BBI 3219

1. BBI 3219 Semantik & Pragmatik

2. “Language without meaning is meaningless”… (Roman Jakobson) Semantics: • is the technical term used to refer to the study of meaning, and, since meaning is a part of language, semantics is a part of linguistics.

3. Some things we know • These sentences describe the same situation: • The small blue circle is in front of the square. • The square is behind the small blue circle. We are also capable of verifying that both sentences are true in this particular situation. This is because we know what the world must be like in order for these sentences to be true.

4. Some things we know • We know that the following sentence can mean more than one thing (it is ambiguous): • She drove past the bank. • This seems to be related to our knowledge of what bank denotes.

5. Semantics • Semantics is the branch of linguistics that deals with the study of meaning, changes in meaning, and the principles that govern the relationship between sentences or words and their meanings. • It is the study of the relationships between signs and symbols and what they represent.

6. Gay noble stupid bright, lively-looking beautiful, excellent homosexual cheerful, carefree, merry (woman) leading immoral life dedicated to social pleasures, promiscuous, frivolous

7. Wicked bad in various extended senses (e.g. wounds, quality) bad in moral character excellent, splendid, remarkable malicious, mischievous, sly (jocular use)

8. The study of the linguistic meaning of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences is called Semantics. The study of semantics includes the study of how meaning is constructed, interpreted, clarified, obscured, illustrated, simplified, negotiated, contradicted, and paraphrased.

9. Some important areas of semantic theory or related subjects include these: Symbol and referent Conceptions of meaning Words and lexemes Denotation, connotation, implication Pragmatics Ambiguity Metaphor, simile and symbol Semantic fields

10. Synonym, antonym and hyponym Semantic change and etymology Polysemy Homonymy, homophones and homographs Lexicology and lexicography Epistemology Colour

11. Subfields of semantics: Lexical (of or relating to the vocabulary, words, or morphemes of a language) semantics - meanings of words, and the meaning relationships among words; Phrasal or sentential semantics-concerned with the meaning of syntactic units larger than the word.

12. The study of how context affects meaning is called Pragmatics. • For example, the sentence "It's cold in here" can be interpreted in certain situations as "close the windows".

13. What is meaning? ‘Aboutness’ of natural language • A noise that I make when I speak or a scribble that I produce when I write words in English or a sign-language gesture I make are physical objects that convey meanings, they are about something • We use language to communicate, to talk about things in the world, people and their properties, relations between people, events, in short about the way the world is, should be, could have been …

14. Semantics involves the most abstract level of linguistic analysis, since we cannot see or observe meaning as we can observe and record sounds. • Meaning is related very closely to the human capacity to think logically and to understand. • So when we try to analyze meaning, we are trying to analyze our own capacity to think and understand our own ability to create meaning.

15. Can we define meanings in terms of their physical properties? • Linguistic forms usually lack any physical resemblance with the entities that they stand for.

16. Can we define meanings in terms of their physical properties? • The connection between a word and what it stands for is ARBITRARY - there is no relationship between the way a word is pronounced (or signed) and its meaning. • “The ARBITRARINESS of the linguistic sign” (Ferdinand de Saussure, 1916, Cours de linguistique générale) is one of the defining properties of human language.

17. Language and the world • But in characterising knowledge of meaning, we also have the problem of distinguishing linguistic knowledge from world knowledge • E.g. What is the meaning of the word man or ostrich? • Is your knowledge of the meaning independent of your experience of the world? • Are you born with an innate knowledge of such words?

18. Knowledge of language and the world semantics How do we account for the relationship between words and concepts? How do we decode the meaning of complex sentences? How is linguistic meaning related to the world? things & situations concepts/ thoughts

19. Indirect relation between word and world THING IN THE WORLD CONCEPT THOUGHT IDEA SENSE possibly IMAGE ? IS IT IN YOUR MIND? WORD house

20. Gold is getting more and more expensive. • What idea, concept, thought or image do you think of when you hear this sentence? • For EVERY PERSON, the word gold evokes a DIFFERENT PICTURE, IDEA, CONCEPT, etc.; yet that does not prevent us all from using the word with the same meaning. • This means that the word gold applies to something general, or possibly even universal.

22. Where is meaning? • The meaning of words cannot be derived from their physical properties, • It cannot be reduced to the real-world objects or their perception, and • It cannot be reduced to the particular image in my or your mind. • The meaning of words is to be derived from the relations between words, concepts and things in the real world.

23. Levels of Meaning • Sentence / Expression meaning – the linguistic meaning sentence • Utterance meaning – meaning of the sentence in a particular context

24. Expression meaning • The meanings of words, phrases and sentences, taken out of context, in their general sense constitute the level of meaning . • Covers word meaning and sentence meaning. • Literal/conventionalised meaning • “core meaning”, independent of context • this belongs to semantics proper

25. Sentence / expression meaning • Corresponds to phrasal meaning or sense i.e. the compositional meaning of the sentence as constructed out of the meanings of its individual component lexemes I don't need your bicycle. • need, bicycle content words • I, do, not, your function words • context-independent • The meaning of content words are concepts. It describes what it refers to, i.e. it is descriptive meaning • The meaning of function words contributes to the descriptive meaning of the sentence.

27. Uncovering the knowledge of the meanings of words and sentences and revealing its nature are the central objectives of semantics. Determine the meaning of the sentence in (1): (1) I like your shirt. The description of meaning must be specific enough to distinguish it from all other words with different meanings

28. Utterance Meaning • The meaning that results from using an expression in a given context of utterance (CoU). • CoU  the sum of circumstances that bear on reference and truth. • The speaker • The addressee(s) / recipients • The time • The place • The facts

31. Utterance Meaning • Speaker meaning & context • What a speaker means when they say something, over and above the literal meaning. • This and other “contextual” effects belong to pragmatics Oh well done! Pass it over here.

32. (4) Son: I’ve fixed the toy. Dad: Oh well done! Pass it over here. (5) Jane: Sorry, I think I’ve broken it. Bob: Oh well done! Pass it over here.

33. More examples: (6) Jack: Would you like something to eat? Laura: I’ve just had lunch. (7)Jack: How was that new restaurant you went last night? Laura: The walls were a nice colour. Implied meaning - Implicature

34. To successfully analyse meaning as used by speakers of a language, we need to distinguish various aspects of a communicative situation So did you like the food? You made great black coffee.

35. Utterances vs. sentences • Consider the sentence: • John stole the meat pie. • Every time this sentence is spoken, the result is a new utterance of the same sentence. • There can be many utterances of the same sentence.

36. Utterance • A speaker’s production of a linguistic signal in a specific context of use. • This is inevitably bound to the context: • who it is addressed to • the physical surroundings • disfluencies • etc

37. Sentence • The abstract grammatical object that an utterance represents. • Roughly, this focuses only on grammar and lexicon. • Reasons to distinguish from utterance: • There can be many utterances of the same sentence. • We can quote somebody else, extracting the sentence that underlies their utterance: She said that John stole the meat pie. • The distinction gives us a way of abstracting aspects of language from their specific context of use

38. Study of sentence / linguistic meaning = Semantics • Study of utterance / speaker meaning = Pragmatics (8) You made great black coffee. (9) I’ve just had lunch. (10)The walls were a nice colour. Sentences have invariant/context-independent properties in virtue of the meaning of the words. Utterances are fairly concrete things: they happen; they’re spoken. The meaning of utterance is context-dependent.

39. Semantics vs. pragmatics • Many linguists make a distinction between • Literal/conventionalised meaning • “core meaning”, independent of context • This belongs to semantics proper • Speaker meaning & context • What a speaker means when they say something, over and above the literal meaning. • This and other “contextual” effects belong to pragmatics • NB. The distinction between semantics and pragmatics is not hard and fast

40. Which of those figures is the Princess of Spain? Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas (Museo Prado, Madrid)

41. There are many ways to reply: • the girl in the white dress • the girl in the middle • the person being tended to by the kneeling maid Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas (Museo Prado, Madrid)

42. Reference • These different expressions mean different things, have different content. • However, they all pick out the same entity in this context (the Princess of Spain). • i.e. they refer to the princess of Spain • In a different context, the girl in the white dress could pick out something different. • Sometimes, it can fail to pick out anything. • an action on the part of a speaker • it is context-bound

43. Reference is a relationship between parts of a language and things outside the language (in the world). • my house - represent something outside of these words, there’s a meaning to them • The meaning comes from the fact that the words represent, or symbolize, or indicate, or refer to some real object in the real world.  All such correspondences between words and what the words refer to are called references. • Any two expressions which refer to the same thing in the real world have the same referent.  The referent is the real world thing indicated by the words.

44. My favourite place to buy mobile phones is The Mines Shopping Centre. • Refer to the same place in the real world • Two expressions with the same referent Think of a referent. Find 2 or more ways to describe the same thing in different words.

45. What would be the referent of the phrase the present President of the United States used: • In 2011? (b) in 2001? • Therefore we can say that the phrase the present President of the United States has variable reference. • Does the reference of an expression vary according to (a) the circumstances (time, place, etc.) in which the expression is used, or (b) the topic of the conversation in which the expression is used, or (c) both (a) and (b)?

46. Reference Different types of reference Three classes of reference: • Definite reference: the entity referred to is UNIQUELY identifiable from context, e.g. The boy kicked my dog. • Indefinite reference: the entity referred to is NOT UNIQUELY identifiable from context, e.g. A boy kicked my dog. • Generic reference: it refers to a whole class of entities rather than to individual members of it, e.g. Dogs are animals./Tigers are found in Asia. (dogs and tigers here are referred to as a species).

47. Reference and denotation: often used interchangeably, e.g.  “the word Labrador denotes/refers to a kind of dog”; As distinguished by Lyons (1977) and Saeed (2003): • Denotation = astable relationship between a word/phrase in a language and the thing/class of things it stands for in the world; • Reference = the use of a word/phrase to pick out something in the world, relevant to some situation. • Therefore, denotation/denote is context-free, whereas reference/refer is context-dependent (i.e. reference occurs in language use) • Referent: the entity picked out by an act of reference. E.g. The referent of your Labrador in I like your Labrador is a particular kind of dog which is large in size and often used by blind people.

48. Two major theories of reference • The Denotational theory: • direct relationship between words and the world • meaning = the relationship between linguistic expressions and things/situations • The Representational theory: • the relationship between words and the world is mediated by our mental model

49. Denotation • The denotation of an expression is whatever it denotes. • Sentences, words and so forth – in a language were said to denote aspects of the world.

50. The denotational theory • ‘Meaning’ manifests itself in the link between language (i.e. words) and the world. • Language enables us to describe the world. We can talk about things.  I met Tony Blair in London last week. Tony Blair refers/denotes its bearer: a person named Tony Blair • Reference (denotation) • Referent (denotatum) The denotation relation constitutes the most fundamental semantic relation.