SEMANTICS HANDOUTS

(grad level)
I. THE STUDY OF MEANING
What is meaning?


Where does meaning come from?


How is meaning generated?

How can meaning be conveyed?



What does semiotics study?


How can signs be classified?



An arbitrary sign is one whose form bears no relation of analogy or resemblance to its referent.
Eg:
An iconic sign is one whose form bears some relation of analogy or resemblance to its referent.
Eg:
Natural signs: all sorts of sights, sounds and smells can be natural signs
Eg:
Conventional signs have human senders as well as human receivers; each one has an intention
and an interpretation.
Eg:
Types of signs:
+ Icon: visual sign, theres similarity between the sign and what it represents. Eg:
+ Index: the sign whose relation between it and what it refers to is logically inferred. Eg:
+ Symbol: an arbitrary and conventional sign for abstract objects or relationships (chemicals, logic,
algebraic formula or diagram). Eg:
Practice 1: Which of the followings are icons, indices, or symbols?
Yawning
Earache
Sweaters
nodding the head



What kind of signs are words?



What is semantics? What is the unit of lexical
semantics?



II. MEANING, THOUGHT, AND REALITY
Intention vs. extension


Denotation: aspect of meaning of a word / expression which shows its potential to denote
something in or about the world.
Sense: intension of the word / expression
Reference: extension of the word / expression
Referring expressions vs. referents
How are referents classified?

What are different ways of referring?

Practice 2: State whether the following underlined words or phrases are generic or non-generic,
specific or non-specific, definite or indefinite?
1. Somebody telephoned and left a message for you.
2. I hope that somebody will tidy up this file cabinet.
3. The last person to leave the office should lock the door.
4. A stitch in time saves nine.
5. Evans sometimes forget to keep his eyes on the ball.
Practice 3: Analyze the referential ambiguity in the following underlined words / phrases?
1. I want to buy a newspaper
2. Jack told Ralph that a visitor is waiting for him.
3. If you want to get ahead, you have to work hard
4. Im buying a drink for everybody here.
Homonymy vs. Polysemy?



III. MEANING AND COGNITION
How does human perception happen and develop?

How correctly can language reflect the outside world?

Lexical field: lexical set organized according to lexical relations or themes.
Lexical gap: the lack of names for the objects.
Practice 4: Explain these

Lexical relations:
Kinship: relation through blood ties and marriage. Eg:
Hyponymy
Meronymy
Synonymmy
Antonymy

What is semantic change?

What are the causes of linguistic change?

Semantic transfer:
Source domain:
Target domain:
Metaphor
Metonymy
Irony
Litote
Hyperbole
euphemism
IV. MEANING AND STRUCTURE
Deep structure vs. surface structure?
Practice 5: What makes the following 3 sentences similar and different?
(1) You close the door.
(2) The door is closed by you.
(3) Close the door!
Propositional meaning: the part of sentence meaning which determines its truth conditions.
ARGUMENT: something which is named or talked about, also known as entity,
PREDICATE: an assertion or predication made about the arguments.

Practice 6: Notational representation of propositional meaning
(1) You close the door.
(2) The door is closed by you.
(3) I bought her some flowers.
(4) It was raining.
(5) They are working.
(6) Ms. Janet is now retired.
Modality:
Bybee (1985) defines modality in broad terms. According to him, modality is what the speaker is doing
with the whole proposition.
Palmer (1986): Modality is the semantic information associated with the speakers attitude or opinion
about what is said. Modality concerns the factual status of the proposition.

Classification of modality?


How is modality manifested?



V. MEANING AND LOGIC
How does logic matter in linguistics?
Richard Montauge (1974) believed that tools of logic can help us to represent sentence meaning
Truth values

Truth functionality
F(p,q) = p & q / p BUT q



F (p,q) = p V q / p V q




F (p,q) = p ->q








F (p,q) = p q






Paraphrases
Entailment
Presupposition
Logico-semantic relations




VI. MEANING AND INTERACTION

Deixis: the process of using words to point in specific context, the words are call indexicals
or deictic expressions
Personal deixis:

Temporal deixis:

Spatial deixis:

Discoursal deixis:

Constative utterances

Performative Utterances

Locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary

IFIDs

declaratives, directives, commisives, representatives, expressive, phatic acts


VII. LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY
Linguistic Diversity:
Languages, especially members of quite different language families, differ in important ways from
one another.
Linguistic Influence on Thought:
The structure and lexicon of one's language influences how one perceives and conceptualizes the
world, and they do so in a systematic way.

Sapir Whorf Hypothesis
Linguistic relativity:
Structural differences between languages are paralleled by nonlinguistic cognitive differences
(the structure of the language itself effects cognition)
Eg. The number and the type of the basic colour words of a language determine how a subject sees
the rain bow
The structure of a language can strongly influence or determine someones World View.
A World View describes a (hopefully) consistent and integral sense of existence and provides a
theoretical framework for generating, sustaining and applying knowledge
Arbitrariness: The semantic systems of different languages vary without constraint. Different
languages have different semantic features (over and above differences in lexical semantics)