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.
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.