Presentation on theme: «Semantics Word meaning Sentence meaning.»— Presentation transcript:
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Semantics Word meaning Sentence meaning
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Word Meaning Dictionaries only give paraphrases, not fundamental characterizations of word meaning. overcoat: coat worn over indoor clothing terror: state of intense fear fear: to be afraid afraid: fearful
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Reference: The entity or entities in the world identified by the word
Same referent G.W. Bush president of the United States
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If A and B have the same reference…
…they can substitute for each other in a sentence without changing the meaning of the sentence. G.W. Bush met with members of Congress. The president met with members of Congress.
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But the next sentences don’t have the same meaning.
‘I want to be the president of the U.S.’ vs. ‘I want to be George W. Bush.’
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Have a difference sense
G.W. Bush the president of the United States Sense: The meaning of a word which is independent of its reference, the word’s mental representation
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The following often have the same reference but always have a different sense.
my father my mother’s husband
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The following have sense but no reference.
the king of the United States werewolf, dragon, unicorn
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But sense is also not all there is to meaning.
What is sense — a mental image? Then what is the mental image of: car lecture forget food love bird
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Prototypical reference
For many common nouns, the set of possible referents are clustered around a prototype. E.g. ‘bird’ Prototypical exemplars of a category are more readily processed than atypical exemplars.
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Semantic Relations among Words
Synonym: A and B mean the same thing; A can be paraphrased by B. A and B have the same reference. automobile car big large purchase buy throw-up vomit
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Antonym A and B have related but contrastive meanings.
Complementary: alive/dead Gradable: dark/light, young/old Reverse: left/right, come/go Converse: employer/employee
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Hyponymy and hypernymy
If B is a hyponym of A, then the meaning of B is a special case of A If A is a hypernym of B, then the meaning of A is a more general instance of B B A
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Hyponyms Note dual position of ‘animal’: topmost as in ‘animal’ vs. ‘mineral’ vs. ‘vegetable’
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(Un)productive Hyponym Formation
Hypernym Hyponym interesting => very interesting car => German car => Adding a modifier
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Not with Compounds boom box No: box Yes: sound system station wagon
No: wagon Yes: car soap opera No: opera Yes: TV show
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Polysemy: One word has more than one related meaning.
Homophony: One phonetic form has more than one meaning.
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“bright” = 1. shining 2. intelligent => Polysemy “bat”
1. winged rodent 2. baseball equipment => Homophony
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Polysemy vs. Homophony Polysememous word ‘hard’
meaning meaning2 “difficult” “durable, solid” => Single lexical entry
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Homophony Homophones ‘rodent’ ‘baseball equipment’
‘bat’ ‘bat’2 ‘rodent’ ‘baseball equipment’ => Distinct lexical entries
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Lexical Ambiguity Due to polysemy: Do you smoke after sex?
She cannot bear children. Mary licked her disease.
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Due to homophony: Clinton wins on budget. More lies ahead.
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Lexical or Structural Ambiguity?
The two sisters were reunited after years at the checkout counter. The woman strolled near the bank. The judge sentenced the killer to die in the electric chair for the second time. The girl found a book on Main Street. The cranes were transported by boat overseas.
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What makes the Marx Brothers funny?
In the midst of a battle… Zeppo: General Smith reports a gas attack. Groucho: Tell him to take a teaspoon of bicarbonate and half a glass of water. (Duck Soup)
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Groucho: I’ve got a good mind to join a club and beat you over the head with it.
(Duck Soup) (Marx Brothers examples from P.M. Tiersma “Language-based Humor in the Marx Brothers Films”, Indiana Univ. Linguistics Club)
SEVEN TYPES OF MEANING
A word is the smallest unit of spoken language which has meaning and can stand alone, it is a written representation of one or more sounds which can be spoken to represent an idea, object, action, etc. in order to be understood by the people, a word must have a meaning.
Most words have more than one meaning, it is the characteristic of words that a single word may have several meaning, in fact, words may play an enormous part in our life. Words are used to express something and also conveys feelings about we are describing. Words are used not in isolation but related to human situation. It is through our experience with them in human situation that they take on meaning.
If we talk about words, we can not avoid talking about the study of meaning (semantics). The meaning of word is often complex, having such component as a picture, an idea, a quality, a relationship and personal feelings and association. Lyons 1977:643 in Palmer1981:40-41) suggested that we should draw a distinction between sentence meaning and utterance meaning, the sentence meaning being directly predictable from the grammatical and lexical features of the sentence, while utterance meaning includes all the various types of meaning, then, is the part of meaning of a sentence that we are going to discuss in the next following. Lyons states that, utterance meaning is the part of meaning of a sentence that is directly related to grammatical and lexical features, but is obtained either from associated prosodic and paralinguistic features or from the content, linguistic and non-linguistic. The seven types of meaning are as follows:
- Conceptual Meaning.
Conceptual meaning is sometimes called denotative meaning or cognitive meaning, it is widely assumed to be the central factor in linguistic communication. Larson noted that denotative meaning is also called as primary meaning, that is the meaning suggested by the word when it used alone. It is the first meaning or usage which a word will suggest to most people when the word is said in isolation. it is the meaning learned early in life and likely to have reference to a physical situation (Larson, 1984: 100)
The denotation of word is its agreed-upon sense-what it refers to, stands for, or designates, a part from the feeling it may call up, and this again is able for a good deal on the context the words that appears in.
It is said that the aim of denotative meaning is to provide, for any given interpretation of a sentence, a configuration of abstract symbols, in which shows exactly what we need to know if we are to distinguish that meaning from all other possible sentence meaning in the language.
- Connotative Meaning.
As we experience, words are human situations, they not only take on certain denotation, but also often acquire individual flavors. They have come to have emotive tone, the associations, and suggestiveness of the situation in which they have been a part. For example let us examine the words “brink”. This denotes on “edge”. However in the phrase “The brink of the cliff” or” the brink of disaster”, this word suggest danger and its emotive tone is that of fear.
According to Leech (1974: 40-41) connotative meaning is the communicative value an expression has by virtue of what it refers to, over and above its purely conceptual content. It will be clear if we are talking about connotation, we are in fact talking about the “real word experience”. Someone associates with an expression when someone uses and hears it. The fact that if we compared connotative meaning with denotative meaning is that connotations are relatively unstable; that is they vary considerably we have seen, according to culture, historical period, and the experience of the individual. Although all the speaker of particular language speaks the language exactly the same conceptual framework, actually each of them has individual perception of words. Connotative meaning is indeterminate and open in the same way as our knowledge and belief about the universe are opened-ended. Connotations play a major role in the language of literature, of politics, of advertising, and a greeting card.
- Stylistic Meaning.
Stylistic meaning is that which a piece of language conveys about the circumstances of its use. A recent account of English has recognized some main dimensions of stylistic variation. For instance:
1. They chucked a stone at the cops, and then did a bunk with the loot.
2. After casting a stone at the police, they absconded with the money.
Sentence (1) could be said by the two criminals, talking casually about the crime afterwards; sentence (2) might be said by the chief of the police in making the official report; both could describe the same happening (Leech, 1974: 15)
- Affective Meaning.
Affective meaning is a sort of meaning which an effect the personal feeling of speakers, including his/her attitude to the listener, or his/her attitude to something he/she talking about. In order to get people attention to be quiet, we might say either (1)”I’m terribly sorry to interrupt, but I wonder if you would be so kind as to lower your voice as a little” or (2) “Will you belt up”. Factors such as intonation and voice timbre are also important here. The impression of politeness in the sentence (1) can be reserved by tone of biting sarcasm; sentence (2) can be turn into a playful remark between intimates if delivered with the intonation of a mild request.
- Reflected Meaning.
Reflected meaning involves an interconnection on the lexical level of language, it is the meaning, which arises in case of multiple conceptual meaning, when one senses of word forms part of our response to another sense. For instance, on hearing the Church service, the synonymous expressions The Comforter and The Holy Ghost both refer to the Third Trinity, but the Comforter sounds warm and comforting, while the Holy Ghost sounds awesome.
- Collocative Meaning.
Collocative meaning consists of the associations a word acquire s on account of the meanings of the words, which tends to occur in its environment. For instance the words pretty and handsome share common ground in the meaning of good looking. But may be distinguished by the range of noun in which they are like to occur or collocate; Pretty woman and handsome man. The ranges may well match although they suggest a different kind of attractiveness of the adjectives.
7. Thematic Meaning.
This is the final category of meaning, thematic meaning is the meaning that is communicated by the way in which the speaker or writer organizes the message, in terms of ordering, focus, and emphasis. It is often felt an active sentence such as (1) below has a different meaning from its passive equivalent (2) although in conceptual content they seem to be the same (Leech. 1974: 19)
1. Mrs. Bessie Smith donated the first prize.
2. The first prize was donated by Mrs. Bessie Smith
We can assume that the active sentence answers an implicit question “what did Mrs. Bessie Smith donate?”, while the passive sentence answer the implicit question “who donates the first prize?”, that in other words (1) in contrast to se (2) suggest that we know who Mrs. Bessie Smith.
References:
Larson, Mildred, L. 1984. Meaning based Translation. USA: University Press of America.
Leech, G.N. 1979, Semantics. Auxland: Pengin Books.
Palmer, I.R. 1981, Semantics, Cambridge University Press.
Tarigan, Guntur Henry. Prof. Dr. 1993. Pengajaran Semantik. Penerbit Angkasa Bandung.
In semantics and pragmatics, meaning is the message conveyed by words, sentences, and symbols in a context. Also called lexical meaning or semantic meaning.
In The Evolution of Language (2010), W. Tecumseh Fitch points out that semantics is «the branch of language study that consistently rubs shoulders with philosophy. This is because the study of meaning raises a host of deep problems that are the traditional stomping grounds for philosophers.»
Here are more examples of meaning from other writers on the subject:
Word Meanings
«Word meanings are like stretchy pullovers, whose outline contour is visible, but whose detailed shape varies with use: ‘The proper meaning of a word . . . is never something upon which the word sits like a gull on a stone; it is something over which the word hovers like a gull over a ship’s stern,’ noted one literary critic [Robin George Collingwood].»
(Jean Aitchison, The Language Web: The Power and Problem of Words. Cambridge University Press, 1997)
Meaning in Sentences
«It may justly be urged that, properly speaking, what alone has meaning is a sentence. Of course, we can speak quite properly of, for example, ‘looking up the meaning of a word’ in a dictionary. Nevertheless, it appears that the sense in which a word or phrase ‘has a meaning’ is derivative from the sense in which a sentence ‘has a meaning’: to say a word or phrase ‘has a meaning’ is to say that there are sentences in which it occurs which ‘have meanings’; and to know the meaning which the word or phrase has, is to know the meanings of sentences in which it occurs. All the dictionary can do when we ‘look up the meaning of a word’ is to suggest aids to the understanding of sentences in which it occurs. Hence it appears correct to say that what ‘has meaning’ in the primary sense is the sentence.» (John L. Austin, «The Meaning of a Word.» Philosophical Papers, 3rd ed., edited by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford University Press, 1990)
Different Kinds of Meaning for Different Kinds of Words
«There can’t be a single answer to the question ‘Are meanings in the world or in the head?’ because the division of labor between sense and reference is very different for different kinds of words. With a word like this or that, the sense by itself is useless in picking out the referent; it all depends on what is in the environs at the time and place that a person utters it. . . . Linguists call them deictic terms . . .. Other examples are here, there, you, me, now, and then. «At the other extreme are words that refer to whatever we say they mean when we stipulate their meanings in a system of rules. At least in theory, you don’t have to go out into the world with your eyes peeled to know what a touchdown is, or a member of parliament, or a dollar, or an American citizen, or GO in Monopoly, because their meaning is laid down exactly by the rules and regulations of a game or system. These are sometimes called nominal kinds—kinds of things that are picked out only by how we decide to name them.» (Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought. Viking, 2007)
Two Types of Meaning: Semantic and Pragmatic
«It has been generally assumed that we have to understand two types of meaning to understand what the speaker means by uttering a sentence. . . . A sentence expresses a more or less complete propositional content, which is semantic meaning, and extra pragmatic meaning comes from a particular context in which the sentence is uttered.» (Etsuko Oishi, «Semantic Meaning and Four Types of Speech Act.» Perspectives on Dialogue in the New Millennium, ed. P. Kühnlein et al. John Benjamins, 2003)
Pronunciation: ME-ning
Etymology
From the Old English, «to tell of»