Language and Meaning

1. Language and Meaning idb 157

2. What is meaning? • A difficult question... • Instead; Where do we look for meaning in language?

3. Is it only linguistic? • ...or contextual? Context of what? • ... or cognitive? • or...? • Meaning is something that emerges out of the combination of a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic elements.

4. Study of meaning has been within the interest of; • philosophy • linguistics • semiotics • psychology • cognitive sciences • social psychology • literature • hermeneutics • ... and so on.

5. When we are interested in how linguistics deals with meaning, we look at meaning on the; • lexical level • syntactic level, • textual or discoursal (discursive) level.

6. Emergence and interpretation of meaning in each of these levels are closely related to; • cultural, • contextual, • social, • psychological, • cognitive processes.

7. Linguists are generally interested in these questions: • Which combination of morphemes make up a meaningful (correct) word? • What makes a word / sentence meaningful? • What meaning relations are there between words? • What meaning relations are there between sentences?

8. How do we mean sth? • How do we assign meaning to an utterance? • How do we comprehende what is said? • What is the relationship between linguistic utterances and their interpretations? • What factors have an influence on the way utterances are interpreted? • etc.

9. Branchesof linguistics that studymeaning: • Semantics:the study of linguistic meaning. • Lexical semantics which is concerned with the meanings of morphemes and words; • Phrasal semantics which is concerned with phrases and sentences. • Pragmatics:the study of how context affects meaning.

10. Lexical semantics (word meanings) • The speakers of a language share a basic vocabulary – the sounds & meanings of morphemes and words. • The lexicon is the part of grammar that contains the knowledge that the speakers have about individual words & morphemes, including semantic properties.

12. The triangle of reference was first proposed by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards in their 1923 book The Meaning of Meaning. • This book was a pioneering work in the field of semiotics, which is the study of signs, including words, and the relationship between signs and their meanings. • It is related to pragmatics, which deals with the relationship between sentences and their real-world meanings.

13. According to Ogden and Richards, there are three parts to the meaning-making process: • the symbol, • the thought or reference, and • the referent. • The symbol is the word itself, such as the letters "c-h-a-i-r." • When a person sees or hears the symbol "chair," he or she has a mental image or collection of logical ideas related to the idea of a chair: a piece of furniture usually with four legs designed to be sat on. This is the thought or reference. If the reference is adequate, the hearer is able to connect it to the referent — a chair that exists in the real world.

14. In linguistics, the triangle of reference is a model for explaining how words convey meaning. • It is also sometimes called the Ogden-Richards triangle for meaning or the semiotic triangle. • In layman's terms, the triangle of reference says that a word suggests an idea in the mind of the hearer. The idea connects to a real-world object.

15. Semantic Properties • are pieces of information of the word on which speakers of the language agree. E.g., “Female” is a semantic property that helps to define: tigress hen aunt maiden doe mare grandmawidow ewe vixen girl woman

16. Semantic features • are a formal or notational device that indicates the presence or absence of semantic properties by pluses and minuses. For example, the lexical entries for words such as father, girl, and mare would appear as follows:

17. Man [+Human] [+Adult] [+Male] Woman [+Human] [+Adult] [+Female] Boy [+Human] [-Adult] [+Male] Girl [+Human] [-Adult] [+Female] King [+Human] [+Adult] [+Male] [+Status] Queen [+Human] [+Adult] [+Female] [+Status] Prince [+Human] [-Adult] [+Male] [+Status] Princess [+Human] [-Adult] [+Female] [+Status]

18. Semantic Priming • Beyond semantic features, the meanings of words can be related to each other in very subtle ways. • Ex: When we hear one word, it can make us (subconsciously) think of other words with related meanings.

19. The relationships of words • Homonyms: words pronounced the same but have different meanings (e.g., bear and bare /beə(r)). • Heteronymsare words spelled the same but pronounced differently and having different meanings, such as sow /saʊ/“female pig,” and sow /səʊ/“to plant seeds.” • Homographsare words that spelled the same and have different meanings, such as trunk of an elephant and trunk for storing clothes.

20. Homonyms: Two or more words that have the same sound or spelling but differ in meaning. (Adjectives: homonymic and homonymous.) Generally, the term homonym refers both to homophones (words that are pronounced the same but have different meanings, such as which and witch) and to homographs (words that are spelled the same but have different meanings, such as "bow your head" and "tied in a bow").

21. accept/except buy/by/bye capital/capitol eminent/imminent fair/fare lie/lye meat/meet/mete role/roll scene/seen whine/wine

22. Synonymsare when two words have the same meaning but different sounds (e.g., sofa and couch). The use of synonyms may result in lexical paraphrases, two sentences with the same meaning. • Polysemydescribes a single word with several closely related but different meanings, e.g., good means “well behaved” in good child, and “sound” in good investment.

23. polysemy • A polyseme is a word or phrase with different, but related senses.It is the the coexistence of several meanings in one word: • mole: ananimal; a spy; skin mark; chemistry unit; an unofficial holiday; popular dessert in Brazil; record label; video game,etc.

24. Antonyms are two words that are opposite in meaning. Antonyms have the same semantic properties except for the one that accounts for their oppositeness. • There are antonymous pairs that are; • complementary(alive/dead), • gradable(hot/cold), and • relationalopposites (buy/sell, employer/employee).

25. Hyponymsare words like red, white, and blue that share a feature indicating they all belong to the class of color words.

26. Metonyms are “substitute” words, such as ; • Rome:“The Catholic Church”; • gol kralı • altın ayakkabı • diva • sultan, etc.

27. A retronymis a type of neologism that provides a new name for an object or concept to differentiate its original form or version from a more recent form or version. • television cable television. • table top laptop ipad • electric guitar acoustic guitar

28. Phrasal Meaning • Noun-centered meaning • As nearly always, the meanings center on the head of the phrase. • Noun phrase meanings are combinations of meanings of nouns, adjectives, articles, and even sentences. • Noun phrase is the syntactic category, also phrasal category, of expression containing some form of a noun or pronoun as its head, and which function as the subject or as various objects in a sentence. • Sense & Reference • Some additional meaning that is present is termed sense. • By knowing the sense of an expression, you can determine its reference, if any, namely, what it points to in the world.

29. Other descriptions make a clear distinction between reference and sense. Consider the noun phrase, the president of USA. Its reference in 2012is Barrack Obama; this will change in time. Its sense is “head of USA.” The sense is more enduring. Some meaningful expressions (e.g., the present King of France) have sense but no reference; others, such as proper nouns, often have reference but no sense.

30. Verb-centered meaning • Thematic Roles • The noun phrase subject of a sentence & the constituents of the verb phrase are semantically related in various ways to the verb. The relations depend on the meaning of the particular verb. • For example, the NP the boy in the boy found a red brick is called the agentof the action of finding. The NP a red brick is a theme & undergoes the action. So, part of the meaning of find is that its subject is an agent & its direct object is a theme. find, V, _________ NP, (Agent, Theme) • The following is the list of the thematic roles of the verb:

31. Thematic Roles of The Verb

32. Sentential Meaning • The truth of sentences • The sense of a declarative sentence permits one to know under what circumstances that sentence is true; • Those “circumstances” are called the truth conditions (the sense) of the sentence; • Paraphrases: sentences with the same truth conditions. • Entailment: the relationship between two sentences where the truth of one infers the truth of the other. • Contradiction: negative entailment (the truth of one sentence necessarily implies the falseness of another sentence).

33. Events vs. States • Event/eventive is a type of sentence that describes activities such as John kissed Mary or Mary ate oysters. • States/statives is a type of sentence that describes states of being such as Mary likes oysters. • Some of stative verbs are know, understand, have, hear, love, appear, see, like, seem, wish, sound, own. • Eventive sentences sound natural when passivized, when expressed progressively, when used imperatively, and with certain adverbs. In contrast, the stative sentences seem peculiar, if not ungrammatical or anomalous, when cast in the same form.

34. Pronouns & Coreferentiality • Reflexive Pronouns (RP) • The meaning of a reflexive pronoun always refers back to some antecedent, e.g. in Jane bit herself, herself refers to Jane. • Coreferential • Describes noun phrases (including pronouns) that refer to the same entity. • Syntactically, RP & their antecedents must occur within the same S in the phrase structure tree. • Sentence structure also determines the coreferentiality of a pronoun & a noun phrase in different clauses.

36. To Mean or Not To Mean • Three ways in which meaning may be veiled or even absent: • Anomaly is a violation of semantic rules resulting in expression that seem nonsensical, e.g. My brother is an only child. • Metaphor is non literal, suggestive meaning in which an expression that designates one thing is used implicitly to mean something else, e.g. The night has a thousand eyes, to mean “One may be unknowingly observed at night. • Idiom is an expression whose meaning does not conform to the principle of compositionality that is, may be unrelated to the meaning of its parts, e.g. kick the bucket meaning “to die”.

37. Pragmatics • Concerns with the interpretation of linguistic meaning in context. • Two kinds of contexts: • Linguistic context = the discourse that precedes a phrase or sentence that helps clarify meaning; • Situational context = knowledge of who is speaking, who is listening, what objects are being discussed, and general facts about the world we live in, used to aid in the interpretation of meaning. • There are several ways that real-word context influences & interacts with meaning.

38. Maxims of Conversation • Are conversational conventions that people appear to obey give coherence to discourse? • There are four conversational maxims: • Maxim of Quantity: a speaker’s contribution to the discourse should be as informative as is required, neither more nor less. • Maxim of Relevance: a speaker’s contribution to a discourse should always have a bearing on, and a connection with, the matter under discussion. • Maxim of Manner: a speaker’s discourse should be brief & orderly, and should avoid ambiguity & obscurity. • Maxim of Quality: a speaker should not lie or make unsupported claims.

39. Some conceptsof Pragmatics • Speech Acts • Speech act theory is the study of what an utterance does beyond just saying something. • The effect of what is done is called the illocutionary force of the utterance. For example, use of a performative verb like bequeath may be an act of bequeathing, which may even have legal status. • Presuppositions • Are implicit assumptions that accompany certain utterances, e.g., Have you stopped smoking? carries with it the presupposition that at one time you smoked. • Deixis • Refers to words or expressions whose reference relies entirely on context & the orientation of the speaker in space & time, e.g. I, yesterday, there, this cat.