Lexical Semantics: The Meaning of Words

Semantics

• Definition: Study of linguistic meaning; from word meaning to the construction of complex meaning of larger phrases

• Premise: Every language contains only a finite number of words, with their meanings and other linguistic properties stored in the mental lexicon.

• Problem: However, every language contains an infinite number of sentences and other phrasal expressions, and native speakers of a language can understand the meanings of any of those sentences.

• Question: Since speakers cannot memorize an infinite number of distinct sentence meanings, they need to figure out the meaning of a sentence based on the meanings of the words in it and the way in which these expressions are combined with one another

Two Aspects of Linguistic Meaning

• Sense = the mental representation of the meaning of an expression/the concept itself

• Reference = by knowing the sense of some expression, you also know its reference, i.e., its relationship to the world; the collection of all referents of an expression is its reference

• Note

  • You need to know the sense of an expression to know the reference but knowing the sense doesn't guarantee that you are able to pick out the referents

    • Examples: Diamand (you know the sense but can you tell it from fake?)

• Pulling apart sense and reference

  • Unicorn

  • the queen of the United States

  • Tom Riddle/He who must not be named; Batman/Bruce Wayne; Spiderman/Peter Parker

  • the most populous country in the world-- said in 2016 vs. in 2025

• Why we need both sense and reference

  • Without sense:

    • difficult to talk about meanings of expressions that do not refer to anything (e.g., unicorn)

    • difficult to accommodate the fact that one and the same thing in the world can be talked about or referred to in many different ways

  • Without reference:

  • difficult to make connections between meanings of expressions and what they are about

Lexical Semantics: The Meaning of Words

• Are dictionaries the true source of word meanings?

  • Dictionaries collect definitions of word meanings and express them in terms of other 

    words and their meanings. However, they have no authority on the definition.

• People who write dictionaries arrive at their definitions by studying the ways speakers of the language use words.

• Entries in dictionaries are not fixed and immutable; they change over time as people come to use words differently.

• Dictionaries model usage, not the other way around. There simply is no higher authority on word meaning than the community of native speakers of a language

• Words are associated with senses, i.e., mental representations of their meaning.

• What form might these representations have?

• How could we store word meanings in our minds?

  • (a) Dictionary-Style Definitions

  • (b) Mental Image Definitions

  • (c) Usage-Based Definitions

Lexical Semantics: Dictionary-Style Definitions

• Option 1: The nature of a word’s meaning is a dictionary-style definition that defines words in 

  terms of other words + the way that speakers of a language really use that word.

• Problem: Circularities. Understanding a word's meaning would involve understanding the 

  meanings of the words used in its definition. Salient example: pride definition is ‘the quality of state of being proud,’ proud definition is ‘feeling or showing pride’

• Conclusion: Dictionaries are of practical aid to people who already speak a language but cannot make theoretical claims about the nature of meaning. It may be useful for us to define words in terms of other words, but that type of definition cannot be the only way in which 

  meanings are stored in our heads

Lexical Semantics: Mental Image Definitions

• Option 2: The nature of a word's meaning is a mental image we can conjure up (e.g., Mona Lisa, “What does fingernail mean?")

• Problems:

  • Mental images may vary between people while meanings are still similar;

    • Example: most people’s mental image for mother is likely to be an image of their own mother; if you hear the word in some context, like “Mother Teresa” or “the elephant’s mother,” you almost certainly do not picture your own mother!

• What type of mental image should be associated with a word's meaning? Using a typical prototype of a bird might exclude ostriches or penguins.

• Many words, perhaps even most, have no clear mental images. What mental image is associated in your mind, for example, with the words forget, aspect, reciprocity, useful?

• Conclusion: Similarly to dictionary-based definitions, mental images seem somewhat associated with the words stored in our heads. But they cannot be all there is to how we store meaning in our minds

Lexical Semantics: Usage-Based Definitions

• At this point, we will leave it as an open question as to exactly what lexical sense is: it is a question that linguists, philosophers, and psychologists continue to investigate.

• A practical take: When we know a word, we know when it is suitable to use it in order to convey a particular meaning or grammatical relationship.

• Example: If I want to describe a large, soft piece of material draped across a bed for the purpose of keeping people warm while they sleep, I know that I can use the word blanket. Moreover, when somebody else uses a word, I know what the circumstances must be like for them to have used it. → Regardless of the form that our mental representations of word 

  meanings take, if we know what a word means, then we know under what conditions it is appropriate to use it

Word Reference

• What kind of reference can words have? (Nouns are the easiest to consider, but the same holds for adjectives, verbs, etc).

• Proper names: India refers to the country India. Elisa Kreiss refers to the individual Elisa Kreiss. UCLA refers to the institution of UCLA. In general, proper names refer to specific entities in the world— people, places, etc.

• Nouns such as cat or woman:

  • Consider: Does Sally have a cat? No, Sally has never had a cat.

  • The expression cat is intended to restrict the attention of the listener to a certain set of things in the world, namely, those things that are cats. With the question, we inquire

• about entities in the world that are cats and whether Sally has one of them.

• Thus, common nouns like cat do not refer to a specific entity in the world, but rather they focus the attention on all those things in the world that are cats, i.e., the set of all cats. A set is just a collection of things. A set of cats, then, is a collection of precisely those things that are cats

Meaning Relationships

• So far, we discussed a variety of word relationships already:

  • Words may be phonologically related (e.g., night/knight, which share the same pronunciation), they may be morphologically related (e.g., lift/lifted, which both share the same root), or they may be syntactically related (e.g., feed/pet, as inI pet the horse and I feed the horse).

• Now: Semantic relationship, as in pot is intuitively more closely related semantically to the word pan than it is to the word floor

Meaning Relationships: Hyponyms

• We say that a word X is a hyponym of a word Y if the set that is the reference of X is always included in the set that is the reference of Y. When set X is included in set Y, we also say that X is a subset of Y.

• Example: The word poodle is the hyponym of the word dog.

• The reference of dog is the set of all things that are dogs, while the reference of poodle is the set of all things that are poodles. The set of poodles is contained in the set of dogs; i.e., all poodles are dogs, but not all dogs are poodles.

• Conversely, dog is a hypernym of poodle

Meaning Relationships: Synonyms

• Two words are synonymous if they have exactly the same reference.

• Truly synonymous words are rare, but couch/sofa, quick/rapid, and groundhog/woodchuck come close. Anything that is a groundhog is also a woodchuck, and vice versa; The set that is the reference of groundhog is exactly the same set as the one that is the reference of 

  woodchuck.

• Note that the senses of the words in these pairs may differ—it is possible for someone to know what woodchucks are without knowing what groundhogs are, so their senses are not the same thing. Similarly, quick and rapid may have different senses, but the set of quick 

  things in the world is probably the same as the set of rapid things

Meaning Relationships: Antonyms

• In order for two words to be antonyms of one another, they must have meanings that are related but contrasting in some significant way.

• There are different types of antonyms, e.g., complementary and gradable 

• complementary (binary) 

  • married/unmarried 

  • existent/nonexistent

  • alive/dead

  • win/lose

• Gradable (continuum)

  • wet/dry

  • easy/hard

  • old/young

  • love/hate

• How questions can help diagnose the type of antonym:

  • How old is he? How hard was the test?

  • How alive is he? How nonexistent is that unicorn?