SEMANTICS1ST QUARTER

CHAPTER 1

1. BASIC CONCEPTS

SEMANTICS: the study of MEANING (Lyons).

LINGUISTIC SEMANTICS: the study of MEANING in so far as it is systematically ENCODED in the VOCABULARY and GRAMMAR of natural languages.

2. BRANCHES OF THE STUDY OF MEANING:

CRUCE divides Semantics into 3 subfields:

LEXICAL Semantics: focuses on “CONTENT” words (tiger, daffodil etc) and NOT on GRAMMATICAL ones.

GRAMMATICAL Semantics: gives emphasis to aspects of meaning which have direct relevance to SYNTAX.

LOGICAL or FORMAL Semantics: studies the relation between NATURAL LANGUAGE and FORMAL LOGICAL SYSTEMS that try to model natural languages as closely as possible and using a totally controlled and austere logical formalism.

3. OVERLAP BETWEEN SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS:It is not easy to know where to drop the line.

THE BASIC IDEA is that:

SEMANTICS deals with CONVENTIONAL meaning, that is, with those aspects of meaning which DO NOT VARY from CONTEXT to CONTEXT; it is the SENTENCE MEANING, while

PRAGMATICS deals with aspects of individual usage and CONTEXT-DEPENDENT meaning. It is the SPEAKER´S MEANING; here the speaker is the one who incorporates further meaning into the conventional sentence meaning.

4. DIFFERENT UNITS OF ANALYSIS:

WordsUtterancesSentencesPropositionsTexts

For Lyons words are composite units that have both FORM and MEANING and suggests a more technical term: LEXEME.

WORDSA minimal permutable element. Most of the time, words are separated by silence in spoken language and by spaces in writing. Also, WORDS are DICTIONARY ENTRIES.

UTTERANCESAn UTTERANCE is created by speaking or writing a piece of language. An UTTERANCE is any STRETCH OF TALK by one person before and after which there is silence on the part of that person. An utterance can be said in different ways or accents. The same sentence pronounced by two different persons are two different utterances.

SENTENCESABSTRACT GRAMMATICAL ELEMENTS obtained from utterances. Differences in accent or pitch do not alter the basic content of the sentence. It is a string of words put together by the grammatical rules of a language, thus, a given sentence always consists of the same words in the same order (in languages as English where order is essential but not in Spanish).

PROPOSITIONSThat part of meaning of the utterance of a declarative sentence which describes some state of affairs.Propositions capture only part of the meaning of a sentence and this meaning can be shared with other sentences.

PROPOSITION: Lucas tell Nicholas a lieSentence 1: Did Lucas tell Nicholas a lie? (question)Sentence 2: Lucas, tell Nicholas a lie! (request)Sentence 3: Lucas told Nicholas a lie. (Past event)The speaker does different things with the same proposition. A single proposition could be expressed by using different sentences and each of these sentences could be uttered an infinite number of times.

Utterances, sentences and propositions are terms used to describe different levels of abstraction in language allowing us to identify different units of analysis in relation to meaning.

SAEED gives a SUMMARY of all this.Utterances are real pieces of speech. That by going on to filter out certain types of grammatical information we can get to PROPOSITIONS.Propositions, thus, are descriptions of states of affairs.

5. THE WORD: DIFFERENT DIMENSIONS OF MEANING

DenotationReferenceSense

REFERENCE AND DENOTATION ARE NOT THE SAME THING

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DENOTATION

Lyons points out that words may be put into correspondence with classes of entities in the external world by means of the relation of DENOTATION. The DENOTATION of an expression is INVARIANT and INDEPENDENT of its use on particular occasions of utterance, that is, it is part of the meaning which the expression has in the language-system, independently of its use on particular occasions of utterance.

REFERENCE

Hurford and Heasley: By means of reference the speaker indicates which things or entities in the world we are talking about.Reference is VARIABLE and UTTERANCE-DEPENDENT.

The Reference of an expression varies according to: The circumstances (time, place, etc) in which the expression is

used. The topic of conversation in which the expression is used.

REFERENT: it specifies any object in the external world (or state of affairs) that is identified by means of a world or expression.

REFERENCE: it is the concept which mediates between the word or expression and the “referent”. (examples: nouns and noun phrases)

SAUSSURE approaches this difference (reference-sense) from the linguistic point of view. He distinguishes between SIGNIFIER and SIGNIFIED.

For him, the MEANING of linguistic expressions derives from 2 sources:

1. The language they are part of.2. The world they describe.

For SAUSSURE, Reference is the relationship by which language hooks onto the world and Sense is the semantic link between elements within the vocabulary system. For him the signifier=referent but the signified would be related to other terms in the same language.

EXAMPLE of denotation and referent: THE CAT IS HUNGRY.DENOTATION: the class of cats. Cat as an animal, in general. (remember denotation

relates expressions to classes of entities in the world)

REFERENT: the SPECIFIC cat the person talks about. (remember reference points to

the SPECIFIC entity (concrete or abstract) that the speaker is referring to and that is CLEARLY

IDENTIFIABLE)

OTHE EXAMPLE: “THE QUEEN” This expression might REFER probably to Queen Elizabeth II in the UK or to Queen Sofía in Spain, but its DENOTATION implies something more abstract

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since it will include all those individuals that could be referred to by using the word “queen”. It includes ALL queens who might exist on the earth.

SENSE

It is the set or network of relations between a word and other words (expressions) within the same language (Lyons). (Descriptive synonymy is an example of sense relation). Sense is an interlexical or intra-lingual relation.For FREGE, the object that an expression refers to is its reference whereas the specific way used to express it, is its sense, for example:

Beethoven´s home town (Bonn). The former capital of the Republic of Germany. (Bonn)

These two sentences have the SAME reference: Bonn, but DIFFERENT sense.

For CRUSE: Sense is some kind of mental representation of the type of thing that can be used to refer to.

For HURFORD AND HEASLEY: While the referent of an expression is often a thing or a person in the world, the sense of an expression is not a thing at all, but an abstraction in the mind of the language.

For GREGORY: He defines SENSE as a more intuitive sense of meaning. What remains constant when the referent changes. If we know the sense of a word, we will pick out its referent in any particular set of circumstances, as long as we know the appropriate facts.

6. TYPES OF MEANING

Descriptive El significado descriptivo implica categorías ontológicas básicas y el no-descriptivo tiene que ver con los modos de expresión y, además, implica subjetividad.

Non-DescriptiveFunctional (articles, prepositions and pronouns)Content (lexemes: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs)Lexical OPEN-SET CLASS

Grammatical CLOSE-SET CLASS

Literal (I’m hungry)Non-Literal (I would eat a horse)Contextual (bank)

DESCRIPTIVE MEANING

This aspect of meaning determines whether a proposition is TRUE OR FALSE. It constrains (limits) what the expression can be used to refer to. It is OBJECTIVE in the sense that it establishes some distance between the

speaker and what he says. This aspect of meaning is fully conceptualized.

QUALITY: it is the most important dimension of variation within descriptive meaning and it is this which constitutes the difference between BLACK and WHITE, PEAR and BANANA, WAL and RUN, EAT and DRINK etc.

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Expressive (expletives)Evoked (glen, loch)

There are several hierarchies, semantic domains or ontological types that can be identified within descriptive meaning (at the highest level of generality):

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THING QUALITY QUANTITY PLACE

TIME STATE PROCESS EVENT

ACTION RELATION MANNER

These ontological types represent the fundamental modes of conception that the human mind is innately predisposed to adopt.

There are also lower levels of generality that are also hierarchically arranged in categories:

Living things: animals, fish, insects, reptiles…Animals: dogs, cats, lions…Dogs: collies, spaniels, dalmatians…

NON-DESCRIPTIVE MEANING

It can be:EXPRESSIVE MEANINGEVOKED MEANING

EXPRESSIVE MEANING:

a. Gosh! (It´s subjective and expresses and emotional state. It does not present a conceptual category to the hearer.)

b. I am surprised! (It´s expressive because it represents a proposition that can be questioned or denied and can be equally expressed by someone else or at a different place or time).

Both mean the same thing but vary in the mode of signifying.

WORDS that possess ONLY expressive and non-descriptive meaning are called EXPLETIVES. The expletives DO NOT contribute to the propositional content.

Examples:a. It´s freezing; shut the bloody window!b. Read your fucking paper!

EVOKED MEANING:

It refers to the difference in meaning that result from DIFFERENT DIALECTS or DIFFERENT REGISTERS.

Example: the Scottish word “glen” for valley or “loch” for lake.

FUNCTIONAL MEANING

FUNCTION WORDS = they are important because of the role they play in the organization of the language. Function words are ARTICLES, PREPOSITIONS and PRONOUNS.

CONTENT MEANING

LEXEMES = words that can be important because of what they mean. Lexemes are NOUNS, VERBS, ADJECTIVES and ADVERBS.

Pregunta: Can we relate function words to the concept of functional meaning and lexemes to the concept of content meaning? There is no concept for “Content meaning” in chapter 1.

LEXICAL MEANING

It is related to an open-set class of items or content words. An open-set class can accept a new item each time a new term is needed (for exe: all the new words coined in the computer’s field).

Characteristics of Open-set items: They belong to large substitution sets. There is a rapid turnover in membership of substitution classes. There are many gains and losses in a small gap of time. Their main function is to carry the meaning of a sentence.

GRAMMATICAL MEANING

It refers to a closed-set class of items or grammatical words. (for exe: prepositions; we cannot invent new ones)

Characteristics of Closed-set items: They belong to small substitution sets. Their main function is to articulate the grammatical structure of sentences. They change at a slow rate through time.

LITERAL AND NON-LITERAL MEANING

I am hungry = LITERAL (The speaker speaks in a neutral factually accurate way)

I could eat a horse = NON-LITERAL I´m starving = NON-LITERAL

(The speaker deliberately describes something in untrue or impossible terms in order to achieve special effects)

NON-LITERAL meanings in language are called FIGURATIVE and are described by RHETORICAL TERMS, such as:

METAPHOR, IRONYMETONYMY

SYNECDOCHE HYPERBOLE and LITOTES

It is difficult to draw a neat line between literal and no-literal uses of language, because as time goes by, speakers shift the meanings of words to fit new conditions. A new idea is depicted in terms of something more familiar.Therefore some metaphors get fossilized after some time so their metaphorical quality is no longer apparent to speakers.

CONTEXTUAL MEANING

Since language is an economic system of communication, it maximizes its resources; therefore there are words that have several meanings, for instance:

bank

The hearer can clearly understand and disambiguate any problematic interpretation because of the context. Meaning will vary from context to context and each context will lead to the appropriate interpretation of the word. 7. SENSES, HOMONYMY, POLYSEMY, AMBIGUITY

In HOMONYMS, there is more than one sense in a word. They have different entries in the dictionary.

In POLYSEMY, there is a connection between the senses. They have just one entry in the dictionary.

If there is MORE THAN ONE MEANING in the SAME word, so there may be AMBIGUITY in its meaning. For example:

She went to the bank. She was wearing a light coat.

Bank can be the financial institution or the bank of a river, so, bank 1 and bank 2 are HOMONYMS and there is AMBIGUITY in the sentence.Light can refer to a color that is not strong or something that is not heavy in weight. Again we have HOMONYMS and there is AMBIGUITY.

OJO QUE AUNQUE HOMONIMAS, LOS SENTIDOS (SENSES) SON COMPLETAMENTE DISTINTOS. NO EXISTE RELACIÓN DE SENTIDO ENTRE LOS SIGNIFICADOS.

Example of connection between SENSES:

I fall asleep in a very uncomfortable position. She has now been promoted to a much better position. What is your position on the death penalty?

In this case “Position” is POLYSEMOUS.

Homónimos = Se escriben igual pero sus significados son distintos.Polisemia = Se escriben igual y sus significados guardan una relación.

8. EXTENSIONS OF MEANING: METAPHOR AND METONYMY

METAPHOR = the use of a word or phrase to mean something different from the literal meaning. In the classical tradition it was considered a stylistic device.METAPHOR IS BASED IN RESEMBLANCES.

According to LAKOFF, there are 3 elements of metaphor:

A SOURCE domain, usually concrete and familiar.A TARGET domain, usually abstract or at least less well structured.A SET OF correspondences.

The correspondences involved in metaphor are of two kinds:

ONTOLOGICAL: Involving entities in two domains.EPISTEMIC: Involving relations of knowledge about the entities.

METONYMY = Relies on an ACTUAL, LITERAL association between two components within a single domain.METONYMY IS BASED ON “CONTIGUITY”.

Examples: The car in front (instead of the driver of the car) decided to turn

left. CONTAINER IS TAKEN FOR THE CONTAINED. The Spanish government (instead of the prime minister) withdrew

the troops.

EXERCISES AND ACTIVITIES

Utterances Sentences Propositions

Can be loud or quiet + - -Can be grammatical or not

+ - -

Can be true or false + + +In a particular regional accent

+ - -

In a particular language + + -

1. Can the same proposition be expressed by different sentences? YES

2. Can the same sentence be realized by different utterances? YES

Thoughts= mental processes Propositions= abstract semantic entities Sentences= linguistic entities Utterances= actions

3. The words MEAN, MEANING, and related ones are used in a variety of ways. In the following examples, say whether what is intended is SENSE or REFERENCE.

a. POSTPONE has the same meaning as PUT OFF. SENSEb. When he said “my brother”, he meant John. REFERENCEc. If you go to the disco, you will see who I mean. REFERENCEd. What do you mean, you’ve been “fooling” me? SENSE

4. Distinguish at least two senses of the following words. Provide two examples of items (either individuals or objects) which all within the denotation of each word sense and give an example in which they are the intended referent.

a) Eye My left eye is sore. The eye of a needle.b) Foot My right foot is swollen. The foot of the hill.c) Head My head hurts. He’s the head of the department.

5. Answer these questions:a. Is “A MAN” in “John attacked a man” a referring expression?

YES.b. Is “A MAN” in “John is a man” a referring expression?

NO.

6. Read the following words and mark what is most important in each of them.

CONTENT Meaning RELATIONAL Meaning

Submarine +After +Subtle +Between +

LESSON 1: BASIC CONCEPTS (CURSO VIRTUAL)

KEY ISSUES IN LESSON 1

In this section, understanding that utterances, sentences and propositions codify the same information but at different degrees of abstraction is a must.Similarly, the differences between reference, denotation and sense are also very basic and important concepts in semantics.

While the concept of reference is linked to the idea of a relation with the real world, the concept of denotation is a dimension of meaning which has to do with the abstraction that is needed to group concepts in classes. For example, the class of cats is related to a category of animals.Finally, the idea of “sense” has to do with the idea of words or concepts organized in groups of related words grouped in semantic fields.

Lo que se transmite en la comunicación es un mensaje y el contenido fundamental de este mensaje es el significado.La comunicación humana es un intercambio de información. Este intercambio puede ser muy simple e implicar tan sólo un establecimiento de contacto entre personas como, por ejemplo un saludo, o más complejo. Cuando es más complejo, implica la transmisión de un mensaje. De esta manera el mensaje, que es elemento central en la transmisión de la comunicación, codifica un significado. En esta asignatura estudiamos cómo se codifica el significado en general pero, especialmente, cómo se codifica en inglés. COMUNICACIÓN---MENSAJE---SIGNFICADO

A continuación se estudian las diferentes unidades de análisis que se pueden identificar en el lenguaje y cuál es el tipo de significado que transmiten.Asimismo, se analizan los diferentes tipos de significado. Se trata de comprender cómo cada unidad de análisis encapsula distintos aspectos del significado pero también diferentes grados de abstracción. Así, la diferencia entre alocuciones, oraciones y proposiciones es, fundamentalmente, una diferencia del grado de abstracción. Por su parte el texto se entiende como una unidad de análisis en uso. Es decir, tanto una palabra como una oración pueden constituir un texto si adquieren significado en función de su uso en una circunstancia concreta. También se estudian diferencias importantes para la comprensión del significado como las diferentes dimensiones de éste. Así se aprende a diferenciar entre sentido y referencia.

Entre los conceptos que deben resaltarse por su importancia en el conjunto de la asignatura se encuentra la diferencia entre alocuciones, oraciones y proposiciones. Cuando hablamos de alocuciones (utterances) nos estamos refiriendo a la producción concreta de una comunicación lingüística oral en unas circunstancias concretas y que viene definida por éstas. Así, si alguien dice “Could you pass me the salt please?” dicha por una persona con un determinado acento y tono de voz es una alocución diferente de “Could you pass me the salt please?” dicha por otra persona, con otro acento y otro tono de voz. Una oración (clause) implica un grado mayor de abstracción pues ya no son relevantes ni el acento ni las circunstancias. Se refiere a los elementos léxicos y sintácticos que configuran, como mínimo, una oración simple. Finalmente, una proposición supone un grado mayor de abstracción ya que los elementos puramente sintácticos pueden ignorarse de manera que sólo se tiene en cuenta el estado de cosas y los participantes en ella.Otro de los conceptos que conviene resaltar tiene que ver con las diferentes dimensiones de la configuración del significado. Así, la diferencia entre sentido y referencia y entre referencia y referente son de la mayor importancia para comprender las relaciones semánticas. Aquí son de suma validez las explicaciones de Saussure acerca de las relaciones entre el significante ( árbol, tree), el significado ( la imagen mental abstracta de dicha realidad) y la cosa o referente concreto a la que el hablante puede estar haciendo alusión en un momento concreto.

En este sentido, y siguiendo a Lyons ( 1995:79) se puede establecer una diferencia entre “reference” y “denotation” en los siguientes términos:

The crucial difference between reference and denotation is that the denotation of an expression is invariant and utterance-independent: it is part of the meaning which the expression has in the language-system, independently of its use on particular occasions of utterance. Reference, in contrast, is variable and utterance-dependent. For example, the word “dog” always denotes the same class of animals ( or, alternatively, the defining property of the class), whereas the phrases ‘the dog’ or ‘my dog’ or ‘the dog that bit the postman’ will refer to different members of the class on different occasions of utterance.

Por otra parte el concepto de sentido viene definido por las relaciones que la palabra establece con otras palabras de la misma lengua. Lyons (ibídem) continúa explicando:Sense, as I have defined it here, is wholly internal to the language system; This distinguishes it clearly from denotation, which relates expressions to classes of entities in the world.

En cuanto a los tipos de significado, hay varias clasificaciones. La primera establece una división entre significado descriptivo y no descriptivo. El significado descriptivo implica categorías ontológicas básicas y el segundo tiene que ver con los modos de expresión y, además, implica subjetividad. Del mismo modo, se pueden establecer diferencias entre el significado relacional o funcional de palabras como ‘and’, ‘or’ o ‘under’ y el significado de palabras como ‘table’ o ‘dog’. Esta diferencia entre palabras ya estaba definida en la gramática desde los clásicos como partes variables e invariables de la oración y de alguna manera muestra como esta diferencia de significados se percibía como importante.

Tanto la metáfora como la metonimia, que han sido tradicionalmente consideradas como recursos estilísticos, se perciben ahora también como formas plenamente válidas de entender el significado de las palabras. Es decir, como extensiones del significado, no sólo estudiadas por las corrientes cognitivas de la lingüística, sino plenamente aceptadas como parte de los conceptos semánticos básicos.

De esta manera lo que subyace bajo el significado metafórico y/o metonímico son operaciones conceptuales de extensión del significado que coexisten con las formas de conceptualización y categorización clásicas. En esta primera lección se estudia la categorización conceptual como una herramienta mental y por eso se incluye bajo el epígrafe de aspectos metodológicos. Así, se estudian las formas de categorización clásica (basada en una lista de rasgos que definen un concepto) y las formas de categorización prototípica (basadas en la idea de parecido y de unos rasgos más centrales que otros en la definición de los conceptos).