Semantics
LING 200
Spring 2006
Overview
• Semantic competence
• Lexical semantics
– Some meaning relationships
– Cross-linguistic variation
• Reference
– iconicity
– protypes
– sense vs. reference
• “semantics”
• Phrasal semantics
Semantic competence
• Semantics
– overlaps with morphology, syntax
– an important part of linguistics
• What native speakers know about:
– meanings of individual morphemes
– meanings of heteromorphemic words and
sentences
– relationships between meanings
• Challenge of studying semantics
– knowing what morphemes, words and sentences
mean
Lexical semantics
• = meanings of morphemes (and words)
• 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
• (Fairly) synonymous lexical items
–
–
–
–
couch = sofa
get = receive
throw up = vomit
put off = postpone
• cf. procrastinate (‘put off due to laziness’)
Ambiguity
• Polysemy vs. homophony
• Polysemous morpheme
– meaning1
– e.g. hard
meaning2
• “durable, solid”
• “difficult”
• Single lexical entry in a dictionary
Homophony
• Homophones
– morpheme1
morpheme2
meaning1
meaning2
– e.g. pass (‘I’m going to pass’)
• ‘abstain’
• ‘succeed’
• Distinct lexical entries in a dictionary
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: adjectives
colored (‘contains color’)
red
green
black
purple
blue
yellow
turquoise royal blue
Hyponymy: verbs
hyponym
hypernym
dance
move
slice
cut
drive
motate
Fromkin, Rodman and Hyams (p. 184): ‘clarinet,
guitar, horn, marimba, piano, trumpet, and violin
are hyponyms because they are “musical
instruments” but there isn’t a single word meaning
“musical instrument” that has these words as its
hyponyms.’
Still, piano is a hyponym of musical instrument; etc.
(Generally) productive ways of forming
hyponyms
strategy
adjectival/
sentential
modification
hyponym
car
flower
compounding pickle
rage
adverbial
modification
interesting
Japanese car
the flower I picked last
night
dill pickle
road rage
incredibly interesting
Caveats re adjectival modification
• Anti-intersection adjectives
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 thief
alleged
thief
??
??
Caveat re compounding
• “Exocentric” compounds
boombox
is not a
hyponym of:
instead hyponym of:
box
sound system
station wagon wagon
car
soap opera
TV show
opera
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’
– cf. -[jischm] ‘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?) How are concepts
morphologically encoded?
• Witsuwit’en
– [tstl’s] ‘paper, letter, book’
– [nxw]- ‘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’j/-eq’j
paXáX
6
‘father’s sister’
--
-pits
pišíš
7
‘parent’s brother’
uncle
--
--
8
‘mother’s brother’
--
-z?E
káka
9
‘father’s brother’
--
-thaj
mXa
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 (quickly, reliably)
processed than atypical
exemplars.
Reference and prototypes
• Prototypes vs. set of possible referents:
– some set overlap possible:
• ‘bowl’
vs.
‘cup’
Reference and prototypes
• ‘a few’
• ‘blue’
vs.
vs.
‘several’
‘green’
Coreference
• Grammatical encoding of reference
– syntax overlaps with semantics
• 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
--‘What does [hawláak] mean?’
--‘Let’s ask Virginia Beavert.’
vs. ‘Let’s ask someone who speaks Sahaptin.’
Sense vs. reference
• Reference (‘extension’): identity of real
world object
• Sense (‘intension’): (compositionally
determined) meaning
• Same referent, unequal sense
– ‘Toshiyuki Ogihara’
• has no sense (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 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-linguist native speakers of English, if
two expressions differ in “semantics”, the
expressions have the same referent but differ in
sense (as pointed out to me by Prof. Ogihara)
– "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 ViewWhisman School Board (example from the internet)
The Seattle Times, 11-1-2005
Sentence (phrasal) semantics
• How do the meanings of lexical items combine?
– Metonyms, metaphor
– Compositionality and lack thereof (idioms)
– Anomaly
• Entailment
Metonyms and metaphor
• Metonym: ‘substitutes for the object that is
meant, the name of an attribute or concept
associated with that object.’ (Fromkin, Rodman and
Hyams p. 184)
– redcoat: ‘a British soldier in a uniform with a red coat,
as during the American Revolution’ (New World Dict. of the
Amer. Lg.)
– soap opera: ‘a daytime radio or television serial
drama of a highly melodramatic, sentimental nature: so
called since many original sponsors were soap
companies’ (New World Dict. of the Amer. Lg.)
– redneck: ‘Exceptions [to lexical category
predictability] are compounds like redneck,
which is a type of person not a type of neck.
Their meaning cannot be predicted by rule.’
(Fromkin, Rodman and Hyams p. 184)
• [Slang] a poor, white, rural resident of the South:
often, a somewhat derogatory term [from the
characteristic sunburned neck acquired in the fields
by farm laborers] (New World Dict. of the Amer. Lg.)
• redneck a metonym; meaning not entirely
predictable by rule
Metaphor
• ‘an expression that ordinarily designates
one concept---its literal meaning---but is
used to designate another concept, thus
creating an implicit comparison.’
– ‘Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.’
Idioms/proverbs
• Institutionalized metaphors
– When does a metaphor become so widespread as to
become an idiom?
• Have two (or more) meanings
– literal (compositional) meaning
– figurative (noncompositional) meaning, a.k.a. ‘free
translation’
Some English idioms and proverbs
idiom
phrasal
category
noncompositional
meaning
to put one’s foot VP
in one’s mouth
‘to say something
stupid, regrettable
and/or insensitive’
to split hairs
VP
to get religion
VP
‘to insist on minute,
possibly unimportant
detail’
‘to become zealously
convinced (about
something)’
dead end
NP ‘termination of street with no
connection to another street’
black market
NP ‘illegal trading or exchange’
fair winds and
following seas
NP ‘an easy, straightforward time with
future endeavors’
dead in the water AP ‘not going to happen/come to
fruition’
Let sleeping dogs S
lie.
‘Don’t ask questions/raise issues
that could create more problems
than would be solved by the
original question.’
Some Tsek’ene idioms
idiom
[tche? nikl]
phrasal
category
literal meaning
noncompositional
meaning
VP
‘it wagged its
tail’
‘he/she/it died’
‘he/she put my
head in the
water’
‘frog hand’
‘he/she
criticized me’
[thìtshìsIni?õ] VP
[thehkhahče
ilà?]
NP
‘slow, clumsy
hands’
Some Witsuwit’en idioms
idiom
[jX ste]
[njzil
util?j?]
phrasal literal
category meaning
‘he/she stays
VP
home’
VP
[c’t’xwts’j NP
il]
[ljap t?at
S
p jininje]
noncompositional
meaning
‘she is pregnant’
‘he/she/it likes ‘he/she/it is used to you’
your smell’
‘songbird
backpack’
‘large wet snowflake’
‘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”
• Semantic well-formedness independent of
syntactic well-formedness
– #Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
• # = semantically ill-formed
– Jabberwocky (see p. 202 of Fromkin, Rodman and Hyams)
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: A contestant was fired by Donald Trump.
entails:
• Y: Someone was fired by Donald Trump.
Entailment
• Mutual entailment = complete synonymy
• ‘Put off’ is synonymous with ‘postpone’
– If
– They put off the wedding until June. entails
– They postponed the wedding until June.
and
– They postponed the wedding until June. entails
– They put off the wedding until June.
– Then
– They postponed the wedding until June.
is synonymous with
– They put off the wedding until June.
Predicting entailment
1. Factive verbs: be sorry, regret, stop
Factive verbs entail the truth of their
complements.
• I’m sorry that the Seahawks lost. entails
• The Seahawks lost.
• I regret that I put my foot in my mouth. entails
• I put my foot in my mouth.
• When did you stop beating your ___? entails
• You were beating your ___.
• Complements of factive verbs cannot be
‘cancelled’
– Julia is sorry the party is over (#but it’s actually
still in full swing).
• Complements of non-factive verbs can be
cancelled
– Julia said the party is over (but it’s actually still
in full swing).
– Julia 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: Prof. Ogihara bought a Japanese car. entails
Y: Prof. Ogihara bought a car.
Predicting entailment
3. Dictum de nullo
If sentences X and Y differ only in that X contains a
hypernym (general case) found in Y, then X
generally entails Y.
And the sentences containing X and Y are (any of)
– 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
• 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”
• There are both compositional and noncompositional aspects of linguistic meaning
• Entailment