Semantics
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Semantics
The branch of linguistics that is concerned
with how meaning is expressed in
language is called semantics
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Semantics
• The study of the linguistic meaning of
words, phrases and sentences
• The study of the relationship between
symbol and meaning
• The study of meanings
• The study of meaning in human language
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Semantics
• The word semantics originates from the
Greek verb semeion which means mark,
sign.
• The word was coined in the late nineteenth
century
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What is language for?
• most people would say that the function of
language is to express and communicate
meanings
•
•
certainly, this ability to express meanings is an indispensable aspect of language
most other functions of language would scarcely be available to us if our utterances
were NOT capable of carrying meanings
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What is meaning?
How do we recognize a
meaning when we see one?
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Meaning
• meaning is not an easy concept to deal with partly
because we are dealing with abstractions
•
(one person’s idea of ‘goodness’may differ radically from another’s)
• meaning is so intangible ( that one group of linguists, the structuralists,
preferred not to deal with it or rely on it at all)
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Meaning
• The analysis of meaning has proved to be
one of the most difficult and elusive tasks in
linguistic description
• It involves investigating the relationship
between language and everything that we
use language to talk about
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Meaning
• Philosophers have long puzzled over what
words mean, or what they represent, or how
they relate to reality
• Contributions towards the understanding of
meaning, i.e. semantics, have come from a
diverse group of scholars, ranging from
Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece to
Bertrand Russell in the twentieth century
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Meaning and the World
• if you have ever tried to translate a text from one language
into another, you will know that translation is far from easy
• one big reason is that words in different languages do not
match up one to one
• English, for example, makes a clear difference in meaning
between ape and monkey, while French has only the single
word singe to cover both creatures
• on the other hand, English has only ball to cover the six
French words boule,boulet,boulette,balle,pelote and
ballon, all of which have different meanings
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Word Meaning
• The basic repository of meaning within the
grammar is the lexicon, which provides the
information about the meaning of individual
words relevant to the interpretation of
sentences
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Word meaning
• words can be regarded as symbols
• for example, the word cat in English, or chat in
French, or Katze in German, functions as a symbol
of the real world animal; or rather, it might be
more accurate to say, as a symbol of the mental
concept that we have of a cat
•
we can do this because there are agreed conventions among language users about the interpretation of
the word. Without this communication would not take place
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Word meaning (contd.)
• the relationship between a word and the entity that
it symbolizes, however, is much more complex
than for other symbols
• words may be symbols, but they are very flexible
symbols, whose meaning shifts in different
contexts -sometimes a considerable distance from
what we might think of as their ‘usual’ meaning
•
this is particularly true of poetry, to give an extreme example
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Semantic Analysis
• semantic analysis has to try to account for how
we are able to use the words in the vocabulary of a
language to talk about anything in the world
• semantic analysis has also to explain how we are
able to use words in all kinds of different ways -jokingly or sarcastically, for instance, as well as
straightforwardly
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Semantic Analysis
• a very simple approach to the analysis of
word meaning sees words as ‘naming’ or
‘labeling’ things in the world
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Reference, Denotation and Connotation
• one well-known approach to semantic analysis
attempts to equate the meaning of a word or
phrase with the entities to which it refers-- its
denotation or referents
• a distinction can be drawn between denotation
and reference
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Reference, Denotation and Connotation(contd.)
• denotation is used for the class of things indicated
by a word
• reference is used for a particular thing that is
indicated when the word is used
•
e.g.. the word cat denotes the class of all cats in the sentence A cat makes a good pet, but it refers to
a particular cat in the sentence A cat scratched her arm
This approach, however, takes no account of the flexibility of word meaning. Cat in the phrase cool
cat denotes a different thing than cat in the two sentences above. The sentence That girl is a real cat
is also different.Therefore this approach is difficult to apply to all words in the vocabulary. Also
consider words like until, love,job.
• this approach does allow a useful distinction to be
made between these ‘naming’ types of
meaning(referential meaning) and a second 17
type of meaning referred to as connotation
Reference, Denotation and Connotation(contd.)
• connotation refers to the associations that words
have for us
• psychologists have long been aware that in
addition to ‘naming’ things, words carry overtones
of meaning which color our reaction to them
even the most innocent of words can conjure up associations that may affect our attitude and our
response to an utterance which contains them
For example, the word winter evokes thoughts of snow, bitter cold, short evenings, frozen fingertips.
These associations make up the word's connotation, but they cannot be its meaning (or at least, not its
entire meaning) The word winter does not become meaningless just because it is a mild winter year
• we must therefore look beyond connotation for
our understanding of what meaning is
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Dictionary entries
• dictionaries are produced as part of the process of
language standardization
• besides givng syntactic, phonetic and (sometimes)
historical information, dictionary makers, or
lexicographers, try to make explicit the
conventions that language users share about the
meanings of the words in the language
• they however do not normally try to deal with
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connotative meaning
Some proposals to determine
meaning
• One well-known approach to semantics
attempts to equate a word’s meaning with
the entities to which it refers -- its referents
• The impossibility of equating a word’s
meaning with its referents has led to a
distinction between extension and
intension
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Extension and Intension
• whereas an expression’s extension corresponds to
the set of entities that it picks out in the world (its
referents), its intension corresponds to its
inherent sense, the concepts that it evokes
•
thus the extension of the word woman is a set of real world entities (women), while its intension
involves notions like ‘female’ and ‘human’
Similarly, the phrase Prime Minister of Singapore has its extension an individual (Goh Chok Tong),
but its intension involves the concept ‘leader of the governing party’
One suggestion is that intensions correspond to mental images. This is an obvious improvement over
the referential theory since it is possible to have a mental image of a unicorn, although there is no
such entity in this world. However, problems arise with the meanings of words like dog, which can
be used to refer to animals of many different sizes, shapes, and colors. If the meaning of this word
corresponds to a mental image, that image would have to be general enough to include Chihuahuas
and St.Bernards., yet still exclude foxes and wolves. If you try to draw a picture that satisfies these
requirements, you will see just how hard it is to equate word meanings with images in such
cases.
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More attempts to define meaning
• Still another approach to meaning tries to
represent a word’s intension by breaking it down
into smaller semantic components
• this is sometimes referred to as componential
analysis or semantic decomposition
• this approach has long been used to analyze the
meaning of certain types of nouns in terms of
semantic features.
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Componential Analysis or Semantic Decomposition
• an obvious advantage of this approach is that it
allows us to group entities into natural classes
e.g.. the words man and boy could be grouped
together as [+human,+male] while man and
woman could be put in a class defined by the
features [+human, +adult]
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Componential Analysis or Semantic Decomposition
• componential analysis is most useful for
uncovering and representing similarities among
semantically related words
• however, there are limits on the insights into word
meaning offered by componential analysis
• Do we say the meaning of the word blue consists
of the feature [+color] ? Isn’t it blueness ? If this is
so , we have not broken the meaning of the word
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blue into smaller components
More attempts to define meaning
• The meaning of a word is an idea associated with
it in the mind (mentalism)
• The meaning of a word is our disposition to
respond in a certain way to that word as a result of
our past experiences
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Even more attempts at defining
meaning
• The meaning of a word is the characteristic that is
common to the set of things named by the word
• The meaning of a word is its relation to other
features of the verbal and situational context in
which it occurs
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Semantic relations among words
Despite the difficulties associated with
determining the precise nature of meaning,
it is possible to identify a number of important
universal semantic relations relevant to the
analysis of word meaning
• Foremost among these are the relations of
synonymy, antonymy, polysemy and
homophony
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Synonymy
• Words or expressions that have identical meanings
are called synonyms
• Synonyms are words or expressions that have the
same meanings in some or all contexts
e.g..
Some English synonyms
youth
adolescent
automobile
remember
purchase
big
car
recall
buy
large
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Synonymy (contd.)
• although it is easy to think of contexts in which
both words in each pair have essentially the same
meaning I spent my holidays/vacation in Kedah,
there are also contexts in which their meanings
diverge slightly
e.g.. Deepavali and Hari Raya are holidays, but they are not necessarily part of one’s vacation
Similarly, although youth and adolescent both refer to people of about the same age, only adolescent
has the meaning of ‘immature’ in a phrase such as What an adolescent!
Many linguists believe that it would be inefficient for a language to have two words or phrases whose
meanings are absolutely identical in all contexts, and that complete synonymy is therefore rare or
non-existent
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Antonymy
• Words or phrases that have opposite meanings are
called antonyms
• Antonyms are words or phrases that are opposites
with respect to some component of their meaning
e.g.. Some English antonyms
dark
male
hot
up
light
female
cold
down
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Polysemy and Homophony
• When a word has two or more meanings that are at
least vaguely related to each other, this is called
polysemy
e.g.. iron
a type of metal
an instrument made of iron for
pressing clothes
• Homophones are words that have a single
phonetic form but two or more entirely distinct
meanings
e.g. bat
a mouse-like flying animal
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a piece of equipment used in
baseball
Polysemy and Homophony(contd.)
• polysemy is where a single word has two or more
separate meanings,e.g. bright ‘shining’, ‘intelligent’
• homophony is where two or more separate words,
with separate meanings, have the same form, e.g.. club
‘a social organization’ ‘a blunt weapon’
• polysemy and homophony create lexical
ambiguity in that a single form has two or more
meanings e.g.. Liza bought a pen
pen
a writing instrument
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a small cage
Semantic Relations Involving
Sentences
• Like words, sentences have meanings that
can be analyzed in terms of their relation to
each other -- paraphrase, entailment,
and contradiction
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Paraphrase
• Two sentences with identical meanings
are said to be paraphrases of each other
e.g..
The police chased the burglar.
The burglar was chased by the police.
e.g.. I gave the cake to Kamal.
I gave Kamal the cake.
•
•
however, there are subtle differences
as with synonymy, many linguists feel that languages do not permit two or more structures to have
absolutely identical meanings and that paraphrases are therefore never perfect
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Entailment
• A relation in which the truth of one sentence
necessarily implies the truth of another is called
entailment
e.g.. The park warden killed the bear.
The bear is dead.
( if it is true that the park warden killed the bear, then it must be true that the bear is
dead.However, the reverse does not follow since the bear could be dead without the park
warden having killed it)
e.g.. Ahmad is a man.
Ahmad is human. (if it true Ahmad is a mad, then it is also
true that Ahmad is a human. Once again, the reverse does not hold)
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Contradiction
• In contradiction, the truth of one sentence entails
the falsity of another
e.g.. Charles is a bachelor.
Charles is married.
If it is true that Charles is a bachelor, then it cannot be true that he is married.
• When two sentences cannot both be true, we say
that there is contradiction
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Summary
• Semantics is the study of meaning in
language
• while semantics has traditionally focused
on referential meaning, language also
conveys social meaning
• referential meaning is often called
denotation, while social and affective 37
meaning is termed connotation