Semantics

Semantics: The meaning Language

Language without meaning is meaningless

Roman Jakobson

For thousand years philosophers have been pondering the meaning of “meaning”; yet speakers of a language can understand what is said to them and can produce strings of words that convey meaning.

Learning a language includes the “agree-upon” meaning of certain string of sounds and learning how to combine these meaningful units into lager units into larger units that also convey meaning. We are not free to change the meaning of these words at will, for if we did we would be unable to communicate with anyone.

You can not make words mean that they do not mean. All speakers know how to combine words to produce phrase and sentence meaning. The study of linguistic meaning of words, phrases and sentences is called semantics.

Words meaning

Dictionaries are filled with words and their meanings. So is the head of every human being who speaks a language. You know the meaning of thousands of words. Your knowledge of their meaning permits you to use them to express your thoughts and understand them. The meaning of words is part of linguistic knowledge and is therefore a part of grammar. Your mental storehouse of information about words and morphemes is what we have been calling the lexicon.

Semantic properties

Words and morphemes have meanings. We shall talk about the meaning of words even though words may be composed of several morphemes.  Suppose someone said.

The assassin was stopped before he got to Mr. Thwacklehurst.

If the word assassin is in your mental dictionary, you know that it was some person person who was prevented from murdering some prominent person named Thwacklehurst. Your knowledge of the meaning of assassin tells you that it was not an animal that tried to kill the man and that Thwacklehurst was not likely to be a little old man who owned a tobacco shop. In other words your knowledge of assassin includes knowing that the individual to whom that word refers is a human, is a murderer, and is a killer of prominent people. These pieces of information, then, are the semantic properties of the word upon which speakers of the language agree.

Evidence of Semantic Properties

Semantic properties are not directly observable. Their existence must be inferred from linguistic evidence. One source of such evidence is found in the speech errors, “slips of the tongue”, that we all pronounce. Consider the following unintentional word substitutions that some speakers have actually spoken.

Intended Utterance	Actual Utterance (Error)
Bridge of the nose	Bridge of the neck
When my gums bled	When my tongue bled
He came too late	He came too early
Mary was young	Mary was early
The lady with the dachshund	The lady with the Volkswagen
That’s a horse of another color	That’s a horse of another race
He has to pay his alimony	He has to pay her rent

 

These errors and thousands of others have been collected reveal that the incorrectly substituted words are not random substitutions but share some semantic property with the intended words.

Semantic properties and the lexicon

The lexicon is the part of the grammar that contains the knowledge speakers have about individual words and morphemes, including semantic properties. Words that share a semantic property are said to be in a semantic class, for example, the semantic class “female” words. One way of expressing these facts about semantics about semantic properties is through the use of semantic features; which are a formal or notational device for expressing the presence or absence of semantic properties by pluses and minuses.

Homonyms and ambiguity

Homonyms are different words that are pronounced the same, but may or may not be spelled the same. To, too and two are homonyms because they are pronounced the same, but despite their spelling differences. Homonyms can create ambiguity. A word or sentence is ambiguous if it can be understood or interpreted in more than one way.

She can not bear children because they are noisy.

She cannot bear children because she is sterile.

Sentences may be ambiguous because they contain one or more ambiguous words. This is called lexical ambiguity. Examples:

1.       The rabbi married my sister.

2.       It takes two mice to screw in a light bulb.

The item 2 is an example of structural ambiguity, in which two or more meanings are not the result of lexical ambiguity but two or more structures underling the same string words. The word screw has two meaning and the sentences have to structures:

V             VP              PP                                                                       V             VP           NP

To screw              in            a light bulb                          to screw                               a light bulb

Synonyms and Paraphrases

There are not only words that sound the same but have different meaning, there are also words that sound different but have the same or nearly the same meaning. Such words are called synonyms.

He’s sitting on the couch.

He’s sitting on the sofa.

The use of synonyms may result in paraphrase, which occurs when two different utterances have the same meaning.

Antonyms

The meaning of a word may be partially defined be saying what it is not. Male means not female. Dead means not alive. Words that are opposite meaning are often called antonyms. With gradable pairs the negative of one word id not synonymous with the other. For example, someone who is happy is not necessarily sad. It is also true of gradable antonyms that more of one is less than another. More bigness is less smallness, wider is less narrow, and taller is less short.

Names

What’s in a name? is a question that has occupied philosophers of language for centuries. Usually when we think of names we think of names of people or places, which are proper names.

Proper names are definite, which means they refer to unique object insofar as the speaker and listener are concerned.

Phrase and Sentences Meaning

Words and morphemes are the smallest meaningful units in language. The meaning of a phrase or sentence depends on both the meaning of its words and how these words are structurally combined.

Combining Words into Sentences

Although it is a widely believed that learning a language is merely learning the words of that language and what they mean. We comprehend sentences because we know the meaning of individual words, and we know the rules for combining their meanings.

All these combination make sense because the semantic rules of grammar combine the meaning of the parts to give of the whole.

 

When rules are broken

The rules of language are not laws of nature, because they are broken everyday by everybody. This lawlessness is not human perversity, but rather another way in which language is put to use. There are three kind of rules violation: anomaly, metaphor and idioms.

Anomalous sentence is a violation of semantic rules to create “nonsense”. Example: “the stone ran”. And there are sentences that include words which have no meaning, so they are called uninterpretable.

Metaphor, or non-literal meaning, interpretations of sentences; example: “walls have ears”. Some semantics rules can be used to convey a particular idea. Walls have ears is certainly anomalous, but can be interpreted as meaning “you can be overhead even when you think you nobody is listening to you.” In some sentences is ambiguous, but the literal meaning is so unlikely that listeners stretch their imagination for another interpretation. To interpret metaphors we need to understand both literal meaning and facts about the world. Metaphorical use of language is language creativity at its highest.

Idioms are phrases where the meaning of an expression may be unrelated to the meaning of its part; all language contains idiomatic phrases. Idioms grammatically as well as semantically, have special characteristics. They must be entered into the Lexicon or mental dictionary as single “items”, with their meanings specified, and speakers must learn the special restrictions on their use in sentences.

Discourse Meaning

Linguistics knowledge accounts for speakers’ ability to combine phonemes into morphemes, morphemes into words, and words into sentences. Knowing a language also permits combining sentences to express complex thoughts and ideas. This linguistic ability makes an excellent medium of communication; and it is called discourse.

Pronouns may be used in place of Noun Phrases or may be used to refer to an entity presumably. Semantic rules of varying complexity establish whether a pronoun and some Noun Phrase in the discourse can be interpreted as conferential; so we say that the pronoun is bound to that Noun Phrase. When a pronoun refers to some object not explicitly mentioned in the discourse, it is said to be free or unbound. The reference of a free pronoun may be determined by context. First and second person non reflexive pronouns are always bound.

Missing Parts performance discourse convinces us to “violate” in regular ways many of the grammar rules. For example, the rules of syntax would not generate as a well-formed sentence My uncle has, too, but in the following discourse it is perfectly acceptable:

First speaker: My aunt has been dieting strenuously.

Second speaker: My uncle, too.

The second speaker is understood to mean “My uncle has been dieting strenuously”. The missing part of the verb phrase is understood from previous discourse.

The article “the” and “a”; there are discourse rules that apply regularly, such as those that determine the occurrence of the articles the and a. the article “the” is used to indicate that the referent of a noun phrase is agreed upon by speaker and listener. If someone says “I saw the boy” it is assumed that a certain boy is being discussed. No such assumption accompanies “I saw the boy”, which is more of a description of what was seen that a reference to a particular individual.

Maxims of conversation, states that a speaker’s contribution to the discourse should be as informative as is required –neither more nor less. Conversational conversations such as the requirement to “be relevant” allow the various sentences meaning to be sensibly connected into discourse meaning, as much as rules of sentences grammar allow words meanings to be sensibly connected into sentence meaning.