LINGUISTICS - Semantics and Pragmatics

What is literal meaning? (Semantics)

Conventional property of expressions

Learned arbitrary mapping between sounds and meaning

Can be understood without detailed knowledge of speaker or context ; context independent

Deals with sentences

• Declarative

• Interrogative

• Imperative

Language as a Conduit (Shannon’s model of communication channel)

What is meaning in context? (Pragmatics)

Language as social action / tool

• context dependent, flexible

Integrates knowledge of context and social cognition

Active participation of listener to decode

• Joint action ; actively reasoning about each other, interdependency of meaning

• audience design

social activity to be engaged in

What are Speech Acts?

What kinds of Context is important?

Pronouns, Tense, Stress, Demonstratives (here, there..)

What are Implicatures?

Inferences drawn about what was said based on what the speaker would have said in other cases

Generated by Counterfactual reasoning;

• Informativity

  • “I have 3 brothers” → If I actually have 5, statement is true but less informative and so wouldn’t make sense to say = social aspect of reasoning as listener infers there are no more then 3

• Truth

• Relevance

  • “I’ve got a lot of work to do” → Infers they don’t want to go to dinner

• Politeness

What is Presupposition?

Border between semantics and pragmatics

Gives away the speakers assumptions about what is being said

“My dog isn’t here”

• Presupposes I have a dog

• But another explanation for the dog not being here is that I do not have a dog

“He does / not realise he’s in the wrong class”

• Presupposes speaker thinks he’s in the wrong class either way

What is Focus?

When placed intonation interacts with word meanings

Why did he marry her?

• As opposed to doing something else

vs

Why did he marry her?

• As opposed to marrying someone else

Usually fly under radar due to it being not represented in written language

What is the Extension of an expression?

The thing that it conventionally refers to

Stuff in the real world that the word “picks out”

• Dog = All the dogs in the real world

also referred to as denotation or reference

What is the Intention of an expression?

the concept associated with the word

whatever is known that allows you to classify the extension

rule that allows you to classify things into concepts

• What is / isn’t a dog

What is Compositionality?

Meaning of a complex sentence can be built up using the lexical meanings (intentions) of items combined with systematic principles + syntactic structure of sentence

“I saw the man with the telescope”

• Depends on what listener believes is modifying the verb

What are the two kinds of evidence for semantic theory?

Truth Value Intuitions

• Would this sentence be true in the following scenario/a particular context

Entailment

• Does A entail B? If A is true, then B must be true

• If it’s cold and windy, then it has to be cold

  • Cold and windy entails cold

Sense Relations - Synonymy

True synonymy hard to find

• Aubergine + Eggplant

A + B synonymous not synonymous bc they have the same denotation

→ have to distinguish Intension + Extension

• EG “Trump” and ““The President” are not inherently synonymous bc they require reference to Time + Situation

Sense Relations - Entailment / Inclusion / Part-whole relations

Student - Postgraduate = Inclusion Relationship

• Postgrad is a kind of student

Mary is a Student + a Postgraduate = Contradictory / Exclusion Relationship

• Cannot be both at the one time