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Lecture 1

Lecture 1. Ling 442. What is meaning?. Meaning – what the speaker wants to convey Literal meaning vs. pragmatic meaning I forgot the paper. Literal meaning: Some relevant info about “the paper” disappeared from the memory of the speaker. Pragmatic meaning: My hypothesis is wrong.

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Lecture 1

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  1. Lecture 1 Ling 442

  2. What is meaning? • Meaning – what the speaker wants to convey • Literal meaning vs. pragmatic meaning • I forgot the paper. Literal meaning: Some relevant info about “the paper” disappeared from the memory of the speaker. Pragmatic meaning: My hypothesis is wrong. (See the text for a scenario.)

  3. What is meaning (for this class)? • We mainly focus on literal meaning or concrete meaning = denotation, reference (semantics in the narrow sense) • In Chapter 1 we cover pragmatics/pragmatic meaning: implicatures, presuppositions, etc.

  4. Frege and reference/sense • The President of US is the President of US  obviously true (tautology) • The president of US is the Commander in Chief of the US Armed Forces  not obviously true. Something called contingency (or synthetic statement) • What we could say about the intuition?

  5. Frege’s solution • Here is one possible account: A = B stated in a circumstance w is true if and only if the extension of A in w is the same as the extension of B • ⟦A is B⟧ = true iff the reference of A is the same as the reference of B. • This still allows us to say that the sense of A is not the same as the sense of B.

  6. Frege’s point (big picture) • The “literal meaning” of some expression A (forgetting about the pragmatic meaning of A) has two different layers/levels: • [1] reference (or extension/denotation) --- what A actually refers to (in a particular situation), concrete meaning • [2] sense (or intension) --- what A means in various situations, abstract meaning

  7. Syntax vs. Semantics • Syntax deals with syntactic intuitions (grammaticality judgments) (1) * Likes Mary Sue. (ungrammatical) • Semantics deals with semantic intuitions (e.g. entailment judgments, judgments about truth conditions, etc.) (2) entails (3). (2) Mary and Bill arrived. (3) Mary arrived.

  8. Natural Language Semantics • We investigate the semantic properties of natural language in a compositional way. • The idea: The meaning of Mary loves Bill is contributed by the meaning of each expression and is arrived at by the rules that put their meanings together. (We take syntax seriously.)

  9. Names/Predicates • Names denote entities • Adjectives, nouns, intransitive verbs denote groups (or sets) of entities E.g. dog denotes {x | x is a dog} (the set of all dogs)

  10. Truth values / truth conditions • A sentence denotes a truth value (1) Mary is in Seattle • Is true if and only if the person Mary is among those who are located in Seattle.

  11. Semantic relations/notions • Contradiction • Analytic statement = Tautology • Synthetic statement = Contingency

  12. Ambiguity types • Lexical ambiguity bank (river bank vs. financial institution) • Structural ambiguity The spy saw the cop with the binoculars. • Scope ambiguity Every boy likes some rock star.

  13. Implicature (P. Grice) • Rules of conversation • Principle of relevance (22) We don’t want any rows about politics. • Principle of informativeness (24a) Most of them passed.

  14. Context Dependency • Indexicality/deixis • I, you, here, there, now, then, etc.

  15. Presuppositions • Some of what a sentence conveys is not asserted; it is presupposed. • Russell’s example: • The King of France is bald. • Did you stop embezzling public funds?

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