Semantics presentation

‘LINGUISTIC SEMANTICS’ PREPARED AND PRESENTED

BYAZMAT ARAA

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study of the MEANING OF THE ‘MEANING’


Semantics is taken from the Greek word ‘Semantikos’ meaning sign.The word ‘meaning’ can be defined in many ways, but the most pertinent definition to linguistics is :

“ Meaning is the function of signs in language.”

This understanding of meaning corresponds to German philosopher Ludwig Wittgensteins’ definition:

“ The meaning of a word is its use in the language.”(in other words, the role a word plays in the language).


Meaning has interested philosophers for thousands of years. The

Greek philosophers were the first people known to have debated

the nature of meaning. They held two opposing views on the

subject.

The Naturalist view , held by Plato and his followers, maintained

that there was a direct association between a word and its meaning,and the words were only names for the objects.

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The concept of a word’s meaning was first made explicit in Greek philosophy by Aristotle.Definitions have been particularly important for conceptual theories of meaning which traditionally assumed a close link between concepts and definitions: knowing the concept HORSE, for example, is simply the ability to use the word horse in a way that accords with or fits its definition.

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Since about the sixteenth century, dictionaries have played an extremely important role in the way we think about and use our own language.

Monday, March 16, 2015

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signifier ____________________________ signifiedlinked by an associative bond

(sound image) (concept)


Ogden and Richards saw this relationship between words and concepts as a TRIANGLE.

Thought or Reference

Symbol Referent


According to this theory there is no direct link between symbol and referent i.e.(language and the word).This link is established via thought or reference, the concepts of our minds. It avoids problems faced by naming the words,i.e classification of words.what exactly is the associative bond of Saussure or the link between Ogden and Richards’ symbol and concept?We don’t relate words to concepts every time we utter them rather this permanent association is stored in our brains. Hence, we can say that concept is the meaning of the word. Many linguists accept conceptual view of meaning which stemmed from ‘mentalism ‘ of Chomsky.We understand the meaning of a word just like we can read a signpost.


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The purpose of semantics is not to search for an elusive entity called ‘MEANING’, rather it is an attempt to understand how it is that words and sentences can ‘mean’ at all or ‘how they can be meaningful?’Wittgenstein says, “Don’t look for the meaning of a word, look for its use.”Hence, with the assistance of Semantics we can investigate USE.!


REFERENCE

Reference deals with

the relationship

between the linguistic

elements;words,senten

ces etc, and the non-

linguistic world of

experience.

SENSE

Sense relates to the

complex system of

relationships that hold

between the linguistic

elements themselves

(mostly the words); it is

concerened only with intra-

linguistic relations.


SENSE RELATIONS

No doubt, SENSE RELATIONS have formed an important part of the study of language.Linguists and philosophers are more concerned with the sense relations ,

BECAUSEThere are extremely great theoretical and practical difficulties in handling Reference (Content) satisfactorily.

THE ONLY CONCERN OF SEMANTICS


To linguists and non-linguists alike, the word is the most basic and obvious unit of language. But in many languages a single word can appear in many different morphological forms. Thus, in English, go, goes, went, have gone and to go are all forms of the verb to go. Other languages have many more morphological variants of a single word-form. In Ancient Greek, for example, a single verb, tithe-mi,which means ‘put’, has several hundred different forms, which convey differences of person, number, tense and mood. Monday, March 16, 2015 13

The lexeme is the name of the abstract unit which unites all the morphological variants of a single word. Thus, we can say that go, goes, went, have gone and to go all are instantiations of the lexeme to go.We usually refer to the lexeme as a whole using one of the morphological variants, the citation form.

( Nick Riemer)


All human languages have the property of productivity. This is simply the fact that the vocabulary of any given language can be used to construct a theoretically infinite number of sentences (not all of which will be meaningful),by varying the ways in which the words are combined. For example, given the words the, a, has, eaten, seen, passing, contemporary, novelist and buffalo,the following figure among the large number of meaningful sentences that can be constructed:


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1. The novelist has seen the buffalo.2. A novelist has eaten the buffalo.3. A contemporary novelist has seen a

buffalo.4. The novelist has seen a passing buffalo.5. A buffalo has eaten a passing

contemporary novelist and so on.


One especially important category of non compositional phrase is idioms. For example, if wesay that so-and-so has thrown in the towel, most English speakers will recognize that we are not talking about anyone literally ‘throwing’ a ‘towel', but that we simply mean that the person in question has given up on whatever venture is being spoken about. This phrase is not compositional, since its overall meaning, does not derive from the meanings of its individual component lexemes.


Based on the distinction between the meanings of words and the meanings of sentences, we can recognize two main divisions in the study of semantics: lexical semantics and phrasal semantics.Lexical semantics is the study of word meaning,

whereas phrasal semantics is the study of the principles which govern the construction of the meaning of phrases and of sentence meaning out of compositional combinations of individual lexemes.


SENTENCE MEANING

The sentence meaning of the given example is theliteral, compositional meaning as built up from the meanings of the individualwords of the sentence. If we did not speak English, we could discoverthe sentence meaning by finding out what its translationwas in our own language.

UTTERANCE MEANING

The utterance meaning, by contrast, is the meaning whichthe words have on a particular occasion of use in the particular context inwhich they occur.


There are many uses in which words seem to acquire a strongly different meaning from the one they normally have.Suppose that while cooking Peter has just spilled a large quantity of spaghetti carbonara all over the kitchen floor. Hearing the commotion, Brenda comes into the kitchen, sees what has happened, and utters (33)You’re a very tidy cook, I see.

It is clear that Brenda doesn’t literally mean that Peter is a tidy cook, but that she is speaking ironically. What she actually means is the opposite of Brenda is drawing attention to the fact that Peter has precisely not beena tidy cook. In cases like this, we say that there is a difference between sentence meaning and utterance meaning.


LEXICAL RELATIONS

Relationships like Synonymy, Antonymy,

Meronymy and so on all concern the

paradigmatic relations of an expression: the relations which determine the choice of one lexical item over another. In the construction of any utterance, the speaker is typically confronted with a choice between various lexical items.kitchen is a meronymof restaurant; often is the antonym of rarely, many is (in this context) a synonym of numerous, and sushi is a hyponym of Japanese food.Monday, March 16, 2015 21

Speakers of English can readily agree that words like good-bad, love-hate and in-out are opposites or antonyms. The notion of oppositeness involved here seems to cover several different types of relation; in general, however, antonymymay be characterized as a relationship of incompatibility between two terms with respect to some given dimension of contrast.Some words seem to have more than one antonym, depending on the dimension of contrast involved (girl has both boy and woman, depending on whether the dimension of contrast is sex or age; sweet has both bitter and sour.


Not every word has an obvious antonym: library, of, and corresponding are three cases for which there is no obvious relevant dimension of contrast and for which antonyms are consequently hard to identify. And even where an obvious dimension of contrast does exist, antonyms are not always available: angry, for instance, does not have any obvious antonym in English even though we can easily conceive of the scale of arousal and calmness to which it belongs.



In antonymy, the principal distinction we have to make is between gradable and non-gradable antonyms. Non-gradable antonyms are antonyms which do not admit a midpoint, such as male-female or pass fail. Assertion of one of these typically entails the denial of the other.Thus, if someone is female, they are necessarily not male, and someone who has failed an exam has necessarily not passed it. Gradable antonyms,however, like hot-cold or good-bad, seem to be more common than non gradable ones.


A gradable pair of antonyms names points on a scale which contains a midpoint: thus, hot and cold are two points towards different ends of a scale which has a midpoint, lexicalized by adjectives like tepid, which is used to refer to the temperature of liquids which are neither hot nor cold, but somewhere in between. A consequence of the fact that gradable antonyms occur on a scale is the fact that they are open to comparison.Thus, we may say that one drink is hotter than another, or that some water is less cold than another.


List ten gradable and five non-gradable antonym pairs.


A certain number of words in English which have more than one meaning can be given descriptions which make them seem autoantonymous, i.e. their own opposites. (Murphy 2003: 173). Thus, temper means both ‘to harden’ and ‘to soften’;cleave means both ‘stick together’ and ‘force apart’ and sanction means both ‘to approve’ and ‘to censure’.


Furthermore, there are many denominal verbs for putting in or taking out things which show similar autoantonymy, (e.g. to string a bean vs. to string a violin. Murphy points out (2003: 173) that contextual factors limit the risk of confusion in many of these cases: if you temper your comments you are softening them, not making them harder, whereas tempering metal can only refer to hardening it.


Meronymy (Greek meros: ‘part’) is the relation of part to whole: hand is a meronym of arm, seed is a meronym of fruit, blade is a meronym of knife (conversely, arm is the holonym of hand, fruit is the holonym of seed, etc.).Surprisingly, not all languages seem to have an unambiguous means of translating the phrase ‘part of’ but meronymy is nevertheless often at the origin of various polysemy patterns (where a single word has more than one meaning; and an important lexical relation for that reason.


Hyponymy (Greek hypo- ‘under’) is the lexical relation described in English by the phrase kind/type/sort of. A chain of hyponyms defines a hierarchy of elements: sports car is a hyponym of car since a sports car is a kind of car, and car, in turn, is a hyponym of vehicle since a car is a kind of vehicle.Other examples of hyponym hierarchies include• blues – jazz – music,• ski-parka – parka – jacket,• commando – soldier – member of armed forces,• martini – cocktail – drink and• paperback – book


A given word or phrase is accepted as having the same meaning as another word or phrase if its substitution for the other in the given context yields an utterance which they will accept as having the same meaning as the first utterance. (Lyons 1968: 75)


It has often been suggested that English is particularly rich in Synonyms for the historical reason that its vocabulary has come from two different sources, from Anglo-Saxon on the one hand and from French, Latin and Greek on the other.


There are no real synonyms; no two words have exactly the same meaning. It would seem unlikely that two words with exactly the same meaning would both survive in a language. If we look at possible synonyms there are at least five ways in which they can be seen to differ.


Words in different dialects Fall___ autumn Cowshed, cow house, byre, haystack,

hayrick, haymow Tap, faucet, spigot


Words in different styles or registersSmell, obnoxious effluvium, ‘orrible stinkGentleman, man, chap, Pass away, die, pop off


Different in emotive or evaluative meaning Statesman/politician Hide/conceal Thrifty/economical/stingy Fascist/liberal


Collocationally restricted words May be called True synonyms (occur in different environments) Rancid occurs with bacon or butter Addled with eggs or brains


Same words have a set of different meanings Such words are called polysymic words Dictionary meaning of ‘flight’ Passing through the air Power of flying Air jouney Unit of the Air Force Volley Digression Series of steps


Wind (verb) and wind (noun) are spelt in the same way but pronounced differently (homography)

Sight/site, rite/right are spelt differently but pronounced in the same way (homophony)


Identical forms , different origin (homonym) Given separate entries Identical forms, same origin (polysemy) Given single entry


Meanings overlap Loose sense of synonymy Exploited by the dictionary makers Mature/adult/ripe/perfect/due Govern/direct/control/determine/require Loose/inexact/free/relaxed/vague/lax /slack/unbound/inattentive/


On the traditional view of metaphor, which goes right back to Aristotle, metaphors are principally seen as a matter of (especially literary) usage.On this understanding, metaphors assert a resemblance between two entities.Thus, the metaphor the holiday was a nightmare works because it asserts a resemblance or similarity between the holiday and a nightmare.


Understanding the meaning of the metaphorical utterance involves identifying things which holidays and nightmares might hold in common,such as being unpleasant.Metaphors like this are no more than isolatedusages which can only be discussed on a case-by-case basis: we should not expect there to be any significant generalizations about metaphoricalusages.


Another important structural relation is the relation of metonymy.In traditional rhetoric, metonymy is the figure of speech based on an interrelation between closely associated terms – cause and effect, possessor and possessed, and a host of possible others.


The common element in metonymy is notion of contiguity: the things related by a metonymy can be understood as contiguous to (neighboring) each other, eitherconceptually or in the real world. Here are some examples:a. Moscow has rejected the demands.b. The kettle is boiling.c. This cinema complex has seven screens.d. I saw the doctor today.e. My bags were destroyed by customs.


In (4a) we understand that Moscow refers to the Russian government. In(4b) it isn’t the kettle itself, but the water inside it, which is boiling. In(4c) the cinema is not claimed to just have seven screens: the speaker means that it has seven separate auditoriums, each with its own screen.In (4d) the speaker does not mean that they just saw the doctor: they mean that they consulted the doctor. In (4e) it was not just the bags, but theircontents as well which were destroyed.


Notice the difference between metonymies and metaphors: in metaphor, there is a relation of mapping between two concepts, with the structure of one concept (NIGHTMARE, UNPLEASANT) being imposed onto another (HOLIDAY, BORING). Metonymies do not serve to structure one conceptin terms of another: it is not possible to articulate the detailed mappings we established in the love and obligation cases. Instead, they draw on the associations within a single conceptual ‘domain’, allowing one part of a concept to convey another.


The arrangement of words(or lexemes) into groups(or fields) on the basis of an element of shared meaning .It is also called lexical field analysis.Although the terms lexical field and semantic field are usually used interchangeably,SiegfriedWyler makes this distinction: a lexical field is “a structure formed by lexemes” while a semantic field is “the underlying meaning which finds expression in lexemes”.


Semanticists often divide the meaning of a word into semantic components based on real world concepts such as human/live/dead/animal/plant/thing/ etc.Discussing the meaning of words by breaking it down into smaller semantic components such as this is calledCOMPONENTIAL ANALYSIS.


With back

With legs For a singleperson

For sitting

With arms

rigid

chair + + + + _ +

Arm chair + + + + + +

Stool _ + + + _ +

sofa + + _ + + +

Bean bag _ _ + + _ _


Thus the level, chair adds a specification which we could describe as ‘for one person to sit on’ to piece of furniture, and armchair adds ‘with arms’ to chair. Similarly, we could describe the difference between chair and sofa through a contrast between the feature ‘for one person to sit on’ (chair) and ‘for more than one person to sit on’ (sofa). Continuing in this way, we could envisage an entire description of the semantic field of words for furniture items based on the presence or absence of a finite number of features, conceived as the ‘conceptual units out of which the meanings of linguistic utterances are built’ .


Its embodiment in binary features (i.e. Features with only two possible values, + or −) represents a translation into semantics of the principles of structuralist phonological analysis, which used binary phonological features like [± voiced], [± labial] [±nasal],etc. to differentiate the phonemes of a language. The componential analysis of meaning like the one sketched in Table is precisely analogous to the feature specifications of phonemes advanced in the structuralist tradition.


Thus, just as sofa can be described through the use of binary semantic components like [+ with back], [+ with legs], [− for a single person], [+ for sitting], [+ with arms], [+ rigid], so the phoneme /d/ of English would be described (in the system of Chomsky and Halle 1968) as a constellation of the following distinctive features: /d/ [+ consonantal, − nasal, − sonorant, + anterior, + coronal, + voiced . . . ]


A standard dictionary represents the contrast between chair and sofa through differing definitions, as follows; chair ‘a separate seat for one person, of various forms, usually having a back and four legs’sofa ‘a long upholstered seat with a back and arms for two or more people’ (Concise Oxford 1995).The componential analysis represents the same difference in meaning simply through the presence or absence of a single feature, [for a single person], an analysis which struck many linguists as superior in terms of its concision.



table horse Boy Man Girl woman

animate _ + + + + +

human _ _ + + + +

female _ _ _ _ + +

adult _ + _ _ _ +

Despite the popularity it enjoyed for a time, especially in structuralistcircles, componential analysis is confronted with a number of serious problems. One important problem is the rigidity of the binary feature system, according to which the only possible value of a specified semantic feature is + or − (or unspecified).This aspect of the analysis came to be seen as increasingly unsatisfactory from the 1970s onward, largely in light of psychological evidence about human categorization. Another serious problem was the fact that it seemed simply not to apply to many areas of the vocabulary. Componential analysis is particularly suited to restricted semantic fields from which intuitively obvious semantic distinctions can easily be abstracted.

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The most obvious types of lexeme to which it can be applied are nouns with obvious properties available for conversion into features (‘with legs’, ‘to sit on’, ‘for one person’, etc.). Elsewhere, however, the utility of features is much less clear. In spite of these problems, the use of distinctive features in componential analysis had some subtle consequences for many linguists’ conception of semantics, by making meaning seem something much more concrete and uniform than it had appeared in traditional dictionary definitions.


A collocation is two or more words that often go together. These combinations just sound "right" to native English speakers, who use them all the time. Other combinations may be unnatural and just sound "wrong".



Falling rising toneShe is very clever.She is so pretty.You are such a loyal friend.

These utterances don’t mean what they mean!!!


SemanticsNot a single, well-integrated discipline.No absolute distinction betweengrammar and Semantics.

It relates to sum total of human knowledge.



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Semantics presentation