SEMANTICS (1)

DR. ANSA HAMEED

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Levels of Language

Phonetics Phonology Morphology Syntax

Semantics Pragmatics

TODAY’S LECTURE

Semantics: An Introduction

Semantics: Lexical & Sentential

Sentential Semantics

Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life.(Joseph Campbell)

SEMANTICSEtymology:Greek word: SemantikosGiving signs

Definition: The field of linguistics concerned with the study

of meanings in language

Semantics is traditionally defined as the study of meaning in language.

SEMANTICSUse of Term Semantics

•First used in 1894 in ‘Reflected meanings: a point in semantics’.•M. Bréal: ‘An Essay on Semantics’ (1897)•Most important usage of the term: Ogden and Richards: ‘The Meaning of Meaning’ (1923)•(Malinowski:‘The problem of meaning in primitive languages’)

SEMANTICSWhy Meaning are Important????

To understand languagethe meaning of words and of the morphemes that compose them

Words into phrases and sentences (Semantics)

Context which determines the meaning (Pragmatics)

SEMANTICS

Difficulty with Meanings:Linguists and dictionary makers face considerable problems in dealing with meaning. There are two traditional schools of theories of meaning: the reference theory and the representation theory . Some have been trying to establish definitions of the meanings of words so that the meaning of linguistic expressions can be given. Saeed (1997) calls it the definition theory.

SEMANTICSReferential Theory of Meanings

•The referential theory holds that a linguistic sign derives its meaning from it refers to something in the reality.

•This suggests that language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication.

•For example, words like man, fish, are meaningful in that they each refer to an individual or a collection of living beings existing in the reality.• •However, some linguistic signs, like God, ghost, dragon, unicorn, merely denote something imaginative.

SEMANTICSRepresentational Theory of Meanings

•The representational theory holds that language in general, and words in particular, are only an icon (or representation) for an actual thing (or form) being symbolized.

•In other words, they conjure in our minds pictures of the things, happenings and ideas. This suggests that there is one kind of "natural" resemblance or relationship between words and the things represented by them. For the most part, this seems to happen.

•But there are a number of function words, such as a, an, the, or, which "conjure" no pictures of this kind.

Types of Meanings

Conceptual MeaningsAssociative MeaningsThematic Meanings

Types of Meanings

Conceptual Meanings/ Denotative MeaningsConceptual meaning is also called "logical" or "cognitive" meaning.

This refers to the definition given in the dictionary. It is widely assumed to be the central factor in linguistic communication and is integral to the essential functioning of language. For example, man can be defined by the contrastive features [+Human], [+Male], [+Adult], as distinct from girl, which can be defined as [+Human], [-Male], [-Adult].

Associative Meaning

This refers to the meaning associated with the conceptual meaning, which can be further divided into following five types: 1. Connotative meaning: This is the communicative value attributed to an expression over and above its purely conceptual meaning. e.g. woman

2. Social meaning: This refers to what is communicated of the social circumstances of language use, including variations like dialect, time, topic, style.

3. Affective meaning: This is what is communicated of the feelings and attitudes of the speaker/writer towards the listener and/or what is talking about.

4. Reflected meaning: This is the meaning when we associate one sense of an expression with another.

5. Collocative meaning: This refers to what is communicated through association with words which tend to occur in the environment of another word.

Thematic Meanings

This is what is communicated by the way in which the message is organized in terms of order and emphasis. Now compare the following pair of sentences:

(1) The young man donated the kidney voluntarily.(2) The kidney was donated by a young man voluntarily.

SEMANTICS

Meanings at two levels:

At word level: Lexical SemanticsAt Phrase/Sentence Level: Sentential Semantics

WHAT IS MEANT BY PHRASAL/SENTENTIAL SEMANTICS?

DEFINITIONS:

Phrasal or Sentential semantics is the branch of Semantics concerned with the meaning of the syntactic units larger than the word.

Calculating meanings at Sentence level:The linguistic knowledge permits us to formulate semantic rules to build the meanings of a sentence from the meaning of its words and the ways whereby they combine syntactically. This aspect pertaining to sentential meaning is linguistically referred to as ‘Truth Conditional Semantics’(because it takes the semantic knowledge of truth as basic). It is also called Compositional Semantics(as it calculates the truth value of a sentence by composing or putting together the meanings of smaller units)

SOME PROMINENT MANIFESTATIONS OF SENTENTIAL SEMANTICS

1. TAUTOLOGY(or ANALYTIC SENTENCES)It generally speaking refers to needless repetition of an idea, statement, or word however within sentential semantics , tautology implies the philosophical interpretation whereby it refers to the restricted number of sentences that are always true ,irrespective of the situation in which they are uttered . e .g :

Cows are Animals Circles are round Man is mortal

2.CONTRADICTIONS

Contradictions refer to the kind of sentences that are always false .e.g:

Man is immortalA bachelor is married.Elizabeth ,the queen of England is a man.Circles are the triangles.

3.PARADOXES

1.Paradoxes refer to those sentences to which it is difficult to ascribe a truth value .

2. a statement that is seemingly contradictory or opposed to common sense and yet is perhaps true.

"War is peace.“"Freedom is slavery.“"Ignorance is a bliss

4. ENTAILMENT

Entailment describes a situation in which the truth of one sentence necessarily ‘entails or implies’ the truth of another sentence .

For example the sentence A assassinated B entails that B is dead

Similarly the sentence The brick is red entails that The brick is not white /yellow/blue etc

The sentence John is a renowned poet entails that John is a poet.

(Much of what we know about the world comes from knowing the entailments of the true sentences)

5.PARAPHRASES OR SYNONYMOUS SENTENCES

Two sentences are Synonymous or Paraphrases if both of them are either True or False with respect to the same situation e.g :a. The police chased the burglar &

The burglar was chased by the police.

b. Paul bought a car from Jack &

Jack sold a car to Paul

c. John was absent &

John was not present

6.AMBIGUOUS SENTENCES

Sometimes the sentential expressions have more than one meaning, such kind of sentences are known as ‘Ambiguous Sentences’ .For example:

The old lady whacked the girl with an umbrella is ambiguous because it can mean:

(1.The old lady whacked the girl with the help of an umbrella) OR (2.The old lady whacked a girl who was holding an umbrella)

6.AMBIGUOUS SENTENCES

Following are some more examples: The novel dealing with the Hatred of the Killer(i.e.’ either

someone hated the killer’ OR ‘the Killer hated someone’ can be the underlying interpretation.)

John saw a man with the telescope (i.e. either John saw a man who was holding a telescope OR John saw a man by using a telescope)

7.ANOMALOUS SENTENCES

Anomalous sentences are the kind of sentences that follow the rules of Syntax but go against the rules of Semantics.

A famous sentences :"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"as presented by  Noam Chomsky in his book entitled Syntactic Structures is an example of an anomalous sentence (i.e. a  sentence  that is grammatically correct, but semantically nonsensical).

Following are some more examples: The oak tree is a beautiful animal. The flowers stole the pie and ran home. The Fish likes to go to school.

8.IDIOMS

Sometimes the meanings of the phrases cannot be inferred from the meanings of the individual words. Such expressions are called Idioms

For Example:   A battle/war of nerves Fool's paradise The smoking gun To beat about the bush To smell a rat

9.METAPHORS

In some cases, the sentences are ‘ambiguous ‘ but the literal meaning is so unlikely that listeners stretch their imagination for another interpretation .This ‘stretching’ is based on semantic properties that are ‘inferred’ .Such non-literal interpretation at sentential level are referred to as ‘metaphorical expressions ‘ or simply the Metaphors. e.g:

Dr. Jack is a butcher. John is tiger. The world is a stage. Time is money.

RECAP

Semantics Types of Meanings Sentential Semantics Meaning is considered to be the soul of any language. Knowing a

language means to know how to produce and understand sentences with particular meanings. The principle of compositionality states that the meanings of phrases and sentences depend upon the syntactic arrangement of lexical items .We thus comprehend the phrases and sentences because we know the meanings of individual words and the rules for combining their meanings.

Certain brief sentences are peerless in their ability to give one the feeling that nothing remains to be said.(Jean Rostand)

REFERENCESAllwood, Jens and Peter Gardenfors (eds) 1999. Cognitive semantics. Meaning

and cognition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Chomsky, N., 2000, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press. Fine, K., 2007, Semantic Relationism, New York: Blackwell Publishing. Foster, J., 1976, “Meaning and Truth Theory,” in Evans and McDowell (1976), 1–32.

Goodman, S. and Graddol, D. (1996) Redesigning English: new texts, new identities. London: Routledge. Horwich, P., 1998, Meaning, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hudson , R, A.Sociolinguistics,2nd ed, Cambridge University press, :Cambridge

Kittay, Eva. 1987. Metaphor. Its cognitive force and linguistic structure. NewYork: Oxford University Press.

Oxfords Advanced Learners’ Dictionary (2005).p.362 Prasad, Tarni. (2012) A Course in Linguistics. New Delhi:PHI Learning Pvt. Ltd.