SEMANTICS & PRAGMATICS

Lecture 01

Abdul Aleem Yahya | MPhil, Dip. TEFL

English Language Lecturer
Department of English,
University of Education, LMC, Lahore | Pakistan
Cell: +92. 332 6386010  
 
Email: [email protected] | [email protected]
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/AbdulAleemYahya 

1
Introduction

2
 INTRODUCTION
• SEMANTICS is the technical term used to refer to the study of meaning.
Unfortunately, ‘meaning’ covers a variety of aspects of language, and there
is no very general agreement either about what meaning is or about the way
in which it should be described.

The terms ‘semantics’ and ‘meaning’

• The term semantics is a recent addition to the English language.

Although there is one occurrence of semantick in the phrase semantick
philosophy to mean ’divination’ in the seventeenth century, semantics
does not occur until it was introduced in a paper read to the American
Philological Association in 1894 entitled ‘reflected meanings: a point in
semantics'.

• The French term sémantique had been coined from the Greek by M.
Bréal. In both cases the term was not used simply to refer to meaning,
but to its development — with what we shall later call 'historical
semantics’.

• In 1990, however, there appeared Bréal’s book Semantics. studies in the

science of meaning; the French original had appeared earlier.
3
• One of the most famous books on semantics is The
meaning of meaning by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, first
published in 1923. Yet semantics does not occur in the
main body of the book itself. However, it appears in an
appendix, which is itself a classic in the field, entitled: The
problem of meaning in primitive languages, written by the
anthropologist, B. Malin- owski.

• Other terms besides semantics have been used. H. G. Wells

in ‘The shape of things to come’ speaks of the science of
significs, but he says that it was lost sight of and not
revived until the twenty-first century.

• Other names that have been used include semasiology,

semology, semiotics and sememics and semics, though
scholars have often used some of these terms to suit their
own interests and orientation, and in both wider and
narrower senses.
4
• There is, unfortunately, a use of the terms semantic
and semantics in popular language, especially in
newspapers, that bears only a slight resemblance to
our use. The terms are used to refer to the
manipulation of language, mostly to mislead, by
choosing the right word. Thus there were headlines in
The Guardian in 1971 : ‘Semantic maneuvers at the
Pentagon’ and ‘Homelessness reduced to semantics’.

• The tern meaning is much more familiar to us all. But

the dictionary will suggest a number of different
meanings of meaning, or, more correctly, of the verb
mean, and Ogden and Richards were able to list no
less than sixteen different meanings that have been
favored by reputable scholars. 5
• To begin with, we should not see a close link between
the sense we require and the sense of ‘intend’ that we
find in I mean to be there tomorrow. It is significant,
perhaps, that we can not, in this context, talk about
’my meaning’, to refer to ’what I mean to do’.

• Much nearer to the sense we need is that of ‘Those

clouds mean thunder’ or A red light means ’stop’. For
mean here (and meaning too) is used of signs, both
natural and conventional, signs that indicate
something that is happening or will happen, or
something that has to be done. Such signs provide
information or give instructions, and it is easy to
assume that language consists of signs of a similar
kind. 6
• When, however, we look at the use of the terms mean
and meaning to refer to language we find that they
seldom, if ever, suggest this notion of sign.

• The most relevant use of the terms for our purposes is

found in such sentences as What does ’calligraphy’
mean? ’Calligraphy’ is beautiful handwriting.

• The reply to such questions is in terms of other

words that the speaker thinks the hearer can
understand. This is, of course, characteristic of
dictionaries. They provide definitions by suggesting
words or phrases which, we are given to understand,
have the ’same’ meaning, though what is sameness is a
problem that we shall not be able to escape.
7
• The extent to which meaning is dealt with in terms of the
equivalence of terms is even more clearly brought out when we
deal with foreign languages. For if we are asked what ‘ghar’
means in English we shall almost certainly reply ‘house’. It is
interesting to notice that we would not ask what house means in
English, expecting the reply ghar.

• A different use of meaning is found in such sentences as 'It wasn’t

what he said, but what he meant.’ Lewis Carroll made play with the
difference between saying and meaning in Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland.
'Then you should say what you mean’, the March Hare went on.
‘I do’, Alice hastily replied; ‘at least — at least I mean what I say —
that’s the same thing, you know’.
‘Not the same thing a bit’, said the Hatter.

8
• This is a curious use for, if our words have a meaning, how can
we fail to say what we mean, or, rather, how can the words fail
to mean what they mean? The answer is, of course, that we wish
to suggest that the words do not mean what they might most
obviously be thought to mean, that there is some other meaning
besides the ‘literal’ meaning of the words. There are a number of
quite different ways of achieving this.
• We can quite simply use such features as intonation or even
perhaps non-linguistic signs such as a wink to indicate that the
words must not be taken literally. In this respect there is one
intonation tune in English that is particularly interesting — the
fall- rise, in which the intonation falls and rises on the ’accented’
word in a sentence. For this tune expresses reservations; it says
’but ...’. For instance, with ‘She’s very clever’ it may well ’say’ (i.e.,
imply) that she is not very honest or not very attractive while
with I think so it would suggest that I do not really know
(whereas a different intonation would express confidence in my
belief). 9
• Similarly I can say, with sarcasm, That’s very clever to mean
’That’s very stupid’, and if I wink when I say ’That’s mine’, I
probably intend to suggest that it is not.

• Secondly, much of what we say ‘presupposes’ a great deal. The

classic example is ‘when did you stop beating your wife?’
which presupposes that you beat her at one time without actually
saying it.

• All in all, it seems that we shall not make much progress in the
study of meaning by simply looking at common or even scholarly
uses of the relevant terms. Rather we must attempt to see what
meaning is, or should be, within the framework of an ’academic’
or ‘scientific’ discipline. Semantics is a part of linguistics, the
scientific study of language.

10
SEMANTICS & LINGUISTICS
• Let us now try to place semantics within linguistics
and see what that implies. To begin with, we can
assume that semantics is a component or level of
linguistics of the same kind as phonetics or grammar.
Moreover, nearly all linguists have, explicitly or
implicitly, accepted a linguistic model in which
semantics is at one ’end’ and phonetics at the other,
with grammar somewhere in the middle (though not
necessarily that there are just these three levels). The
plausibility of this is obvious enough.

• Language can be viewed as a communication system

that relates something to be communicated with
something that communicates, a message on the one 11
• The Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, referred to these as
the SIGNIFIER (significant) and the SIGNIFIED (signifié).
(He, unfortunately, used the term SIGN to refer to the
association of these two, but some of his more recent followers
have, more reasonably, used it for the signifier alone.)

• Examples of communication systems, all of them no doubt much

simpler than language, are numerous. For instance, traffic lights
use a system of colors and color combinations to instruct drivers
to go or to stop (and also to warn that such instructions are
about to be given).

• Similarly, animals make noises to communicate. The gibbons, for

instance, have a set of calls to indicate the discovery of food,
danger, friendly interest, desire for company, and they have one
call that is intended merely to establish position and so present
the band from spreading too far away apart.
12
• Although it is reasonable to see language as basically a
communication system, we must not push the analogy with other
systems too far, for several reasons.

• First, language does not always have a ‘message’ in any real

sense, certainly not in the sense of a piece of information; part of
its function is concerned with social relationships, though this is
also true of the animal communication systems too.

• Secondly, in language both the ’signs’ and the ‘messages’ (the

signifiers and the signified) are themselves enormously complex
and the relationship between them is of even greater complexity.
For this reason it has been convincingly argued that human
language differs in kind rather than in degree from other
‘languages’.

• Thirdly, in language it is extremely difficult, perhaps even

impossible, to specify precisely what the message is.

13
• In other communication systems there is no problem because the
message can be independently identified in terms of language or,
rather, of a language such as English, e.g. Red means ’stop’.

• For language in general we have no such easy solution, for we

cannot define meaning (the ’message’) independently of
language. We can only state one set of meanings in terms of
another set, only describe language in terms of language.

• If it is suggested that linguistics is the 'scientific’ study of

language, one essential requirement is that it should be empirical.
If semantics is part of linguistic it too must be no less scientific.
Precisely what ‘scientific’ or ’empirical’ means is a matter of some
debate, but one essential requirement of a scientific study is that
statements made within it must, in principle at least, be verifiable
by observation.
14
• Furthermore, if linguistics is scientific, it must be
concerned not with specific instances, but with
generalizations. This point was made, though in a
rather different conceptual framework, by De
Saussure in distinction between LANGUAGE
(langue) and SPEAKING (parole).

• This distinction has reappeared in the works of Noam

Chomsky and his followers as COMPETENCE and
PERFORMANCE. (Chomsky differs greatly from de
Saussure on the nature of the linguistic system within
language or competence, but the theoretical
distinction is the same.) Both are concerned
essentially, as are we, to exclude what is purely
individual and accidental (speaking or performance), 15
• But for both de Saussure and Chomsky, language or competence
is some kind of idealized system without any clear empirical
basis, and I prefer to think rather in terms of generalizations.

• The point is clear enough in phonetics. The phonetician is not

primarily concerned with the particular sounds that are made at a
particular time by a particular person. He may well study the
pronunciation of e.g. book, but in order to do so he will listen to a
number of individual utterances of this word and will make a
generalized statement on the basis of these. Indeed, it is possible
today, with the help of a computer, to produce an ’average’
utterance, computed by the computer and produced by
equipment that can reproduce human speech sounds.

• What happens at each time a person speaks is not usually of

interest in itself; it is rather part of the evidence for the
generalizations. The same must be true of semantics. We shall
not normally be concerned with the meaning any individual 16
• An individual’s meaning is not part of the general study
of semantics. Of course, it is interesting or important
for some purposes to see how and why an individual
diverges from the normal pattern.

• This is necessary in the study of literature — the poet

may well not ' mean’ what you and I would mean. It is
obviously important too in psychiatric studies where
the individual is apparently unable to use his language
in the same way as others. But it is important to
realize that neither the literary nor the psychiatric
studies of the individual would be possible without the
generalized ‘normal’ patterns to make comparisons
with.
17
• A useful distinction has been made between UTTERANCES and
SENTENCES so that we can distinguish between the utterance
‘There is a book on the table’ and the sentence There is a book on
the trifle.

• This may at first appear surprising and, unfortunately, the

distinction is often lost because we talk of people 'uttering’ or
’speaking’ in ’sentences’. But the point is that an utterance is an
event in time — it is produced by some one and at some particular
time, while a sentence is an abstract entity that has no existence
in time, but is part of the linguistic system of a language.

• The distinction is, obviously, related to that of language or

competence and speaking or performance, the sentence
belonging essentially to the former, and the utterance to the
later.
18
• It is important because when we talk about something
that someone has said we normally describe it in terms
that are appropriate to the sentence.

• In other words we use our linguistic knowledge

(including what a sentence is) to talk about it. For
instance, I referred to the utterance 'There is a book
own the table’, which may have been uttered by
someone at some time.

• But in order to refer to it I have to write it down in

words with all the conventions of spelling and
punctuation. In so doing I identify it as an example of
the sentence There is a book on the table.
19
• In order to talk about an utterance, that is to say, I have to treat
it as an example of the generalized, more abstract, entity, the
sentence. (The only way to avoid even writing it down in a
phonetic script would probably assume some of the
characteristics of the sentence.)

• In particular when I write it down I identify the words, but words

are not a ’given' part of the utterance. They are not accessible by
direct observation but are the result of some fairly sophisticated
linguistic thinking.

• It follows from this that semanticists will not be (and cannot

really ever be) concerned with the meaning of utterances, but
only with the meaning of sentences, and it equally follows that we
cannot study semantics without assuming a great deal about
grammar and other aspects of the structure of language.
20
 The spoken language
• One important characteristic of the linguistic approach towards
the study of language is that it is not concerned merely with the
written language, but also (and usually with greater emphasis)
with the spoken. There are at least few ways in which the spoken
language is ’prior to’, or more basic than, the written:

– The human race had speech long before it had writing and
there are still many languages that have no written form.
– The child learns to speak long before he learns to write.
– Written language can, to a large extent, be convened into
speech without loss. But the converse is not true; if we write
down what is said we lose a great deal.
– Speech plays a far greater role in our lives than writing.
– We spend far more time speaking than writing or reading.

21
• The third point needs some explanation. There are a few features
of the written form that are not easily (or not at all) represented
in speech.

• For instance, the use of italics in this book to refer to examples

would not be indicated if it were read aloud. Nor would the
paragraphs, though that might not be a great loss. But the spoken
language has far more striking characteristics that cannot be
easily shown in the written form.

• In particular it has what are known as prosodic and Para-linguistic

features. The prosodic features include primarily already noted
the use of a fall—rise intonation to suggest 'but’, and any speaker
of English can easily become aware of the great use made of
intonation for a whole variety of purposes, largely of an
attitudinal kind.

22
• The term stress is used for several phenomena including the
differences between e.g. the verb convict and the noun convict,
but for our purpose the most interesting use is that which is
sometimes referred to as accent, in which the accent may fall on
various words in a sentence.

• The semantics of intonation and stress is a major subject in its

own right. But meaning is also carried by paralinguistic features
such as rhythm, tempo, loudness (shouting and whispering are
very meaningful).

• In addition, when we are talking, we use many non-linguistic

signs (the term paralinguistic is sometimes used for these too) —
a smile or a wink may be as good an indication that we do not
really mean what we say as a ‘sarcastic’ intonation tune.

23
• Even apart from the prosodic and paralinguistic features, we have to
recognize that the form of spoken language and the purposes for which
it is used are very different from those of the written.

• Concentration on the written language has misled grammarians — they

have often failed to see that the spoken language is different from the
written and have, misleadingly, attempted to describe the spoken
language in terms appropriate to the written. It has been even more
misleading for semanticists.

• For the written language is largely narration or the presentation of

factual information or arguments. This has led to the assumption that
meaning is largely concerned with information, with what philosophers
have called 'propositions’. But the main function of language,
especially the spoken language, is not to inform. It performs other and
quite different functions.

24
 HISTORICAL SEMANTICS
• It is concerned with the study of the change of meaning in time. A great
deal of work has been done on semantics which is of a historical kind,
and it was noted earlier that the term semantics was first used to refer to
the development and change of meaning.

• Certainly the study of the change of meaning can be fascinating. We can

start by attempting to classify the kinds of change that occur. The great
American linguist, L. Bloomfield noted a number of types each given a
traditional name. These, together with an example and the earlier
meaning were:
Narrowing meat ’food’
Widening bird ’nestling’
Metaphor bitter 'biting’

Metonymy (nearness in space or time)

Jaw ‘cheek’

25
 Synecdoche (whole/part relation)
stone ‘heated room’
Hyperbole (stronger to weaker meaning)
astound ‘strike with thunder’
Litotes (weaker to stronger meaning)
kill ‘torment’
Degeneration knave ’boy’
Elevation knight 'boy‘

• We shall also try to find reasons for the changes. Some are no more than
fortuitous. The word money is related to Latin moneo ’warn’ (cf.
admonish) because money was made at Rome in the temple of the
goddess Juno Moneta. The tanks of modern warfare are so called
because of a security decision in the 1914- 1918 war to deceive the
Germans into thinking that water-tanks were being dispatched.

26
• Other changes arise from new needs. The word car was an obsolete
poetic word for 'chariot’, until the motor-car was invented.

• More scientific words have acquired specialized meanings that have no

close relationship to the non-scientific use; mass and energy in physics
are not what they are to the layman. A cause of fast change is taboo — a
word that is used for something unpleasant is replaced by another and
that too is again replaced later. Thus English has had the terms privy
W.C. lavatory, toilet, bath- room, etc.

• Historical change is properly an area of comparative and historical

linguistics, or what is more commonly called COMPARATIVE
PHILOLOGY, which attempts both to reconstruct the history of
languages and, via their history, to relate languages apparently coming
from a common source or ’ancestor’.

27
• One of the aims of the subject is to establish 'sound laws’, to show for
instance the correlation of p in Romance language with f in Germanic
languages (this is an aspect of what is known as Grimm’s Law). This can
be illustrated in English where pairs of words come from Romance and
Germanic, e.g. father/paternal, feather/pen, fish/piscatorial. But the
establishment of sound laws depends on knowing that the words we
compare are the same in the ‘sense’ that they can be supposed to have a
common origin and this can only be done on the basis of their meaning.

• This is obvious enough in the case of the examples above (remember that
pens were originally quills). It is no surprise that we can relate ewe to
Latin ovis ’sheep’ and English ovine or acre to Latin ager ‘field’ and
agriculture. It may be more surprising (but only from the sound, not the
meaning) that cow and beef are also related (though in a more complex
way).

28
• Generally the less obvious identifications of meaning are well
supported by the evidence of sound laws. We find words that
ought by the sound laws to be related, and then look for
reasonable semantic relationships. Unhappily this is not possible
with all groups of languages.

• In many pans of the world the language relationships are difficult

to establish, largely because we have no ancient records. Thus
speculation may take over.

• Apart from the scientific study of the change of meaning, it is an

obvious fact that people are interested in etymology, the
discovery of earlier meanings of words (or, if we follow the
etymology of etymology, the discovery of their ’true’ meanings).

29
• Indeed dictionaries attempt to satisfy this interest by quoting at least the
most recent origin of each word. Interest in etymology goes back for
centuries. The first serious discussion is in Plato’s Cratylus; many of the
suggested etymologies there are preposterous, but a number of them are
basically correct.

• Part of the difficulty for the layman is that words are often not what
they seem. Gooseberry has nothing to do with geese, and strawberry is
not directly connected with the use of straw to protect the fruit.

• But few would expect hysterical to be connected with the womb (in
Greek), or for lord and lady to have anything to do with loaf (of bread).

• Etymology for its own sake is of little importance, even if it has curiosity
value, and there really should be no place for a smattering of it in
dictionaries.

30
• The chief difficulty is that there can be no 'true’ or 'original’ meaning
since human language stretches back too far. It is tempting, for instance,
to say that nice really means ’precise’, as in a nice distinction. But a study
of its history shows that it once meant silly (Latin nescius ‘ignorant’),
and earlier it must have been related to ne ‘not’ and sc- probably
meaning 'cut’ as in scissors and shears. And before that? We cannot
know.

• As I said at the beginning of this section, there will be no further

discussion of historical semantics. This may be surprising, and perhaps
even disappointing, to the reader who has been led to believe by popular
books and by the practice of most dictionaries to think of meaning in
terms of change of meaning. But linguists have generally come to accept
the distinction made explicit by de Saussure between DIACHRONIC
and SYNCHRONIC linguistics, the first being concerned with language
through time, the second with language as it is, or as it was at a
particular time.

31
• Although there are some theoretical problems about drawing a clear line
between these two types of study, in practice it can be drawn and a great
deal of confusion can be avoided if we are clear whether a linguistic
statement is a synchronic or diachronic one. For instance ’ought is the
past tense of owe’, ’dice is the plural of die’ are confused statements. As
synchronic facts about modem English they are untrue; they may be
diachronically true — but in that case the verb should be ’was’ not ’is’.
• Linguists have in recent years concentrated on the synchronic study of
language. It can, moreover, be argued that the synchronic study must
logically precede the diachronic study, for we cannot study change in a
language until we have first established what the language was like
at the times during which it changed.

• So too in semantics we cannot deal with change of meaning until we

know what meaning is. Unfortunately, because they have no clear theory
of semantics scholars interested in historical change have indulged in
vague statements of the kind we considered earlier. So we should focus
on synchronic matters rather than diachronic.
32
END OF LECTURE

33
 INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY
CRITICISM & LITERARY THEORY
Instructor: Abdul Aleem Yahya
LECTURE 2
University of Education-
Lower Mall Campus, Lahore

34
Theories of Meaning

35
 Theories of Meaning
• We have learnt that semantics deals with meaning in language.
Just like every other discipline, there are theories to explain in
detail the nature of meaning in a principled way.

• The most enduring semantic theories will be presented in this

lecture. It will be recalled that language as a system is organized
along the structures of sound, words, sentences and meaning.
Each of these levels can be studied in some details, following
specified formulations or theories.

• For the purpose of a detailed study of semantics, the theories we

shall explore are expected to explain the nature of word and
sentence meaning, among several other things.

36
• Semantic theories explain the nature of meaning by utilizing
a finite set of rules to explain a variety of semantic
phenomena.

• Any theory of semantics should provide statements that

explain meaning relationship – such as ambiguity, anomaly,
contradiction, tautology, paraphrase, entailment, synonymy,
hyponymy. This means that such a theory should be able to
explain the inherent meaning characteristics of words and
sentences.

• Any reliable theory of semantics should relate meaning to

syntax, highlighting the relationship between them. This
means that the rules of sentence construction and those of
word meaning should relate to explain in full the meaning
of the sentence.

37
• A viable semantic theory should also relate meaning to the
contexts and situations of word and sentence usage for
appropriate interpretation. There should also be a record of
facts of meaning, linguistic reference and truth conditions.

• These requirements suggest that such a theory should be a

part of the general linguistic theory. That means that
semantic rules must have universal applications.

• Such rules must give clues to the nature of semantic

features which distinguish lexical items of different
languages of the world. Since the theory should account for
meaning properties on all languages, it helps to explain the
structure of human languages. These expectations have
been met at different levels by different theories of
meaning.

38
• The following theories of meaning are listed by Leopore
(1989) in his write up on "Semantics: Study of
meaning" in Encyclopedia of Britannica:

i. The Ideational Theory of meaning

ii. The behaviorist theory of meaning
iii. The referential Theory of meaning
iv. Possible-world theory of meaning
v. Fregean theory of meaning
vi. Verificationist theory of meaning
vii. Truth-conditional theory of meaning
viii. Conceptual-role semantics
ix. Gricean theory of meaning
x. The Usage Theory

39
i. The Ideational Theory of Meaning
• The 17th-century British empiricist John Locke (1632 –
1704) held that linguistic meaning is mental: words are
used to encode and convey thoughts, or ideas. Successful
communication requires that the hearer correctly decode
the speaker’s words into their associated ideas.

Meaning of word/expression = idea (in

mind)
OBJECTIONS
• But the ideational account of meaning, as Locke’s view is
sometimes called, is vulnerable to several objections.
Suppose, for example, that a person’s idea of grass is
associated in his mind with the idea of warm weather. It
would follow that part of the meaning of grass, for this
person, is warm weather. If so, then the meaning of grass
or any other word may be different for each person. And in
that case, how does anyone fully understand anyone else?
40
• Similarly, suppose that a person mistakenly associates the word
beech with the idea of an elm tree. Would it follow that, for this
person, beech means elm? If so, how is it possible to say that
anyone misunderstands the meaning of a word or uses a word
incorrectly?

• As these examples show, the ideational account ignores the

“public” nature of meaning. Whatever meanings are, they must be
things that different speakers can learn from and share with one
another.

• A further objection concerns compositionality. Suppose that a

person associates the complex expression brown cow with the
idea of fear, though he is not fearful of all brown things or of all
cows—only brown cows. Thus, the meaning of brown cow, for
this person, is not determined by or predictable from the
meanings of brown and cow. Because the example can be
generalized (anyone can associate any idea with any
complex expression), it follows that the ideational account is
unable to explain the compositionality of natural languages.
41
• The ideational theory is perceived to be abstract
or imprecise because of dependence on mental
images for decoding the meaning of words.
Ideas may be too vague to comprehend. There
are also many words (especially the abstract
ones) that do not have specific physical realities,
let alone mental manifestations. It is unthinkable
that the mind can create an image of what the
senses cannot perceive.

• The theory may not be able to account for

synonymous expressions. It may also be difficult
to use the theory to explain the mental image
conjured by sentences. Indeed, sentences derive
their meaning more from the word order.
42
ii. Behaviorist theory of meaning
• In an effort to render linguistic meaning public and the
study of linguistic meaning more “scientific,” the American
psychologist B.F. Skinner (1904–90) proposed that the
correct semantics for a natural language is behavioristic:
the meaning of an expression, as uttered on a particular
occasion, is either (1) the behavioral stimulus that produces
the utterance, (2) the behavioral response that the
utterance produces, or (3) a combination of both.

Stimulus (object) <=> response

(word/expression)

• Thus, the meaning of fire! as uttered on a particular

occasion might include running or calling for help. But even
on a single occasion it is possible that not everyone who
hears fire! will respond by running or calling for help.

43
OBJECTIONS
• Suppose, for example, that the hearers of the
utterance include a fireman, a *pyromaniac, and a
person who happens to know that the speaker is a
pathological liar. The behaviorist account seems
committed to the implausible view that the meaning
of fire! for these people is different from the
meaning of fire! for those who run or call for help.

• The behaviorist account, like the ideational one, is

also vulnerable to the objection based on
compositionality. Suppose that a person’s body
recoils when he hears brown cow but not when he
hears either brown or cow alone. The meaning of
brown cow, which includes recoiling, is therefore
not determined by or predictable from the meanings
of brown and cow. 44
• This approach has been influenced by the
works of Watson Bloomfield and
Skinner. Behaviorism relies on observables
and records of utterances. These
observables and records are linked to their
relationships with the immediate situations
that produce them.

• To the behaviorist, there is no belief in such

mentalistic constructs as mind, concept and
ideas. As a result, there is no room for
introspection as a means of obtaining valid
information since thoughts and feelings are
usually personal.
45
iii. The Referential Theory of Meaning
• Reference is an apparent relation between a word and the
world. Russell, following the 19th-century British
philosopher John Stuart Mill, pursued the intuition that
linguistic expressions are signs of something other than
themselves.

Word/expression === objects/things

(in the world)

• He suggested that the meaning of an expression is

whatever that expression applies to, thus removing
meaning from the minds of its users and placing it squarely
in the world.

• According to a referential semantics, all that one learns

when one learns the meaning of tomato is that it applies to
tomatoes and to nothing else. One advantage of a
referential semantics is that it respects compositionality:46
the meaning of red tomato is a function of the meanings
OBJECTIONS
• A referential semantics would appear to be
committed to the view that expressions such
as unicorn, Santa Claus, and Sherlock Holmes
are meaningless.

• Another problem, first pointed out by Frege,

is that two expressions may have the same
referent without having the same meaning. The
morning star and the evening star, for example,
refer to the same object, the planet Venus, but
they are not synonymous.
47
• Examples such as these have led some philosophers,
including Mill himself and Saul Kripke, to conclude that
proper names lack meaning.

• But the problem also affects common nouns, including

definite descriptions. The descriptions “the first president
of the United States” and “the husband of Martha referenc
Washington” apply to the same individual but are not e same
nut
synonymous. It is possible to understand both without meaning

recognizing that they refer to the same person. It follows

diff

that meaning cannot be the same as reference.

• This theory is associated with Ogden and Richards

(1922). According to the Referential theory, the meaning
of a word is the object it refers to in the external world.
That actual object is the referent. The connection between
the words or expressions and their referents is through the
process of thought. The words or expressions are just
symbols. 48
• One major criticism of this theory is that there are many
words without physical objects they refer to. Such words
are intelligent, ugly, rich, poor etc. which do not have the
concrete qualities of nouns may not have referents.

• Again, polysemous words (i.e. words with more than one

meaning) may have the additional problem of having more
than one referent. Items that belong to groups may not
have physical objects that are identical.

• Every sub-group has specific feature. Individual members

of the smallest sub-groups also have their identities.
Therefore, we cannot talk about absolute identification for
referents. The referential theory may not have a way to
explain the meaning of words in the categories of
adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions.

49
iv. Possible-world theory of meaning

sentence’s truth value (meaning/function) = possible

worlds

• The meaning of an expression is determined not only by

what it applies to in the actual world but also by what it
would apply to in different “possible worlds.”

• According to possible-world semantics, the meaning of

a proper or common noun is a function from possible
worlds (including the actual world) to individuals or
things: given a possible world as input, the meaning
returns as output the individual or thing that the noun
applies to in that world. 50
• The meaning of “the first president of the United
States” determines that that expression applies to
George Washington in the actual world but to other
individuals in other possible worlds. This refinement of
referential semantics does not compromise
compositionality, because the meaning of “the first
president of the United States” is still a function of the
meanings of its constituent expressions in any possible
world.

• The proposal also seems to account for the difference

in meaning between descriptions whose referents are
the same, and it seems to explain how an expression
can fail to refer to anything and still be meaningful. 51
OBJECTIONS
• Yet there are important problems with possible-world semantics.

• Chief among them is the notion of a possible world itself, which is

not well understood. In addition, it turns out that possible-world
semantics does not entirely dispose of objections based on co-
referential but non-synonymous expressions and non-referential
but meaningful expressions.

• The expressions triangular and trilateral, for example, are not

synonymous, but there is no possible world in which they do not
apply to exactly the same things. And the expression round square
appears to be meaningful, but there is no possible world in which
it applies to anything at all. Such examples are easy to multiply.

52
v. Fregean theory of meaning
• According to Frege, the meaning of an expression consists of two
elements: a referent and what he called a “sense.” Both the
referent and the sense of an expression contribute systematically
to the truth or falsehood (the “truth value”) of the sentences in
which the expression occurs.
referent the truth or falsity of a
proposition or

Expression = (truth-value) statement

sense

• As noted above, Frege pointed out that the substitution of co-

referring expressions in a sentence does not always preserve
truth value: if Smith does not know that George Washington was
the first president of the United States, then Smith believes that
George Washington chopped down a cherry tree can be true while
Smith believes that the first president of the United States
chopped down a cherry tree is false. 53
• Frege’s explanation of this phenomenon was
that, in sentences such as these, truth value is
determined not only by reference but also by
sense.

• The sense of an expression, roughly speaking,

is not the thing the expression refers to but
the way in which it refers to that thing.

• The sense of an expression determines what

the expression refers to. Although each sense
determines a single referent, a single referent
54
may refer to may senses.
vi. Verificationist theory of meaning
• According to the logical positivists, the meaning of a
sentence is given by an account of the experiences on
the basis of which the sentence could be verified.
Sentences that are unverifiable through any possible
experience (including many ethical, religious, and
metaphysical sentences) are literally meaningless.

expression (meaning) => experience

• An example of this approach is provided by the school

of logical positivism, which was developed by
members of the Vienna Circle discussion group in the
1920s and ’30s. 55 all
scientific knowledge is the only kind of factual knowledge and that
traditional metaphysical doctrines are to be rejected as meaningless
• The basic idea underlying verificationism is that meaning results
from links between language and experience: some sentences
have meaning because they are definable in terms of other
sentences, but ultimately there must be certain basic
sentences, what the logical positivists called “observation
sentences,” whose meaning derives from their direct connection
with experience and specifically from the fact that they are
reports of experience.

• The meaning of an expression smaller than a sentence is similarly

dependent on experience. Roughly speaking, the meaning of an
expression is given by an account of the experiences on the basis
of which one could verify that the expression applies to one thing
or another.

• Although the circumstances in which triangular and trilateral

56
apply are the same, speakers go about verifying those
OBJECTIONS
• The case against verificationism was most ardently pressed in the
1950s by the American philosopher Willard Van Orman
Quine.

• He argued that experience cannot be used to verify individual

observation sentences, because any experience can be taken to
verify a given observation sentence provided that sufficient
adjustments are made in the truth values of the other sentences
that make up the scientific theory in which the sentence is
embedded.

• In the case of word meaning, Quine asked: What experience, or

empirical evidence, could determine what a word means? He
contended that the only acceptable evidence is behavioral, given
the necessity that meanings be public.

57
• But behavioral evidence cannot determine
whether a person’s words mean one thing or
another; alternative interpretations, each
compatible with all the behavioral evidence,
will always be available.

• (For example, what possible behavioral

evidence could determine that by gavagai a
speaker means “rabbit” rather “undetached
rabbit part” or “time-slice of a rabbit”?) From
the under-determination of meaning by
empirical evidence, Quine inferred that there is
no “fact of the matter” regarding what a word58
vii. Truth-conditional theory of meaning
• Confronted with the skepticism of Quine, his student Donald
Davidson made a significant effort in the 1960s and ’70s to
resuscitate meaning.

• Davidson attempted to account for meaning not in terms of

behaviour but on the basis of truth, which by then had become
more logically tractable than meaning because of work in the 1930s
by the Polish logician Alfred Tarski.

(sequence of words) Meaning => under certain truth

conditions

• Tarski defined truth for formal (logical or mathematical) languages

in terms of a relation of “satisfaction” between the constituents of a
sentence and sequences of objects. Truth is thereby determined
systematically by the satisfaction of sentential constituents.
59
• Davidson’s innovation was to employ a Tarskian
theory of truth as a theory of meaning. Adopting
Tarksi’s distinction between an “object
language” (an ordinary language used to talk
about things in the world) and a “metalanguage”
(an artificial language used to analyze or
describe an object language), Davidson
proposed that a semantic theory of a natural
language is adequate just in case, for each
sentence in the object language, the theory
entails a statement of the form ‘S’ is true just in
case p, where S is a sentence in the object
language and p is a translation of that sentence
in the metalanguage. 60
Criticism
• But how can such a truth-conditional semantics explain the
phenomena for which Frege invoked the notion of sense? The
sentences George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and the
first president of the United States chopped down a cherry tree
share truth conditions: both are true just in case the individual who
happens to be picked out by George Washington and the first
president of the United States chopped down a cherry tree. But the
sentences are not synonymous.

• Davidson suggested that the problem could be solved by

constructing a semantic theory for the language of any given
speaker who uses these sentences. In order to do so, one must
observe the constraints of “radical interpretation”—in particular, the
“principle of charity,” which states that a speaker’s sentences
should be interpreted in such a way that most of them are counted
as truthful. Interpretation proceeds as follows: collect the
sentences that a speaker “holds true,” then construct a semantic 61
viii. Conceptual-role theory of meaning
• In order to avoid having to distinguish between meaning and
character, some philosophers, including Gilbert Harman and
Ned Block, have recommended supplementing a theory of truth
with what is called a conceptual-role semantics (also known as
cognitive-role, computational-role, or inferential-role semantics).

• According to this approach, the meaning of an expression for a

speaker is the same as its conceptual role in the speaker’s mental
life.

• Roughly speaking, the conceptual role of an expression is the

sum of its contributions to inferences that involve sentences
containing that expression. Because the conceptual role played
by I is the same for both A and B, the meanings of the two
utterances of I am 30 years old are the same, even though the
referent of I in each case is distinct.
62
• In contrast, the meanings of George Washington chopped down a cherry
tree and the first president of the United States chopped down a cherry
tree are different, even though they have the same truth conditions,
because the conceptual role of George Washington is different from that
of the first president of the United States for any speaker.

• Because the meanings of the two sentences are different, the

corresponding beliefs are different, and this explains how it is possible
for a person to affirm one and deny the other without being irrational.

• Although the notion of conceptual role is not new, what exactly a

conceptual role is and what form a theory of conceptual roles should
take remain far from clear.

• In addition, some implications of conceptual-role semantics are strongly

counterintuitive. For example, in order to explain how the meaning of
tomato can be the same for two speakers, conceptual-role semantics
must claim that the word plays the same conceptual role in the two
speakers’ mental lives. But this is extremely unlikely (unless the speakers
63
happen to be psychological identical twins).
• As long as there is the slightest difference between them with respect to
the inferences they are prepared to draw using sentences containing
tomato, the conceptual roles of that word will differ.

• But then it is difficult to see how any sense could be made of

communication. If each speaker assigns a different meaning to tomato
and presumably to most other words, there is no common meaning to be
communicated, and it is a mystery how speakers understand one
another.

• If, on the other hand, the same words have the same meanings, it must
follow that the words play the same conceptual roles, in which case
there would be no need for communication; each speaker would
understand and believe exactly what every other speaker does. In
addition, conceptual-role semantics seems unable to account for
compositionality, since the conceptual role of the complex expression
brown cow, in the speaker who fears brown cows but not all brown
things or all cows, is not determined by nor predictable from the
conceptual roles of brown and cow.
64
ix. Gricean theory of meaning
• The British philosopher Paul Grice (1913–88) and his
followers hoped to explain meaning solely in terms of beliefs and
other mental states.

• Grice’s suggestion was that the meaning of a sentence can be

understood in terms of a speaker’s intention to induce a belief in
the hearer by means of the hearer’s recognition of that intention.

• Grice’s analysis is based on the notion of “speaker meaning,”

which he defines as follows: a speaker S means something by an
utterance U just in case S intends U to produce a certain effect in
a hearer H by means of H’s recognition of this intention. The
speaker meaning of U in such a case is the effect that S intends
to produce in H by means of H’s recognition of that intention.

65
• Suppose, for example, that S utters the sky is falling to H, and, as a result, H
forms the belief that the sky is falling. In such a case, according to Grice, S had
several specific intentions: first, he intended to utter the sky is falling; second, he
intended that H should recognize that he (S) uttered the sky is falling; third, he
intended that H should recognize his (S’s) intention to utter the sky is falling; and
fourth, he intended that H should recognize that he (S) intended H to form the
belief that the sky is falling.

• In these circumstances, according to Grice, the sky is falling has the speaker
meaning that the sky is falling.

• The place of conventional meaning in Grice’s conception of language appears to

be that it constitutes a feature of words that speakers can exploit in realizing the
intentions referred to in his analysis of speaker meaning.

• Although Grice’s approach is not as popular as it once was, the general goal of
reducing meaning to the psychological states of speakers is now widely accepted.
In this sense, both Gricean semantics and conceptual-role semantics
represent a return to the 17th century’s emphasis on inner or mental aspects of
meaning over outer or worldly aspects. To what extent semantic properties can be
attributed to features of the human mind remains a deep problem for further
study. 66
x. The Usage Theory of Meaning
• The German scholar, Wittgenstein (1953),
developed this theory.

• It has been elaborated upon by J. Firth and M.A

Haliday. The usage theory is also referred to as the
contextual or operational theory of meaning.

• The major motivation was fear that the meaning of

certain classes of words could be lost if meaning were
treated as just entities. According to the theory, the
meaning of a word or an expression is determined by
the context of its use. It is the effect created by a
linguistic unit within a given context that expresses its67
full meaning.
 Three Perspectives on
Meaning
• There are at least three perspectives of meaning.

• They are 1. Lexical semantics, 2. Compositional

semantics or sentential semantics (formal
semantics) and 3. Discourse or pragmatics.

• Lexical semantics is concerned with meanings of

individual words. Compositional semantics explains
how those meanings combine to make meanings for
individual sentences or utterances. Discourse or
Pragmatics explains how those meanings combine with
each other and with other facts about various kinds of
context to make meanings for a text or discourse.
Dialogue or Conversation is often lumped together 68
Lexical semantics
• Lexical semantics (also known as lexico-semantics), is a subfield of
linguistic semantics. The units of analysis in lexical semantics are lexical
units which include not only words but also sub-words or sub-units
such as affixes and even compound words and phrases. Lexical units
make up the catalogue of words in a language, the lexicon. Lexical
semantics looks at how the meaning of the lexical units correlates with
the structure of the language or syntax. This is referred to as syntax-
semantic interface (Wikipedia).

• The study of lexical semantics looks at the classification and

decomposition of lexical items, the differences and similarities in lexical
semantic structure cross-linguistically and the relationship of lexical
meaning to sentence meaning and syntax.

• Lexical units, also referred to as syntactic atoms, can stand alone such as
in the case of root words or parts of compound words or they
necessarily attach to other units such as prefixes and suffixes do. The
former are called free morphemes and the latter bound morphemes. They
fall into a narrow range of meanings (semantic fields) and can combine 69
Compositional semantics
• The principle of compositionality states that the meaning of a sentence is
determined by the meaning of its words and by the syntactic structure in
which they are combined. It is concerned with the study of how
meanings of small units combine to form the meaning of larger units.
The following examples shows that the whole does not equal the sum of
the parts and syntax matters to determining meaning.
The dog chased the cat ≠ The cat chased the dog.
The dog chased the cat = The cat was chased by the dog

• The meaning of a sentence is determined by the meaning of its words in

conjunction with the way they are syntactically combined. Anomaly,
metaphor and idioms are exceptions to compositionality. Anomaly: When
phrases are well-formed syntactically but not semantically (i.e., they
‘don’t make sense’)
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
That bachelor is pregnant.

70
• Metaphor: The use of an expression to refer to something that it does
not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity.
Time is money.
The walls have ears.

• Idioms: Phrases with fixed meanings not composed of literal meanings

of the words
Kick the bucket = ‘to die’
(*The bucket was kicked by John.)
When pigs fly = ‘it will never occur’
(*She suspected pigs might actually fly tomorrow.)
Bite off more than you can chew= ‘to take on too much’
(*He chewed just as much as he bit off.)

71
 Summary
• Meaning has been presented to be at the centre of semantics.
Meaning can be thematic, conceptual, associative, connotative,
collocative, affective, reflected or stylistic.

• You have been briefly introduced to these types of meaning. The

descriptions paved way for you to demarcate the core of
linguistics from peripheral aspect of semantics.

• There are a number of theories in semantics, each with its own

merits and demerits. You have observed that these theories
provide a concise framework of analysis in semantics.

• You have been instructed to different theories of meaning such

as the ideational, referential and usage theories of meaning. You
have also learned about the three perspectives of meaning.
72
END OF LECTURE

73
SEMANTICS & PRAGMATICS
Instructor: Abdul Aleem Yahya
Lecture 3
University of Education-
Lower Mall Campus, Lahore

74
Types of Meaning

75
 TYPES OF MEANING
• There are seven types of meaning in semantics.

• A piece of language conveys its dictionary

meaning, connotations beyond the dictionary
meaning, information about the social context of
language use, speaker’s feelings and attitudes
rubbing off of one meaning on the another
meaning of the same word when it has two
meanings and meaning because of habit
occurrence.

• Geoffrey Leech in his ‘Semantic- A Study of

meaning’ (1974) breaks down meaning into
seven types or ingredients giving primacy to
conceptual meaning. 76
• In Sociolinguistics, seven types of meaning are in line with
Hyme’s theory of SPEAKING.

i. Situation – style; talk about formal or informal style.

ii. Participant – who is the speaker.
iii. End – goal is the denotative meaning.
iv. Act – speech act; the implicature; the
ordering/commanding whether you are giving
information, promising, or any other expressions;
something that is implied by the speech
v. Key – emotion/the mood of the speaker
vi. Instrument – the thing we use to send the message
vii. Norm
viii. Genre – the same with style.

77
1. Conceptual or Denotative Meaning
• Conceptual meaning is also called logical or cognitive meaning. It is the
basic propositional meaning which corresponds to the primary
dictionary definition.

• It is the essential or core meaning.

E.g. /P/ can be described as- voiceless + bilabial + plosive.

Similarly Boy = + human + male -adult.

The hierarchical structure of ‘Boy’ = + Human + Male –Adult

• It is the literal meaning of the word indicating the idea or concept to

which it refers. The concept is minimal unit of meaning which could be
called ‘sememe’.

• As we define phoneme on the basis of binary contrast, similarly we can

define sememe
78
E.g. ‘Woman’ as = + human + female + adult.
• Conceptual meaning deals with the core
meaning of expression. It is the denotative or
literal meaning. It is essential for the functioning
of language.
For example, a part of the conceptual meaning
of ‘Needle” may be “thin”, “sharp” or
“instrument”.

• The aim of conceptual meaning is to provide an

appropriate semantic representation to a
sentence or statement.

• The conceptual meaning is the base for all the

other types of meaning. 79
2. Connotative Meaning
• Connotative meaning is the communicative value of an
expression over and above its purely conceptual content. It
is something that goes beyond mere referent of a word and
hints at its attributes in the real world.

• Thus, purely conceptual content of ‘woman’ is +human +

female+ adult but the psychosocial connotations could be
‘gregarious’, ‘having maternal instinct’ or typical (rather
than invariable) attributes of womanhood such as
‘babbling’,’ experienced in cookery’, ‘skirt or dress wearing
‘etc.

• Connotations vary age to age and society to society.

E.g. Old age ‘Woman’ - ‘Non-trouser wearing or sari
wearing’ in Indian context must have seemed definite
connotation in the past.

Present ‘Woman’---- Salwar/T-shirt/Jeans wearing. 80

• The boundary between conceptual and
connotative seems to be analogous.

• Connotative meaning is regarded as

incidental, comparatively unstable, in
determinant, open ended, variable
according to age, culture and individual,
whereas conceptual meaning is not like
that .

• It can be codified in terms of limited

symbols. 81
3. Social Meaning
• The meaning conveyed by the piece of language
about the social context of its use is called the
social meaning.

• The decoding of a text is dependent on our

knowledge of stylistics and other variations of
language.

• We recognize some words or pronunciation as

being dialectical i.e. as telling us something
about the regional or social origin of the
speaker.

• Social meaning is related to the situation in 82

 E.g. “I ain’t done nothing”

• The line tells us about the speaker and that is the speaker is probably a
black American, underprivileged and uneducated.

“Come on yaar, be a sport. Don’t be Lallu”

• The social meaning can be that of Pakistani young close friends.

• Stylistic variation represents the social variation. This is because styles

show the geographical region social class of the speaker. Style helps us
to know about the period, field and status of the discourse.

For example, ‘steed ’, ‘horse and ‘nag’ are synonymous. They all mean
a kind of animal i.e. Horse. But they differ in style and so have various
social meaning. ‘Steed’ is used in poetry; ‘horse’ is used in general, while
‘nag’ is slang.

• The word ‘Home’ can have many use also like domicile (official),
residence (formal) abode (poetic) , home (ordinary use).
83
4. Affective or Emotive Meaning
• It refers to emotive association or effects of words evoked
in the reader, listener. It is what is conveyed about the
personal feelings or attitude towards the listener.

E.g. ‘home’ for a sailor/soldier or expatriate and

‘mother’ for a motherless child, a married woman (esp. in
Indian context) will have special effective, emotive quality.

• For Leech affective meaning refers to what is convey

about the feeling and attitude of the speak through use of
language (attitude to listener as well as attitude to what
he is saying).

• Affective meaning is often conveyed through conceptual,

connotative content of the words used.

84
 E.g. “You are a vicious tyrant and a villainous
reprobation and I hate you” or “I hate you, you idiot”.

• We are left with a little doubt about the speaker’s

feelings towards the listener. Here speaker seems to
have a very negative attitude towards his listener. This
is called affective meaning.

• But very often we are more discreet (cautious) and

convey our attitude indirectly.

E.g. “I am terribly sorry but if you would be so kind as

to lower your voice a little”.

85
• The sentence conveys our irritation in a scaled down
manner for the sake of politeness.

• Intonation and voice quality are also important here.

Thus the sentence above can be uttered in biting
sarcasm and the impression of politeness maybe
reversed while –

E.g. “Will you belt up?” can be turned into a playful

remark between intimates if said with the intonation
of a request.

• Words like darling, sweetheart or hooligan,

vandal have inherent emotive quality and they can be86
5) Reflected Meaning
• Reflected meaning arises when a word has more than one
conceptual meaning or multiple conceptual meaning.

• In church service ‘the comforter and the Holy Ghost

’refer to the third in Trinity. They are religious words. But
unconsciously there is a response to their non-religious
meanings too.

• Thus the ‘comforter’ sounds warm and comforting while

the ‘Ghost’ sounds ‘awesome’ or even ‘dreadful’.

• One sense of the word seems to rub off on another

especially through relative frequency and familiarity (e.g. a
ghost is more frequent and familiar in no religious sense).

87
• In poetry too we have reflected meaning as in
the following lines from ‘Futility’:
‘Are limbs so dear achieved, are sides,
Full nerved still warm-too hard to stir’.

• Owen here uses ‘dear’ in the sense of

expensiveness. - But the sense of beloved is
also eluded.

• Reflected meaning is also found in taboo

words.
88
6. Collocative Meaning
• Collocative meaning is the meaning which a word acquires in the
company of certain words. Words collocate or co-occur with certain
words only e.g. Big business not large or great.

• Collocative meaning refers to associations of a word because of its

usual or habitual co-occurrence with certain types of words. ‘Pretty’
and ‘handsome’ indicate ‘good looking’.

• The word ‘pretty’ collocates with – girls, woman, village, gardens,

flowers, etc.

• On the other hand, the word ‘handsome’ collocates with – ‘boys’

men, etc. so ‘pretty woman’ and ‘handsome man’.

• The verbs ‘wander’ and ‘stroll’ are quasi- synonymous- they may
have almost the same meaning but while ‘cows may wander into
another farm’, they don’t stroll into that farm because ‘stroll’
collocates with human subject only.

89
7. Thematic Meaning
• It refers to what is communicated by the
way in which a speaker or a writer
organizes the message in terms of
ordering focus and emphasis.

• Thus active is different from passive

though its conceptual meaning is the
same.

90
• The ways we order our message also convey what is
important and what not. This is basically thematic meaning.
1) Mrs. Smith donated the first prize
2) The first prize was donated by Mrs. Smith.

• In the first sentence “who gave away the prize “is more
important, but in the second sentence “what did Mrs.
Smith gave is important”. Thus the change of focus change
the meaning also.

• Alternative grammatical construction also gives thematic

meaning. For example,
1) He likes Pakistani goods the most.
2) Pakistani goods he likes the most.
3) It is the Pakistani goods he likes the most.
91
END OF LECTURE

92
SEMANTICS & PRAGMATICS
Instructor: Abdul Aleem Yahya
Lecture 4
University of Education-
Lower Mall Campus, Lahore

93
Semantic Features, Semantic Roles &
Lexical/Sense Relations

94
 INTRODUCTION
• Semantics is the study of the meanings of
words, phrases and sentences.

• In linguistics, semantics deals with the

conventional meaning conveyed by the use of
words, phrases and sentences of a language.
• In semantic analysis, there is always an
attempt to focus on what the words
conventionally mean, rather than what an
individual speaker might want them to mean
on a particular occasion.

• This technical approach is concerned with

objective or general meaning and avoids
trying to account for subjective or local
meaning.
 CONCEPTUAL MEANING
• Conceptual meaning covers those basic
essential components of meaning that are
conveyed by the literal use of a word.

• Some basic components of a word like needle

in English might include ‘thin, sharp, steel
instrument’. These components would be
part of the conceptual meaning of needle.
• Literally, meaning is basically using a
word or sentence NOT in the way it
sounds, but the way the dictionary would
describe it. For example: 
“I felt like I was walking on water”
(implying that you were not walking on
water, it just felt that way) 

• In the literal sense, the sentence will be: 

“I was literally walking on water” (the

device I used made me walk on the
water).
 ASSOCIATIVE MEANING
• Different people might have different
associations or connotations attached to a
word like needle. They might associate it with
‘pain’, or ‘illness’, or ‘blood’, or ‘drugs’, or
‘thread’, or ‘knitting’, or ‘hard to find’ etc.

• These associations may differ from one

person to the next, and are not treated as
part of the word’s conceptual meaning.
• Poets, novelists, advertisers and lovers may
be very interested in using words in such a
way that certain associative meanings are
evoked and literary critics often write about
this aspect of language use.

• When we investigate the meaning of words in

a language, we are normally interested in
characterizing the conceptual meaning and
less concerned with the associative meaning
of the words.
WAYS OF LOOKING AT WORDS

Semantic • Words as ‘containers’ of

Features meaning

Semantic • Words as fulfilling ‘roles’

within the situation described
Roles by a sentence

Lexical/Sens • ‘Relationships’ between words

e Relations
 1. Semantic Features
• Read the following sentences.
oThe hamburger ate the boy.
oThe table listens to the radio.
oThe horse is reading the
newspaper.
oThe tree ate the elephant
• Do you find these sentences odd?
Why?
• We should note that the oddness
of the sentences in the previous
slide does not derive from their
syntactical structure.
oThe hamburger ate the boy.

• The first sentence is syntactically

good, but semantically odd.
• The components of the conceptual meaning
of the noun hamburger must be significantly
different from those of the noun boy, thereby
preventing one, not being the other, from
being used as the subject of the verb ate.

• The kind of noun that can be the subject of

the verb ate must denote an entity that is
capable of ‘eating’. The noun hamburger does
not have this property and the noun boy
does.
• We can make this observation more generally
applicable by trying to determine the crucial element
or feature of meaning that any noun must have in
order to be used as the subject of the verb ate.

• Such an element may be as general as ‘animate

being’.

• We can then use this idea to describe part of the

meaning of words as having either plus (+) or minus
(-) that particular feature.

• The feature that the noun boy has is ‘+ animate’ (=

denotes an animate being) and the feature that the
noun hamburger has is ‘- animate’ (= denotes an
inanimate being).
• The above example is an illustration of a
procedure for analyzing meaning in terms of
semantic features.

• Features such as ‘+ animate, - animate’, ‘+

human, - human’, ‘+ female, - female’ for
example, can be treated as the basic elements
involved in differentiating the meaning of each
word in a language from every other word.

• If we had to provide the crucial distinguishing

features of the meaning of a set of English words
such as table, horse, boy, man, girl, woman, we
could begin with the following diagram.
 table horse boy man girl woma
n
animat - + + + + +
e
human - - + + + +
female - - - - + +
adult - + - + - +
• From a feature analysis like this, we can say that at least part
of the meaning of the word girl in English involves the elements
[+human, +female, -adult].

• We can also characterize the feature that is crucially required in

a noun in order for it to appear as the subject of a particular
verb, supplementing the syntactic analysis along with semantic
features.

The ___________________is reading the newspaper.

N [+ human]

• This approach gives us the ability to predict which nouns make

this sentence semantically odd.

• Some examples would be table, horse and hamburger, because

none of them have the required feature [+ human].
• The approach just outlined is a start on analyzing the
conceptual components of word meaning, but it is not
without problems.

• For many words in a language it may not be easy to come

up with neat components of meaning. If we try to think of
the components or features, we would use to differentiate
the nouns advice, threat and warning, for example, we
would not be very successful.

• Part of the problem seems to be that the approach

involves a view of words in a language as some sort of
‘containers’ that carry meaning components.

• There is clearly more to the meaning of words than these

basic types of features.
 2. Semantic Roles
• Instead of thinking of words as ‘containers’ of
meaning, we can look at the ‘roles’ they fulfil
within the situation described by a sentence.

• If the situation is a simple event, as in ‘The

boy kicked the ball’, then the verb describes
an action (kick). The noun phrases in the
sentence describe the roles of entities, such
as people and things, involved in the action.
•We can identify a small number of
semantic roles (also called ‘thematic
roles’) for these noun phrases.

instrument and location, source

agent and theme
experiencer and goal
Agent and Theme
• Consider the following sentence, ‘The boy kicked the
ball’.

• Agent: the entity that performs the action, e.g. the

boy

• Theme (or the ‘patient’): the entity that is involved in

or affected by the action, e.g. the ball

• The theme can also be an entity (The ball) that is

simply being described (i.e. not performing an
action), as in ‘The ball was red’.
• Agents and themes are the most
common semantic roles.

• Although agents are typically human

(The boy), they can also be non-human
entities that cause actions, as in noun
phrases denoting a natural force (The
wind), a machine (A car), or a creature
(The dog), all of which affect the ball as
theme.
• Consider the following sentences:

o The boy kicked the ball.

o The wind blew the ball away.
o A car ran over the ball.
o The dog caught the ball.

• The theme is typically non-human, but can be human (the

boy), as in ‘The dog chased the boy’.

• The same physical entity can appear in two different semantic

roles in a sentence, as in ‘The boy cut himself’. Here The boy is
agent and himself is theme.
Instrument and Experiencer
• If an agent uses another entity in order to
perform an action, that other entity fills the
role of instrument.

o The boy cut the rope with an old razor.

o He drew the picture with a crayon.

• In the above sentences, the noun phrases an

old razor and a crayon are being used in the
semantic role of instrument.
• When a noun phrase is used to designate an
entity as the person who has a feeling,
perception or state, it fills the semantic role of
Experiencer.

• If we see, know, or enjoy something, we are not

really performing an action (hence we are not
agents). We are in the role of an experiencer.

• In the sentence ‘The boy feels sad’, the

experiencer (The boy) is the only semantic role.

• In the question, Did you hear that noise?, the

experiencer is you and the theme is that noise.
Location, Source and Goal
• Location: where the entity is (on the table, in the
room)

• Source: where the entity moves from (from

Chicago)

• Goal: where the entity moves to (to New Orleans)

o We drove from Chicago to New Orleans.

• Semantic roles may be described in the following

Mary saw a fly on the wall.
EXPERIENCER THEME LOCATION
She borrowed a magazine from George.
AGENT THEME SOURCE
She squashed the bug with the book.
AGENT THEME INSTRUMENT
She handed the back to
magazine George.
AGENT THEME GOAL

“Gee said George.

thanks,”
AGENT
 3. LEXICAL RELATIONS

Synonym Antonym Hyponym Prototype

y y y s

Homophone
s and Polysemy Metonymy Collocation
Homonyms
Synonymy
• Two or more words with very closely related
meanings are called synonyms.

• Synonyms can often, though not always, be

substituted for each other in sentences.

• In appropriate circumstances, we can say

What was his answer? or What was his reply?
With much the same meaning.
• The idea of ‘sameness’ of meaning used in discussing synonymy is not
necessarily ‘total sameness’. There are many occasions when one word
is appropriate in a sentence, but its synonym would be odd.

• For example, reply would be odd in this instance.

– Sandy had only one answer correct on the test
– Sandy had only one reply correct on the test.

• Synonymous forms may also differ in terms of formal versus informal

uses.

• For example, the second version, with four synonymous replacements,

sounds much more casual or informal than the first.
– My father purchased a large automobile.
– My dad bought a big car.
Antonymy
• Two forms with opposite meanings are called
antonyms.

• Some common examples are the pairs: alive / dead,

big / small, fat / slow, happy / sad, hot / cold, long /
short, male / female, married / single, old / new, rich
/ poor, true / false.

• Antonyms are usually divided into two main types:

1) gradable – opposites along a scale
2) non-gradable – direct opposites
• Gradable antonyms, such as big / small, can
be used in comparative constructions like ‘I’m
bigger than you’ and ‘A pony is smaller than
a horse’.

• The negative of one member of a gradable

pair does not necessarily imply the other. For
example, the sentence ‘My car isn’t old does
not necessarily mean My car is new’.
• With non-gradable antonyms (also called
‘complementary pairs’) , comparative
constructions are not normally used. We
don’t typically describe someone as deader
or more dead than another.

• The negative of one member of a non-

gradable pair does imply the other member.
That is, ‘My grandparents aren’t alive’ does
indeed mean ‘My grandparents are dead’.
• Although we can use the ‘negative test’ to identify
non-gradable antonyms in a language, we usually
avoid describing one member of an antonymous pair
as the negative of the other.

• For example, while undress can be treated as the

opposite of dress, it does not mean ‘not dress’. It
actually means ‘do the reverse of dress’. Antonyms of
this type are called reversives.

• Other common examples of reversives are: enter /

exit, pack / unpack, lengthen / shorten, raise / lower,
tie / untie
Hyponymy
• When the meaning of one form is included in the
meaning of another, the relationship is described as
hyponymy.

• Examples are the pairs: animal / dog, dog / poodle,

vegetable / carrot, flower / rose, tree / banyan.

• The concept of ‘inclusion’ involved in this relationship

is the idea that if an object is a rose, then it is
necessarily a flower, so the meaning of flower is
included in the meaning of rose. Or rose is a
hyponym of flower.
• When we consider hyponymous
connections, we are essentially looking
at the meaning of words in some type
of hierarchical relationship.

• We can represent the relationships

between a set of words as a
hierarchical diagram.
 Prototypes
• The concept of a prototype helps explain the
meaning of certain words like bird, not in
terms of component features (e.g. ‘has
feathers’, ‘has wings’), but in terms of
resemblance to the clearest example.

• While words like canary, cormorant, dove,

duck, flamingo, parrot, pelican and robin are
all equally co-hyponyms of the super-
ordinate bird, they are not all considered to
be equally good examples of the category
‘bird’.
• According to some researchers, the most
characteristic instance of the category ‘bird’ is
robin.

• Thus, even native speakers of English might

wonder if ostrich or penguin should be
hyponyms of bird (technically they are), but
have no trouble deciding about sparrow or
pigeon. These last two are much closer to the
prototype.
 Homophones and Homonyms
• When two or more different (written) forms
have the same pronunciation, they are
described as homophones.

• Common examples are bare / bear, meat /

meet, flour / flower, pail / pale, right / write,
sew / so and to / too / two.
• We use the term homonyms when one form
(written or spoken) has two or more
unrelated meanings, as in these examples:

bank ( of a river) – bank (financial

institution)
Bat (flying creature) – bat (used in
sports)
mole (on skin) – mole (small animal)
pupil (at school) – pupil (in the eye)
race (contest of speed) – race (ethnic
group)
 bank ( of a river) – bank (financial
institution)

• The temptation is to think that the two types

of bank must be related in meaning. They are
not.

• Homonyms are words that have separate

histories and meanings, but have accidentally
come to have exactly the same form.
 Polysemy
• When we encounter two or more words with the
same form and related meanings, we have what is
technically known as polysemy.

• Polysemy can be defined as one form (written or

spoken) having multiple meanings that are all related
by extension.

• Examples are the word head, used to refer to the

object on top of your body, on top of a glass of beer,
person at the top of a company or department and
many other things.
• Other examples of polysemy are foot (of person, of
bed, of mountain) or run (person does, water does,
colours do).

• If we are not sure whether different uses of a single

word are examples of homonymy or polysemy, we
can check in a dictionary.

• If the word has multiple meanings (i.e. it is

polysemous), then there will be a single entry, with a
numbered list of the different meanings of the word.

• If the two words are treated as homonyms, they will

typically have two separate entries.
• It is possible for two forms to be distinguished via
homonymy and for one of the forms also to have
uses via polysemy.

• The words date (= a thing we eat) and date (= a point

in time) are homonyms.

• Date (= a point in time) is polysemous in terms of a

particular day and month (= on a letter), an
arranged meeting time (= an appointment), a social
meeting (= with someone we like), and even a person
(= that person we like).
 Metonymy
• A type of relationship based on a close
connection in everyday experience, which can
be based on:
– container-contents relation (bottle / water,
can / juice)
– whole-part relation (car / wheels, house /
roof)
– representative-symbol relationship (king /
crown, the President / White House)

• Using one of these words to refer to the other

is an example of metonymy.
• It is our familiarity with metonymy that
makes it possible for us to understand He
drank the whole bottle although it sounds
absurd literally (i.e. he drank the liquid, not
the glass object).

• We also accept The White House has

announced… or Downing Street protested…
without being puzzled that buildings appear
to be talking.
• Many examples of metonymy are highly
conventionalized and easy to interpret.
However, other examples depend on an
ability to infer what the speaker has in mind.
Examples include:

The strings are too quiet.

I prefer cable.

• Making sense of such expressions often

depends on context, background knowledge
and inference.
 Collocation
• We know that some words tend to occur with
other words. If you ask a thousand people
what they think of when you say hammer,
more than half will say nail. If you say table,
they will mostly say chair, and butter elicits
bread, needle elicits thread and salt elicits
pepper.

• One way we seem to organize our knowledge

of words is simply on the basis of collocation,
or frequently occurring together.
END OF LECTURE

140