English 421
Semantics and Pragmatics
Session One Notes
Goals/Objectives:
1) To gain a grasp of the basic meaning of semantics and pragmatics
2) To gain an understanding of various ways of explaining meaning that have previously been proposed, including dictionary
definitions, mental images, and meaning and reference, and why each falls short
An Introduction
Questions/Main Ideas
(Please write these down as
Semantics as a subfield of linguistics is the study of meaning in language
you think of them)
Semantics deals with the meanings of words and how the meanings of sentences are derived from
them
To fully understand the meaning of a sentence, however, we must also understand the context in
which it is used
Pragmatics is concerned with how people use language within a context and why they use language
in particular ways
An Introduction
In order to understand what “meaning” in language is, it is important to realize that it is a
multifaceted phenomenon
Different aspects of meaning need to be explained in different ways, so they are studied differently
and are governed by different theories
First: language meaning communicates information about the world around us
An Introduction
We can refer to persons, places and both (concrete) things and (abstract) ideas or concepts
We can then assert that these things have certain properties or stand in certain relationships to one
another
By using sentences of a common language, one person can expand another person’s knowledge of
the world
A language is thus fundamentally a system of symbols
An Introduction
Symbols are things that stand for other things
Theories of the information content of language take as basic the relationship between a word and
what it refers to, or a sentence and the fact or situation it describes
Of course, language can be used to talk about imaginary situations and things, like Santa Claus or
unicorns, as well as actual ones
(apologies to Kim Jong-un)
This poses a few problems for theories based on “reference”
An Introduction
Second: meanings are also things that are grasped and produced in the mind of the speaker/hearer as
she uses language
Meanings are therefore a cognitive and psychological phenomenon as well
When we ask whether the meaning of a noun like bird is more like a dictionary definition, a mental
image, or the concept of the typical bird, we are asking about the cognitive aspect of meaning, not
its reference
An Introduction
(The reference of bird is an actual bird or birds, not something in the mind)
Linguists have thus studied language comprehension through laboratory experiments with human
subjects as they hear and speak words and sentences
Or through what children understand words and sentences to mean at various stages of the language
acquisition process
An Introduction
Third: language meaning is a social phenomenon
Relationships between the speaker and hearer come into play in all sorts of ways in determining
what our utterances mean
Language doesn’t just present information independent of the context of an utterance
Questions, commands, suggestions, warnings, etc. involve when, where, by whom, and to whom for
their appropriacy
An Introduction
This third facet of meaning – the appropriateness of meaning in a situation – is known as
pragmatics
But pragmatics and semantics interact so much that they can’t really be separated in all cases
Fourth: meanings of words and sentences have a variety of important relationships among
themselves, which can be studied independently of both information content and hypotheses about
cognition
An Introduction
This includes classifying pairs of words as synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms, etc.
Information content, cognitive meaning, and social (pragmatic) meaning, therefore, are
complementary aspects of the general phenomenon of meaning
The ability to learn and use a language would not be such a remarkably useful characteristic of our
species if we could not use language to talk about all the things in our world
An Introduction
At the same time, language would not be possible without the mental capacity to process and
produce the mental counterparts of this information and integrate it with our other thoughts and
perceptions
The same goes for principles of language use and context-dependence
We (meaning you and I as linguists) will not have fully understood the phenomenon of meaning
until all these aspects are understood (which hasn’t happened so far)
An Introduction
A major division in semantics, which cuts across the distinctions made thus far, is between lexical
semantics, the meanings of words, and compositional semantics, the way that the meanings of
whole sentences are determined from the meanings of the words in them by the syntactic structure
of the sentence
“the dog bit the man”
“the man bit the dog”
An Introduction
These two sentences have the same words but not the same meaning
Syntactic structure plays a role in determining sentence meaning
In other words, we don’t grasp the meaning of a sentence by just putting together the meanings of
the individual words involved in any old way
When we think of meaning in its nonlinguistic sense, we almost always think of word meaning
An Introduction
We are all familiar with looking up words in dictionaries or asking someone about the meaning of a
word we haven’t seen before
We discuss (and argue about) exactly what a certain word means
But we don’t do this nearly as often with the meanings of sentences
Note that there are no dictionaries of sentences!
An Introduction
Every person hears and uses new sentences every day that she or he has never heard or used
before
These sentences, in fact, may never have been uttered before by anyone
(Think about the nightly news)
We understand the meanings of new sentences, and all speakers of English understand the novel
sentence in (more or less) the same way
An Introduction
That is, we agree on its linguistic meaning, though we may differ in the further interpretation and
consequences of that meaning
In fact, this would be true of the meaning of any grammatical and semantically well-formed
sentence you could make up
(Which is why we can never have a “dictionary of all sentences”)
Thus, systematic principles must exist that determine the meaning of any sentence from its syntactic
structure
An Introduction
Along with the meanings of the individual words in it, of course
Further, these principles must apply recursively
That is, they can be applied again to their own output, over and over again to produce meanings for
new sentences and for ever longer, more complex sentences
(Thus, we can never have “the world’s longest sentence”)
An Introduction
Lexical semantics and compositional semantics are fundamentally different because the number of
words in a language is finite, while the number of sentences is not
We tend to take notice when we hear a new word for the first time
We may not be able to guess what it means, even if it is formed by a semantically regular suffix
(like the agentive suffice –er)
But we generally never notice whether a sentence and its meaning are new to us
An Introduction
This is a result of the fact that we learn word meanings individually, one at a time, each
independently of the other
But we don’t “learn” individual sentence meanings – we simply compute them mentally and
unconsciously by compositional rules
So why is it so damn hard to give a meaning of “meaning”?’
What does it mean to say a given word or phrase has a certain meaning?
An Introduction
Here are a couple answers to this question that have been proposed
Dictionary Definitions
In our culture, where dictionaries are wide-spread, many people have the impression that a word’s
meaning is simply its dictionary definition
Just a little thought, however, shows that there must be more to meaning that this
An Introduction
Of course, it is true that a convenient way to find out the meaning of a word is to look it up in a
dictionary
Most people in our culture accept dictionaries as providing unquestionably authoritative accounts of
the meanings of the words they define
This leads people to believe that the dictionary definition of a word more accurately represents the
word’s meaning than does an individual speaker’s understanding of the word
An Introduction
People who write dictionaries, however, arrive at their definitions by studying the ways speakers of
the language use different words
From the linguist’s point-of-view, there is simply no higher authority than the general community
of native speakers of the language
A word’s meaning is determined by the people who use that word, not a dictionary
(Sorry, Miss Schlenker)
An Introduction
The view that a dictionary definition is all there is to a word’s meaning poses an immediate serious
problem when one considers that in order to understand the dictionary definition of a word, one
must know the meanings of the words used in that definition
But understanding the meanings of these words involves understanding the meanings of the words
in their definitions, and so on
An Introduction
Sometimes the circularity of a set of dictionary definitions becomes comical
For example: one English dictionary defines divine as “being or having the nature of a deity”
But defines deity as “divinity”
Another example: another defines pride as “the quality or state of being proud”
But defines proud as “feeling or showing pride”
An Introduction
Notice that you would also have to know the meanings of such words as “being,” “having,”
“nature,” “quality,” “state,” and even “the” and “or”
Dictionaries are essentially written to be of practical aid to people who already speak the language,
not to make theoretical claims about the nature of meaning
Some people do, of course, learn words through dictionaries, but dictionary definitions can’t be all
there is to the meanings of words
An Introduction
Mental Images
Another possible explanation is a word’s mental image
This is attractive, since words do seem to conjure up particular mental images
For example, close your eyes and think of the Mona Lisa
This may well cause an image of Da Vinci’s painting to appear in your mind
Is it the same image, though?
It is 30" high by 20 7/8" wide
An Introduction
Once again, however, this can’t be all there is to a word’s meaning
Different people’s mental images may be very different from each other, without the words really
seeming to vary much in meaning from individual to individual
For a student, the word lecture will probably be associated with an image of one person standing at
the front of the room, and may include the back’s of fellow students’ heads
An Introduction
For the teacher, however, it is more likely to consist of an audience of students sitting in rows facing
forward
The two different perspectives are actually quite different
Even so, both the student and the teacher understand the word lecture as meaning more or less the
same thing, despite the different mental images
How can a word mean the same thing if it conjures up different images?
An Introduction
Another problem with mental images is that the image associated with a word tends to be of a
typical or ideal example of the kind of thing the word represents
Words are used, however, to represent a wide range of things, any one of which may or may not be
typical of its kind
For example, close your eyes and think of a bird
For most of you, the bird probably looked like this
An Introduction
The Robin
An Introduction
However, this is also a bird:
An Introduction
And so is this:
An Introduction
And even this:
Unless Mitt Romney gets his way
An Introduction
Since ostriches and penguins and Big Bird are birds too, any analysis of the word bird must take this
into account
Any complete analysis should provide some indication of what the typical bird is like, but must also
make some provision for atypical birds
A further problem – many words, perhaps even most, simply have no clear mental images attached
to them
Examples: forget, the, further, perhaps
An Introduction
Meaning and Reference
As previously mentioned, language is used to talk about things in the outside world
It is reasonable, then to consider the actual thing a word refers to – its referent – as one aspect of a
word’s meaning
Once again, it would be a mistake to think of reference as all there is to meaning
To do so would be to tie meaning too tightly to the real world
An Introduction
If meaning were defined as the actual thing an expression refers to, what would we do about words
for things that don’t exist?
There is no real-world referent for the words Santa Claus, yet these words are not meaningless
(they create a mental image, for example)
Language can be used to talk about fiction, fantasy, or speculation
Any complete theory of meaning must take this into account
An Introduction
Even some sentences about the real world appear to present problems for the idea that a word is just
its referent
If meaning is the same as reference, then if two expressions refer to the same thing, they must mean
the same thing
It would then follow that you should be able to substitute one for the other in a sentence without
changing the meaning
For example:
An Introduction
Barack Obama and The winner of the 2012 presidential election both refer to the same real-world
referent
So the following two sentences mean the same thing:
1) Barack Obama is married to Michelle Obama
2) The winner of the 2012 presidential election is married to Michelle Obama
These two sentences do indeed seem to describe the same fact
An Introduction
However, consider the following substitutions:
3) Robin wanted to know if Barack Obama was the winner of the 2012 presidential election
4) Robin wanted to know if Barack Obama was Barack Obama
These sentences don’t mean the same thing, and don’t even describe the same fact
Any theory has to describe why substitutions like this don’t work
An Introduction
Truth Conditions and Truth Value
It is not necessary to give up the key insight that meaning as reference provides, however
Meaning involves a relation between language and the world
To help avoid problems, it may be beneficial to think about how a sentence relates to the world,
rather than just how individual words relate to the world
But sentence meaning is a difficult concept to define
An Introduction
Instead of being so direct, linguists have instead taken a more indirect route
Instead of asking “What is sentence meaning?” they take an indirect approach that asks “What do
you know when you know what a sentence means?”
An example: Barack Obama is asleep
To know what this sentence means is not the same as knowing that Barack Obama is actually asleep
or not
An Introduction
Any English-speaking person knows what this sentence means, but relatively few people know at
any given time whether Barack Obama is asleep or not
What English speakers who understand the sentence know is what the world would have to be like
in order for the sentence to be true
That is, anyone who knows a sentence’s meaning knows the condition under which it would be true
An Introduction
They know its Truth Conditions
You know that for the sentence Barack Obama is asleep to be true, the individual designated by the
words Barack Obama must be in the condition designated by the words is asleep
If, in addition to the truth conditions, you in fact know whether or not the sentence really is true,
then you also know another facet of the sentence’s meaning – its Truth Value
An Introduction
The truth conditions and truth value of a sentence relate it to the world, but in a somewhat different
way than ordinary reference does
Sentences about Santa Claus, for example, do have truth conditions, even thought the words Santa
Claus have no real-world referent
What you know is “What would Santa Claus have to be like if he were real”
An Introduction
In other words, you can describe the conditions under which a sentence containing these words
would be true
But describing its truth value is much less clear
The sentence Santa Claus is asleep is neither true nor false
The subfield of semantics called Supposition studies this
An Introduction
This helps explain the previous problem
The truth conditions for Barack Obama and The winner of the 2012 presidential election are
different
Thus, they cannot be freely substituted for each other
But even truth conditions are only part of the explanation
They work well for literal meaning, but what about questions? Wishes? Orders?
There is still much to be explained, especially in relation to the situation where a sentence is used
Summary/Minute Paper: