Semantics: Notes

Semantics and Pragmatics

  • Mark Twain's witticism illustrates using old words with new meanings, successfully communicating the intended message.
  • Humpty Dumpty's claim to be the "master" of his words, using words with self-assigned meanings, fails to communicate because word meanings must be shared by the speech community.
  • Semantics: Study of the relationship between linguistic form and meaning.
  • Pragmatics: Study of meaning aspects depending on word and sentence usage.

Levels of Meaning

  • Word meaning.
  • Sentence meaning: Semantic content of a sentence, regardless of context.
  • Utterance meaning: Semantic content plus pragmatic meaning from specific usage.

Form and Meaning

  • Arbitrary relation: Form and meaning for most words.
  • Onomatopoeic words: Form imitates the sound they refer to (e.g., "ding-dong"). However, partially conventional.
  • Compositional relation: Meaning of multi-word expression predictable from word meanings and their combination.
  • Principle of Compositionality: Fundamental importance.
  • Idioms: Non-compositional; meaning learned as a unit.

What Does Mean Mean?

  • Defining semantics and pragmatics involves defining English words in terms of other English words, which can be circular.
  • Solution: Translate expressions into a well-defined metalanguage.
  • Focus is on meanings people intend to communicate via language, not body language or unintended communication.
  • Natural meaning: Smoke "means" fire, rainbow "means" rain.
  • Linguistic meaning: Focus on how speakers use language to talk about the world.
  • Meaning of a sentence: Knowledge allowing speakers to determine its truth in a context.

Saying, Meaning, and Doing

  • Speech acts: Things people do by speaking.
  • Understanding an utterance requires answering:
    • What did the speaker say? (Semantic content/sentence meaning)
    • What did the speaker intend to communicate? (Implicature/unspoken meaning)
    • What is the speaker trying to do? (Speech act being performed)
  • Direct Request: Grammatical form matches intended speech act.
  • Indirect Request: Grammatical form does not match intended speech act; pragmatic inference needed.

Roadmap

  • Explore reference and truth and how we talk about the world.
  • Reference: Relationship between reference and meaning.
  • Truth: A statement is true if its meaning corresponds to the situation under discussion.
  • Entailment and Presupposition: Meaning-based inference.
  • Logical notation and patterns of inference.
  • Conversational Implicature: Meaning intended by the speaker but not part of the literal sentence meaning.
  • Indirect speech acts.
  • Appropriateness of an utterance.
  • Compositionality.
  • Focuses on word meanings, compositionality, conversational implicature, and speech acts.

Referring, Denoting, and Expressing

  • Referring: Using expressions to point to something in the world.
  • Referring Expression: Noun phrase used to refer to something.
  • Rigid Designators: Proper names always refer to the same individual.
  • Natural Kind Terms: Species names or substances referring to species or substances in general act as rigid designators.
  • Deictic Elements (Indexicals): Words referring to the speech situation itself (I, you, here, now).
  • Anaphoric Element: Reference depends on another NP (antecedent) in the discourse.
  • Quantifier Phrases: Not referring expressions.
  • Definite Noun Phrases: Used when the hearer can identify a unique referent but may also be used generically, without referring to any specific individual.
  • Indefinite Descriptions: May be specific (referring) or non-specific (not referring).
  • Semantic analysis goal: Accounting for ambiguity.
  • Ambiguity: Word, phrase, or sentence with more than one sense.
  • Referential Ambiguity: Pronouns or NPs with multiple possible referents.

Denotational vs. Cognitive Semantics

  • Denotational semantics: Focuses on the link between linguistic expressions and the world.
  • Cognitive semantics: Focuses on the link between linguistic expressions and mental representations.
  • Truth and Reference: Foundational concepts for denotational semantics.

Sense vs. Denotation

  • Sense (Sinn): Aspects of meaning not dependent on context; dictionary definition.
  • Denotation (Bedeutung): Meaning dependent on context; referent.
  • Denotation of content word: the set of all the things in the current universe of discourse which the word could. be used to describe.
  • Two expressions with different senses may have the same denotation in a particular situation.
  • Synonymous expressions: The same sense and denotation in any possible situation.
  • Even non-referring expressions have a sense.

Descriptive vs. Expressive Meaning

  • Descriptive Meaning: Objective claims about the world.
  • Expressive Meaning: Reflects the speaker's feelings or attitudes.
  • Independence: Expressive meaning doesn't affect denotation or truth value.
  • Nondisplaceability: Expressives must be felt by the speaker at the moment of speaking.
  • Immunity: Expressive meaning cannot be negated, questioned, or challenged.
  • Descriptive Ineffability: Expressive meaning can't be adequately stated in descriptive terms.
  • Diminutives: Grammatical markers indicating small size, often with expressive content.