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1. Semantics and Semiotics
- The semantists are committed to describe semantic knowledge, which allows the speaker to know when sentences describe the same situation, when they contradict one another, when one entails another, etc.
- 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 object the sign represents). Icon, index, and symbol indicate three such different relations.
- Semantics investigates linguistic meaning.
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2. Three Challenges in Doing Semantics
- 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.
- Metalanguage, object language, and the tool of description. The language one studies is the object language, and the language one uses to describe the language under investigation is the metalanguage.
3. Semantics in a Model of Grammar
- Components of Grammar
sound <---> phonology <---> syntax <---> semantics <---> thought
Linguistic expressions are first related to meanings, and meanings may be related to objects in the world. Hence the relation between expressions and things is an indirect one. The task of semantics 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 Aristotle by Muhammad Al-Farabi (870-950) (please read "semantics" for "logic") (Krifka 1998, lecture notes)
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 from ancient times till today.
--- physically observable actions?
--- physically observable states of the brain?
--- entities of a particular, immaterial kind?
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.
--- paradigmatic relations: hyponym (literally, ‘undername’) and hyperonym (literally, ‘overname’), antonym, synonyms.
these relations between words and larger linguistic expressions
--- syntagmatic relations: meaning relations between complex expressions and their parts
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3. Meaning and Compositionality (Krifka 1998, lecture notes)
- Possible worlds: A possible world is one way how the world could look like — one way of determining every aspect of the world, down to every minute detail. The real world is just one of these 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 compositionality. It was first proposed, although in a rather 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.
4. Some Basic Notions (Krifka 1998, lecture notes)
- 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 a very witty pen). Also, it may denote the act of writing with a 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 be unsure about whether to apply a term like tall to a person because we do not really know which standards to apply.
- structural ambiguities:
- context-sensitive: yesterday, now, here, he, and local are all words which are context-sensitive.
- denotation: reference of an expression
- connotation: describes certain attitudes a speaker has towards an entity or a state of affairs.
- entailment: A entails B if A is a subset of B, A is more 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 sentence like "My sister drives a Toyota." presupposes that I have a sister.
- literal meaning: the basic meaning of an expression
- implicatures: generated by using the expression at a particular occasion. a property of implicatures is that they can be cancelled.
- reference: the relationship by which language hooks onto the 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
- sentence: abstract grammatical elements obtained from utterance.
- proposition: further abstraction from sentences, passive vs. active sentences.
- information structure:
- truth: true or false for a proposition
- truth-conditional semantics: The version of semantics that takes truth conditions as the basis of all semantic judgments
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Last updated by Haihua Pan, 13 Jan. 2004