of the
parts, here Austin and thrives. This is called the principle of
--
implicit way, by Frege, and is also known as Fregean Principle.
* Name meanings and sentence meanings are complete or, as Frege
termed it, saturated. The meaning of a predicate like thrives is
something that has to be combined with another meaning (e.g. the
meaning of Austin) to produce a complete meaning (namely, a set of
possible worlds). Hence the meaning of thrives is incomplete or
unsaturated. Technically, the meaning of thrives is a function
from entities to sets of possible worlds.
--
* ambiguity: describes cases in which one and the same constituent
has more than one meaning.
* meaning extensions: For example, pen may stand for a writer
(e.g., a hired pen), or for a writing style (e.g., she wrote with
--
pen, as in he penned the letter. These are clearly extensions of
the first meaning of pen.
* vagueness: Terms like several or many or tall are vague. We may
--
specific than B, or A is a hyponym of B.
* presupposition: Often certain components of meaning have
backgrounded status -- they are presupposed. For example, a
--
a sister.
* literal meaning: the basic meaning of an expression
* implicatures: generated by using the expression at a particular
--
world. For exaple, proper names like John denotes an individual
* sense: the semantic links between elements within the vocabulary
system is an aspect of their sense or meaning.
* utterance: is created by speaking a piece of language