3. Characteristics of semantics
• Semantics
- study of the meaning of linguistic expressions
- aims to account for what is linguistically encoded
- linguistic meaning: made up from the sum of the meanings
of its parts
- meaning of sentence: words + syntactic makeup
- focus on literal meaning (non-literal meaning for pragmatics)
• Meaning of a sentence : 2 truth values: true and false
- negation: truth valued is switched.
• Ambiguous: more than one meaning
- words: lexically ambiguous
- phrases: lexically ambiguous and/or structurally ambiguous
• Entailment
- “I dance gracefully.” entails “I dance.”
• Contradictory
- entails the negation of the other sentence.
4. Principle of compositionality
• “expression is composed of the meanings of its parts
and how they are combined structurally.”
• Semantic rule : determine the meaning of a phrase or
sentence based on its composition.
- Rule one: meaning of NP (an individual) is a member
of the meaning of VP (a set of individuals), then the S
is true, otherwise it is false.
Ex. “I dance”
- Rule two: meaning of ( V NP) is the set of individual
VP
X such that X is the first member of any pair in the
meaning of V whose second member is the meaning
of NP.
Ex. “Jack kissed James”
5. Exceptions to principle of
compositionality
• Anomaly: One or more words in a sentence do not
have a meaning, so we can‟t understand the
sentence and when individual words have
meanings but cannot be combined together.
Ex. “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”
• Metaphor: requires a lot of creativity and
imagination to the the meaning of the expression.
Ex. “Time is money”
• Idioms: have fixed non-compositional meanings
Ex. “It is raining cats and dogs”
6. Lexical semantics
Subfield of semantics that studies word
meanings in a sentence and their
relationships with each other
Example:
“I saw my mother just now.”
7. Semantic Features
Tells about the characteristics and properties
of a word
Example:
Mother Father
+human +human
+adult +adult
+married +married
-male +male
8. Semantic Roles (thematic roles)
The noun phrases such as people and thing
in the sentence at describes the role
entities and that involves action
Agent and Theme
Instrument and Experiencer
Location, Source and Goal
11. Pragmatics
• Understanding of language in context
• Aspect of meaning which cannot be found in the plain
sense of words or structure.
• Speech Acts: many utterances are equivalent to
actions
- Locutionary acts: speech acts that have taken place
- Illocutionary acts: real actions which are performed
by utterance
- Perlocutionary acts: effects of the utterance on the
listener
• Conversational implication: how the hearers manage
to work out the complete message when speaker
mean more that they say
Ex. “Have you got any cash on you?”
12. Pragmatics-cont.
• Deixis: concerns the way in which languages encode and thus also
concerns ways in which the interpretation of utterance depends on the
analysis of that context of utterance
„verbal pointing‟
- Deictic expressions
. Personal or possessive pronouns (I, you, mine, yours)
. Demonstrative pronouns (this, that)
. Spatial or temporal adverbs (here, there, now)
. Other pro-forms (so, do)
. Personal or possessive adjectives (my, your)
. Demonstrative adjective (my, your)
. Article (the)
- primary deixis (deixis): used to point to a situation outside a text
(situational deixis) or to the speaker‟s and hearer‟s (shared) knowledge
of the world (knowledge deixis).
- secondary deixis (endophoric deixis): refer either backwards or
forwards to other elements in a text
. Anaphoric deixis: backward pointing (such, said, similar, same)
. Cataphoric deixis: forward pointing (the
following, certain, some, this, these, several)
13. Reference
1. Saeed, J. I. (2009). Semantics third edition. West Sussex, UK: Blackwell
Publishing Ltd.
2. Yule, G. (2010). The study of Language fourth edition. New York, USA:
Cambridge University Press.
3. Fromkin, V., Rodman, R. & Hyams, N. (2010). Introduction to Linguistic
Philippine Edition. Pasig city, Philippines: Cenage learning Asia Pte. Ltd.
(Philippines branch).
4. Thomason, R. H. (1996, December). What is semantics?. Retrieved
November 30, 2011 from the World Wide Web:
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~rthomaso/documents/general/what-is-
semantics.html.
5. Clark, B. Sentence Meaning. Retrieved November 30, 2011 from the
World Wide Web: http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/139.
6. Bach, K. Ambiguity. Retrieved November 30, 2011 from the World Wide
Web: http://userwuw.sfsu.edu/~kbach/ambiguity.html.
7. Moore, A. (1999, March). Pragmatics and speech acts. Retrieved
December 1, 2011 from the World Wide Web:
http://www.teachit.co.uk/armoore/lang/pragmatics.htm#top.
8. O‟Grady, W., Dobrovolsky, M. & Katamba, F. (1997). Contemporary
Linguistics an Introduction. Hong Kong: Longman Asia Limited.