Semantics and Pragmatics

Second Semester
Lecture Two
 THE BASIC UNIT OF MEANING
In this lecture we try to establish the basic
unit of semantic analysis.
1. The word
2. The sentence
3. The utterance
4. The proposition
 The word
Dictionaries appear to be concerned
with stating the meanings of words and
it is, therefore, reasonable to assume that
the word is one of the basic units of
semantics.
 Difficulties
1. Not all words have the same kind of meaning as
others, e.g. ‘full’ words and ‘form’ words.
• Full words, e.g. tree, sing, blue, gently have the kind of
meaning we find in a dictionary
• form words it, the, of, and, belong rather to the
grammar and have only ‘grammatical’ meaning. Such
meaning cannot be stated in isolation, but only in
relation to other words and even sometimes to the
whole sentence.
2. The word is not a clearly defined
linguistic unit. It is to some degree purely
conventional, defined in terms of the
spaces of the written text. Of course, this
spacing is not wholly arbitrary, e.g. stress
(one word seems to allow only one main
stress), thus bláckbird is one word, but
bláck bírd are two words. However, there
are the Whíte House, shóe-horn and shóe
polish, all with a single stress.
Bloomfield (1933) offered two solutions:

He suggested that we should look for an

element smaller than the word, a unit of
meaning-the MORPHEME: examples are
-berry in blackberry or –y in Johnny.
Similarly, loved love- and –d.
3. Problems soon arose with words such as took.
The best way to handle this was by
redefining the term word . We have been
using this term in the sense that love and
loved are different words. But we could say
that they are forms of the same word. A
technical term for the word in this second
sense is LEXEME. It is lexemes that usually
provide dictionary headings. There are not
two entries for love and loved, but one only
(and this may even include the noun love as
well as the verb).
4. Stating the meaning of the elements,
e.g. the grammatical elements and
elements such as cran- in cranberry,
which seem to have no independent
meaning and does not occur in any
other words. Similarly, straw- and goose-
in strawberry and gooseberry have
nothing to do with straw or geese,
unlike black- in blackberry, blackboard,
blackbird, in which the meaning of black
is related.
5. There are many words in English that are
called PHONAESTHETIC, in which one
part, often the initial cluster of consonants,
gives an indication of meaning of a rather
special kind, e.g. many words beginning with
sl- are ‘slippery’ in some way –slide, slip,
sludge, etc., while the –sk words refer to
surfaces or superficiality –skate, skimp, skim,
skid, etc. However, not every word with these
phonological characteristics will have the
meaning suggested. Further, we cannot separate this part and state the
meaning of the remainder.
6. The previous point is related to the
distinction between TRANSPARENT and
OPAQUE words. Transparent words are
those whose meaning can be determined
from the meaning of their parts, opaque
words those for which this is not possible.
Blackboard, blackberry, blackmail, cheesecake.
7. We must notice that some whole groups of
words must be taken together to establish
meaning. These are idioms-sequences of
words whose meaning cannot be predicted
from the meanings of the words themselves,
e.g. kick the bucket, spill the beans. Semantically,
idioms are single units, but they are not
single grammatical units like words, for
there is no past tense *kick the bucketed.
8. Sometimes semantic division seems to
override word division, e.g. heavy smoker
and good singer. Semantically these are not
heavy + smoker (a smoker who is heavy)
and good + singer (a singer who is good).
The meaning is rather one who smokes
heavily or sings well. We can divide, but
the first division would be between heavy
smoke- and -er, good sing-and -er.
 The Sentence
• A part from all the problems concerning
the word itself, there is the question
whether the basic unit of meaning is not
the word after all, but the sentence. For it
is with sentences that we communicate, and
this is reflected in the traditional definition
of the sentence as ‘the expression of a
complete thought’. It is s grammatical unit.
 DIFFICULTIES
1. The sentence is essentially a
grammatical unit that consists
minimally of a subject noun phrase and
a verb phrase as its predicate or
complement. Each of these may be a
single word as in Birds fly. However, we
do not always produce complete
sentences, Horses, Coming? Coming!
2. The meaning of the sentence can
be predicted from the meaning of
the words it contains, or more
strictly, from these words and the
grammatical features with which
they are associated. However, there
might occur different meanings for
sentences.
A. The actual SURFACE STRUCTURE
or some abstract DEEP
STRUCTURE. So each sentence will
have a meaning (a ‘literal’ meaning),
OR, if it is ambiguous like The old
books and magazines are mine, the
chicken are ready to eat, two or more
meanings.
B. A great deal of meaning in the language
is carried by the PROSODIC and
PARALINGUISTIC features of language-
intonation, stress, rhythm, loudness, etc.,
as well as such features as facial
expressions and gestures (which are often
called ‘paralinguistic’ in a wide sense of
the term).
C. There is a variety of what are
today called ‘speech acts’. We
warn, threaten, promise, though
often without giving any overt
indication that we are doing so.
D. Meaning is also presupposed
such as in the sentence, the
king of France is bald.
 In conclusion, Lyons (1977) drew the
distinction between sentence meaning
and utterance meaning. Sentence
meaning is directly predictable from
the grammatical and lexical features
of the sentence. Utterance meaning
includes all the various types of
meaning that we have just been
discussing.
 TYPES OF SENTENCES
1. Analytic sentence: A sentence the propositional content
of which is necessarily true because of the meanings of
the words used in that sentence, e.g., dogs are animals.
2. Synthetic sentence: A sentence the propositional content
of which may be either true or false because of the way
things in the world, e.g., John is a very good teacher.
3. Contradiction: A sentence the propositional content of
which is necessarily false because of the meanings of the
words used in that sentence, thus it is the opposite of
analytic, e.g., bachelors are married men, that man is my
brother’s wife
 PARAPHRASE
A sentence which expresses the same
proposition as another sentence is known as
the paraphrase of that sentence, e.g.,
A: John sold that car to Mary.
B: Mary bought that car from John.
 UTTERANCE
• An utterance is any stretch of language spoken by a
person at a certain time and place and on a certain
occasion. Like a sentence, it is by definition a
meaningful stretch of language.
• It does not need to be in the form of a complete
sentence.
• It can be in the form of a number of sentences.
• If a stretch of language is uttered twice, it will be two
utterances.
• It can be slow or fast, faint or loud.
 PROPOSITION
• For some scholars it is not the sentence but
the PROPOSITION that is the basic unit of
semantics.
• A proposition is the semantic content of a
simple declarative sentence.
• It is essentially a semantic concept.
• If the word order of a sentence changes with no
change in meaning, it will be a different sentence with
the same proposition.
 ENTAILMENT
• Entailment is a property of propositions.
• If the truth of proposition B follows necessarily
from the truth of proposition A, we say that
proposition A entails proposition B, e.g.,
A: yesterday I met a great scholar.
B: yesterday I met a person.
• Entailment can be:
unilateral, i.e., A entails B, but B does
not entail A, e.g.,
A: He is from India.
B: He is from Asia.
Bilateral, i.e., A entails B and B
entails A, e.g.,
A: Mona looks like Barbra.
B: Barbra looks like Mona.