When we study semantics, we must recognise 3 different domains:
1: Facts about Linguistic expressions (lexical items or phrases), including the properties
of Linguistic expressions and the relations that hold between them.
2: the facts about the relationship between linguistic expressions and the world we live in
3: the facts of linguistic expressions and the people who use them
1: Properties of Linguistic Expressions and relations between Linguistic Expressions:
Domain 1 deals mainly with the area or SENSE. Sense holds between the words or
expressions in a single language independently of the relationships, if any, that hold
between those words and their referents. (that is internal, language based)
Actual Meaning: whatever that is, the relation between a linguistic expression and the
concept that it encodes by virtue of linguistic conventions.
Redundancy: We are aware without any instruction that expressions such as ‘a male
uncle’ and ‘a bovine cow’ involve redundancy as the meaning of the modifying element
in the expression is contained in the meaning of the modified element.
Ambiguity: this occurs where one linguistic expression encodes more than one meaning.
There are two types of false ambiguity: Lexical and Structural. There is one true type of
ambiguity: Semantic.
Some words are labeled as ‘ambiguous’ but not correctly so. The appearance of
ambiguity arises only in usage (that is in context) in that the perceiver is uncertain which
of the words is being used: He turned towards the bank, You should have seen the bull
we received from the pope, John has grown another foot . In these utterances the speaker
knows what s/he means but the hearer or reader is uncertain because they are not sure
which word ‘bank’ or ‘bull’ or ‘foot’ is being used by the speaker/writer but the person
using the utterance is clear in what they mean. (Lexical)
The structure of the sentence may be the cause of the appearance of ambiguity. The same
string of words can be parsed in different ways, leading to the hearer not being able to
determine which structure was in the mind of the speaker.
John ran down our street, Flying planes can be dangerous, We saw the boy with
binoculars. (Structural)
W e can come across expressions which are indeterminate in meaning (but not truly
ambiguous) in decontextualised language such as newspaper headlines, banners and
slogans:
Free Women.
These cases of apparent ambiguity are actually part of the system of language whereby
two linguistic expressions that sound the same can be produced so that the hearer will be
uncertain (using simply linguistic evidence) which of the two expressions the speaker
was using.
As the above examples represent merely a problem for the receiver of the language
determining the intended meaning of the utterer, they do not represent true ambiguity and
do not fall within the remit of Semantics.
Ambiguity arises where there is no confusion about words or different structures. This is
true ambiguity:
A quiz master once asked the question as to why bras fasten at the back. The answer that
was considered correct was that once all ladies were dressed by a maid. This brought the
response: ‘She must have been tired’. The joke in this response rested in the ambiguity of
the phrase:
All ladies were dressed by a maid.
One the one hand it refers to a situation where each lady has a maid, perhaps a different
maid for each lady, but it could also mean that there was only one maid and she dressed
all the ladies (hence she would be very tired).
The more usual example given would be:
All men love one woman.
This sentence could be interpreted to mean either that there is only one woman that all
men love, or that it is a property of all men that there is at least one woman for each man
that he loves, but that is not necessarily the same woman for each man. This ambiguity
does not result from any single lexical item being difficult for the receiver to determine or
from two different syntactic structures being uttered as the same string of words. There is
only one sentence structure and the meaning of each of the words is clear but the overall
sentence is ambiguous. This is true ambiguity.
Vagueness: Vagueness is not the same as ambiguity. A words such as ‘tall’ is vague as it
is the case that some people are neither definitely tall or definitely not tall. It is not
precise in its meaning. A heap of sand is still a heap of sand if we remove on grain of
sand. It is not possible to determine at what point it cease to be a heap.
Some words are underspecified. So if I say, bring a parent to the meeting, then the word
does not specify whether it is mother or father is being referred to.
Anomaly:
Colourless green ideas sleep furiously, Being a theorem frightens consternation, To laugh
is very humid.
These expressions are anomalous in that they look like normal sentences in one way but
defy linguistic interpretation due to semantic contradictions and clashes.
Contradiction
Cats are vegetables.- here the meaning of the word ‘cat’ excludes it being a vegetable.
The car is hot and it is not hot. - here two mutually exclusive properties are being
assigned to the car.
Entailment
Where I say John murdered Bill, there is an entailment that John killed Bill. This follows
from the meaning of the word ‘murder’. murder entails kill, but kill does not entail
murder. Assassinate entails murder, but murder does not entail assassinate. But there are
a number things that John murdered bill entails: Bill is dead, John is a sentient being,
John chose to kill Bill. There are a number of different types of entailment: succeed / try,
snore / sleep, as well as the murder / kill type.
One definition states that a sentence x entails a sentence y if in all situations where X is
true, Y is also always true. This leads to the situation where ‘John murdered Bill’ not
only entails ‘Bill is dead’ but also ‘Cats are not vegetables’. As this latter sentence is true
everywhere. Furthermore the truth of ‘Cats are not vegetables’ derives from the meaning
of the term ‘cat’ (compositionality) rather than from a truth about the world such as
‘Two plus Two equals Four’ or ‘Nothing travels faster than the speed of light’.
Synonymy
For words to be truly synonymous, we should find that where two expressions X and Y
are synonyms, all expressions containing X can be altered so that X is simply replace by
Y and there is no change in meaning or grammaticality: die, expire, pass away, pop off,
kick the bucket, snuff it all seem to mean the same thing but while expire can generally
be used where die is used, die can not be used in every place expire is used.
Other possible synonyms include:
FAST / SPEEDY / QUICK
AID / ASSISTANCE / HELP
These can not be totally synonymous with replacement in all circumstances.
car/auto, duvet/eiderdown, dusk / twilight, jumper / sweater but this is rare as most
synonyms tend to diverge: broke/snapped or youth/adolescent.
Paraphrase
Paraphrase occurs where one expression means the same as another , so it is synonymy at
the compositional level. This involves one meaning being encoded in two different
linguistic expressions.
Antonymy: Binary, gradeable:
Antonymy is where words exist in semantic opposition to each other. Binary antonymy
occurs where there is no area of meaning between the two antonyms: alive - dead. Grade
able antonymy occurs where the antonyms exist at either ends of a spectrum as in hot -
cold, where there exists an area of meaning between the two extremes that can be
represented by separate lexical items of through modification: tepid, cool, warm or fairly
cold, a little hot etc. The binary antonyms allow of no modification (half dead) and do not
exist in a spectrum of terms.
Adjectives rely crucially this relationship.
Homonymy
club, bear - an expression has the same form as another but a different etymology and
meaning.
Homophones, homographs: homonyms can be LEs that sound the same (Homophones) or
which look alike when written (Homographs).
So sentences that are show ‘structural’ ambiguity are really examples of homophonic
phrases.
This is not a crucial part of a theory of semantics as they involve utterances.
Polysemy:
Sometimes a word can be said to have a number of meanings. These meanings are
related. An expression has developed more than one meaning generally through a
metaphoric connection. This can also be seen as a kind of true ambiguity.
Conversality
Where expressions can encode the same event from opposite points of view, we have
conversality: Buy / Sell. Lend / Borrow, give / receive. Parent / Child.
Incompatibility
the box is wood / the box is metal
Hyponymy / Hypernymy
Maple is a HYPONYM of tree, tree is a HYPERNYM of Maple.
Meronymy / Holonymy
The part whole relationship: Finger is a meronym of Hand and Hand is a Holonym of
Finger.
Troponymy
This relationship is crucial to the organization of the verbal system. ‘Limp’ is a troponym
of ‘walk’ as an act of limping involves an act of walking; walking in a particular manner.
SENSE:
Sense holds between the words or expressions in a single language independently of the
relationships, if any, that hold between those words and their referents. (that is internal to
language, language based but objective and public in that it can be grasped by different
speakers).
So although ‘the leader of Fianna Fail’ and ‘the taoiseach’ refer to the same person, they
clearly have different meanings. This difference is not in the reference as the referent is
the same, but instead must be internal to the language. The extension is the same but the
intension is different. The members of the sets that the expressions pick out are the same
but the definitions of the sets are NOT the same. For many, meaning in language must
involve this intension (intensional meaning) rather than the extension (extensional
meaning) although many philosophers accept that the extension must be involve in
meaning in language following Hilary Putnam who argued that the meaning of water is
not shown in my belief about a liquid but in its chemical make up which is an
external/extensional property. He argues that this is the case for all natural kinds. And
insofar as the meaning of our words is defined by the properties of the thing they refer to,
he is right. The question is how much of meaning relies on the properties of the thing
referred to.
The classical formulation of sense was provided by Frege who contrasted sense with
reference.
Domain 2:
The relationship between Linguistic Expressions and the world at the time of utterance.
Reference: — the connection between an expression/utterance and the object it refers to
at the time of utterance (thus including ‘it’, ‘that’ etc.).
Words without reference: if, yet, but, shall, almost, and.
Verbs: sets of Actions
Adjectives: sets of Qualities
Proper/Common .. Proper: refers to definite individuals - Pavorotti, London. Common:
refers to sets: Cars, goats. NPs also refer to substances, actions and abstract entities and
fictional characters.
Reference is essential for NPs. Not only for Proper/Common Nouns but also in terms of
Definite NPs: The present Queen of France is frisky; this sentence is dodgy simply
because of the lack of referent for the definite NP
Definite descriptions offer a defining description for an individual and crucially convey
the idea that there is only one such individual.
- NPs as distributive: ‘the students in my class are Irish’
- NPs as collective: ‘the students in my class outnumber those in yours’.
Singular vs. General reference (if you get a donkey, keep it)
I need to go to an ATM (a specific one or just any one)
Definite NPs: The man in the corner ...
Non-referring definite NPs:
‘Smith’s Murderer must be a woman.’ (whoever that may be)
Reference may be attributive as well as being referential:
referential versus attributive use of a definite description:
Who is the man drinking a martini?
Seeking information about a stranger, one relating to a particular individual and one to an
unknown individual.
referential
1: at a fashionable party a student seeks information about a commanding looking
linguist drinking a clear liquid from a martini glass.
attributive
2: at an AA meeting an outraged member finds a half empty bottle of Martini.
Reference can be Variable, Constant, Multiple:
Variable: President of Botswana
Constant: Sun Moon China
Multiple: Morning Star = Evening Star = Venus.
Denotation: what a word refers to in the world
Words without reference:
Certain words may have meaning without any reference to anything in the world or any
human concepts. And, if, but, very are among words that have some meaningful
component but no reference. There is also no sense in the way that sense can normally
determine reference. They have sense in that they can be defined in linguistic terms but
are clearly different in how they have meaning. They are defined in terms of their
function rather than anything else. This means that they are aspects of the rules of
compositional semantics despite being simple words. They are thus quite different to
other words.
INTENSION AND EXTENSION
In a Fregean analysis, the meaning of a word (or expression) is a combination or its sense
and its reference. There is a difference between these elements as we can see that ‘the
leader of Fianna Fail’ and “the taoiseach” pick out the same referent in the world but do
not mean the same thing. We are happy that they do not mean the same thing, but yet
they REFER to the same entity. So if they do not mean the same thing but refer to the
same entity, there must be something more to meaning than reference. This other clement
can be seen in terms of definitions of the Linguistic Expressions. ‘the leader of Fianna
Fail’ and “the taoiseach” can be defined differently. One is the person elected by the FF
parliamentary part to be leader, the other is the person elected by parliament to be leader.
So the same person can be elected to the two offices giving us one referent but two ways
that he is the referent. He is referred to by virtue of being elected leader of FF in one case
and as being elected leader of the parliament in the other. In the same way that ‘morning
star’ and evening star pick out the same object in the sky, they do not mean the same
thing. to say the morning star is the evening star is not a tautology, but to say the morning
star is the morning star is a tautology. Furthermore, both the morning star and the evening
star are the planet Venus, the same referent labeled yet a third way. The same referent
selected via different routes: Brightest object other than sun or moon first thing in the
evening, last thing in the morning, and a planet in a particular orbit around the sun. So
Venus is not the meaning of Morning star or Evening star even though the expressions
pick out the planet Venus at certain times. This extra element is sense and resides
internally in language.
Reference relates language to the world as it involves locating referents in the world. The
word chair picks out certain objects in the world, the set of past present and future chairs.
The mystery is how it can do this, Intension is the answer. Listing the members of a set is
only possible by knowing the criteria for membership of that set.
Domain 3:
The relationship between Linguistic expressions and the people who use them.
The main areas involved here are Language Acquisition (specifically Acquisition of
Lexical and Compositional Meaning) and Propositional Attitude.
Visit the Stanford Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science for more on propositional attitude.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/prop-attitude-reports/