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University of Rwanda
Department of Modern Languages
Module: THEORIES OF MEANING
Component: SEMANTICS OF ENGLISH
Lecturer: Gregory Mbonankira

COMPONENT OUTLINE

Aims: This component intends to introduce students to the various aspects of

semantics. At the end of the component, students will be able to delimit semantics
and be able to use different conceptions and select semantic theories to apply so as
to know what meaning is.
Component Content
-Semantics as part of grammar
-Meaning and denotation
-What is meaning?
• Reductionist approaches to meaning or Equative
Approaches
-Scope of a semantic theory
• Meaning properties
• Meaning relations
• Meaning Properties and Relations of Sentences
• Truth properties
• Truth relations
- Goals of a semantic theory

Practice: Students will be assigned exercises where they deal with semantic field,
synonyms, antonyms, polysemy, ambiguity, etc…

ASSESSMENT
Take-home assignments and the partial examination will carry 50% of the whole
marks and 50% will be allotted to the final examination.

Reference
Akmajian, et. al. 2001. LINGUISTICS: An Introduction to Language and
Communication. 4th ed . New Delhi: Prentice-Hall of India
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Allan, K.1986. Linguistic Meaning. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul

Austin, J.L . 1955. How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cruse, D. 1986. Lexical Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fodor, J.D. 1977. Semantics: Theories of meaning in generative Grammar. New
York: Crowell
Grice, H. P. 1957. Meaning. Philosophical Review 66, 377-388. Reprinted in
Harnish.
Katz, J. 1972. Semantic theory. New York : Harper and Row
YULE George. 2010. STUDY OF LANGUAGE. Cambridge: CUP

COURSE NOTES

0. Introduction : What is Semantics?

Semantics is one of the subfields of linguistics that is traditionally defined as
the study of meaning of words, phrases, sentences, and texts. Semantics can be
approached from a theoretical as well as an empirical point of view.

The study of linguistic units and their principles of combination would not be
complete without an account of what these units mean, what they are used to talk
about and what they are used to communicate. In this chapter, we are going to look at
the meaning and use of words which constitute a major portion of semantics.
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In the field of linguistics, semantics is generally considered to be the study of meaning

and related notions in languages, whereas in the field of logic, semantics is generally
considered to be the study of linguistic reference or denotation and truth conditions in
languages. However, in natural languages, an adequate description must record facts
of meaning and denotation of words, phrases and sentences.
Semantics has not always enjoyed a prominent role in modern linguistics. From World
War I to the early 1960s,the semantics was viewed as not quite respectable: its
inclusion in grammar was considered by many as either a sort of methodological
impurity. But as Katz and Fodor (1963) pointed out in their influential article, “The
Structure of a Semantic Theory”, there is as much reason to consider semantics as part
of grammar as syntax or phonology. It is often said that a grammar describes what
fluent speakers know of their language. If that is so, we can argue that whatever fluent
speakers know of their language is a proper part of description of that language. Given
this, then the description of meaning is a necessary part of the description of a
speaker’s linguistic knowledge i.e., the grammar of a language must contain a
component that describes what speakers know about the semantics of the language.

A more general consideration also motivates us to include semantics in the grammar

of a language. A language is often defined as a conventional system for
communication, a system for conveying messages. Moreover, communication can be
accomplished only because words have certain meanings; therefore, to characterize
this system- language- it is necessary to describe these meanings. Hence, if a grammar
describes a language, part of it must describe meaning, and thus the grammar must
contain semantics. Taking these two considerations together, it seems reasonable to
conclude that semantic information is an integral part of grammar.
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Chapter One: Meaning and Denotation

Meaning is a very difficult concept to grasp and requires a lot of time, ink and energy
to explain. Luckily, in the history of semantics, few leading ideas have emerged
concerning the nature of meaning and denotation. Let us look at some of these
conceptions. In everyday English, the word ‘mean’ has a number of different uses,
many of which are not relevant to the study of language.
(1) a. That was no mean accomplishment. ( insignificant)
b. This will mean the end of our regime. ( result in )
c. I mean to help if I can. (intend )
d. Keep off the grass! This means you. ( refers to )
e. His losing his job means that he will have to look again. ( implies )
f. “Lucky Strike” means fine tobacco. ( indicates )
g. Those clouds mean rain. ( are sign )
h. She doesn’t mean what she said. ( believe )

These uses of the word mean can all be paraphrased by the expressions in parentheses
above. None of them is appropriate for our discussion of word meaning. Rather, we will
use the terms mean and meaning as they are used in the following examples.

(2) a. Procrastinate means “to put things off”.

b. In saying “It’s getting late”, she meant that “we should leave.”

These two uses of the word mean exemplify two important types of meaning: linguistic
meaning (2a) and speaker meaning (2b).
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This distinction can be illustrated with an example. Suppose that you have been arguing
with another person, who exclaims, “The door is right behind you!” You would assume,
quite rightly in this context that the speaker, in uttering this sentence, means that you are
to leave – although the speaker’s actual words indicate nothing more than the location of
the door. This illustrates how speakers can mean something quite different from what
their words mean. In general, the linguistic meaning of an expression is simply the
meaning or meanings of that expression in the language. In contrast, the speaker meaning
can differ from the linguistic meaning, depending on whether the speaker is speaking
literally or non-literally. When we speak literally, we mean what our words mean, and in
this case there is no important difference between speaker meaning and linguistic
meaning. But when we speak non-literally, we mean something different from what our
words mean.

Two non-literal uses of language are sarcasm and irony, as when someone says of a film,
“That movie was a real winner!”, uttered in such a way that we understand the speaker to
mean that the movie was a flop. Metaphorical uses of language are also non-literal
language use. For example, when someone is described as having raven hair, ruby lips,
emerald eyes, and teeth of pearl. Taken literally, this description would indicate that the
person in question is a monstrosity; however, taken metaphorically, it is quite a
compliment.

Returning to the question of linguistic meaning, whenever we talk about the meaning of
an expression, it is useful to keep in mind the distinction between the linguistic meaning
of an expression and a given speaker’s literal or non-literal use of the expression.
Furthermore, in talking about the linguistic meaning of an expression, we must note that
that meaning can vary across dialects and across individual speakers. For example, in
American English, the word bonnet refers only to a type of hat whereas in British
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English, it can refer to the “hood” of a car. Hence, for a word such as bonnet we cannot
isolate a single meaning valid for all forms of English. This is the reason that our
discussion of the meaning of the word should be relative to a specific dialect.

It is better to notice also that even meanings of words can vary across individual speakers
within the same dialect. For example, the word “infer” seems to have different meanings
for different speakers. For some speakers, it has roughly the same meaning as surmise or
conclude, as in
“I infer from what you say that you are sick”. For other speakers, it has roughly the same
meaning as imply, as in “He inferred that he was fed up with us”. The language of a
particular individual is referred to as that person’s idiolect, and it is clear that the
idiolectal meaning of a word can differ from one person to another. The following figure
summarizes the varieties of meaning we have been specifying.

Meaning

Linguistic meaning Speaker meaning

Language meaning Idiolect meaning Literal Non-literal

Dialect meaning Irony Sarcasm Metaphor

Regional Social
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At this point we might ask ourselves, How can so many varieties of meaning exist? Isn’t the case that
official dictionaries of a language tell what the meaning of word is? And isn’t it the case that the only
valid meanings for a word are those listed in the dictionary? In answering these questions, it is important
to recall the distinction between prescriptive and descriptive grammar. Current dictionaries of English
derive from a tradition of prescriptive grammar and have focused on the written language. But there are
numerous words and uses of words in current spoken, informal English that do not appear in
dictionaries. From a prescriptive point of view, these unlisted words and uses might be termed
“incorrect, or improper”. From a descriptive point of view, however, the spoken language forms a
central source of data for linguistic theory, and linguists are very much concerned discovering meaning
properties and relations in forms of spoken language actually used by speakers (rather than forms of
language that prescriptive grammar dictates speakers ‘should’ use). Hence although dictionaries might
be useful in providing certain basic definitions of common words, they do not reflect accurately enough
the meaning and variation in meaning of words in current use in everyday spoken language. And even
where they are useful, they assume that the reader is already familiar with all the words used in the
definition, which eventually appear in other definitions.

Chapter two: WHAT IS MEANING?

Historically, the most compelling idea concerning meaning has been that meaning is some sort of entity
or thing. After all, we speak of words as ‘having’ a meaning, as meaning ‘something’, as having the
‘same’ meaning, as meaning the same’ thing’ , as ‘sharing’ the same meaning , as having many
‘meanings’, and so forth. What sort of entity or thing is meaning? Or, What do I know when I say that I
know ‘a dog’? Different answers to these questions give us a selection of different conceptions of
meaning, and a selection of different types of semantic theory.
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Equative Approach to Meaning

1. Ostension:
It is the ability to point at something which is physical so as to show that you know
the meaning of a word. For the word ‘bank’ for example, you point at the building, the
side of a river; you can even do the action of banking your money. For the word
‘computer, you can point at the material. But this approach to meaning has limitations.
How can it account for words such as belief, happiness, joy, anxiety, sadness etc? It
cannot account for all words we know in a language.

2. Dictionary:
Some people can say that they know meanings of words because they read them in the
dictionary. For them, lexicographers are the custodians of meanings; they can make the
meaning easy. The main weakness of this approach is that lexicographers presuppose that
the individual knows the meanings of the words used in the explanation of each entry but
it is not what the majority of readers experience.

3. Referential Theory of Meaning

If one focuses on just some of the expressions in language- for instance, proper names
such as Mandela, Germany – one is likely to conclude that their meaning is the thing they
refer to.
For convenience, let us formulate this conception of meaning as follows: The meaning
of each expression is the actual object it denotes, its denotation.
Though we use language to talk about the world, there are serious problems with the
identification of meaning as denotation.
For instance, if we believe that the meaning of an expression is its denotation, we are
committed to at least the following claims:
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a. If an expression has meaning, then it follows that it must have a

denotation.
b. If two expressions have the same denotation, then they have the same
meaning.
c. Anything that is true of the denotation of an expression is true of its
meaning.

Each of these claims is wrong. For instance (a) requires that for any
expression having a meaning there is an actual object that it denotes. What,
for instance, is the actual object denoted by such expression as Pegasus (the
flying horse), the, empty, and, hello, very and Leave the room?
( b). This says that if two expressions denote the same object, then they mean
the same thing; that is, they are synonymous. But many expressions that can
be correctly used to denote a single object do not mean the same thing. For
instance, the morning star, the evening star, and Venus all denote the same
planet, but they are not synonymous, as can be seen by the fact that the
morning star is the last star seen in the morning and the evening star is the
first star seen at night.
(c). As far as we know, Sir Edmund Hillary was the first European to climb
Mt. Everest, and as a consequence he was knighted by the Queen of
England. But by (c) we must conclude that it is the meaning of the words the
first European to climb Mt. Everest that climbed Mt. Everest and was
knighted by the queen. Since this seems absurd, we conclude instead that the
denotation theory has to be either rejected or modified in some significant
way. The other point is that the theory does not take into account abstract
objects. According to it, any expression without a referent is meaningless.
Among the weaknesses of this theory one can mention the following:
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a) It does not take into account the meaning of abstract things,

b) Any expression without a referent is meaningless.
Proof of Non-Identity
The identification of meaning with referent is untenable. For example,
consider the fruit “apples and their meanings”. Meanings are not apples.
Apples can be eaten but meanings cannot or meanings can be learned but
apples cannot. So, the meanings and the referents are two different things. If
two things are identical, they must have the same property.
Frege’s refutation of the referential theory is that two expressions with the
same referent do not necessarily have the same meaning; or identity of
reference is not a sufficient condition for identity of meaning. For example,
The phrase” the morning star and the evening star” both refer to the same
thing: the planet Venus. But they do not mean the same. If they did, the
following sentence:
“The morning star is the evening star” would mean the same as “the
morning star is the morning star, yet the latter is analytic and uninformative
while the former expresses an unobvious empirical truth about the universe.

Another example to consider: An expression like “ this book” can be used to

refer to different objects but it is not true that “this book” has a great many
different meanings. “This book” can be used to refer to a book, but “book”
by itself cannot. Its connection with reference is that it can be combined with
certain other elements to form noun phrases which do have referents, but this
is different from saying that “book” itself has a referent.
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4. Ideational Theory of Meaning or Mentalist Theory of Meaning

If meanings are not actual objects, perhaps they are mental objects. Even if
there is no flying horse for Pegasus to denote, there is surely such an idea,
and may be this idea is the meaning of Pegasus. A typical example of this view
can be seen in the
following quotation from Glucksberg and Danks (1974: 50): “The set of
possible meanings of any given word is the set of possible feelings,
images ,
ideas, concepts, thoughts, and inferences that a person might produce
when
that word is heard or processed”. As with the denotational theory, this
conception of meaning can be formulated as ‘The meaning of each
expression
is the idea (or ideas) it gives rise to in the minds of speakers’.

This theory has a number of weaknesses. First of all, the notion of an idea is
too vague to allow the theory to predict anything specific and thus the
theory
is not testable. If we sharpen the notion of an idea by saying that ideas are
mental
images, the theory might work for words like Eiffel Tower or Karisimbi
Mountain, but it is not obvious how it would work for the word ‘beer’ for
example, which gives rise to numerous pictures such as: Primus, Stella,
Mutzig, Ikigage, Amstel, Urwagwa, Bell, Plisner, etc and in different
minds
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and at the same time. So, we need a typical image to be precise. Secondly,
not
all words give rise to mental images or refer to something. What images
are
the meanings of words such as only, and, hello? Worse still, can the theory
apply to units larger than the words, such as the sentence’ She speaks
English
and Kiswahili’. Thirdly, an expression can give rise to concepts or pictures
which are meaningless. How do you figure out the picture of ‘elm tree’
when
you hear it? Which picture do you get when you say or hear the word
‘only’?
Furthermore, it is not clear what concept would be assigned to a sentence,
though sentences are clearly meaningful.
5. Meaning as Sense
Frege (1982) argued that ideas cannot be meaning since ideas are subjective
and fleeting whereas meaning is objective and stable- we use language to
pass
on information from generation to generation. And denotations are not
enough
because if language consisted only of form and denotation, then an identity
sentence such as the following would carry the same information.
a. a=a (the Morning Star is (=) the Morning Star)
b. a=b (the Morning Star is (=) the Evening Star)
Frege said that (b) does not convey the same information as (a), since one can
believe the first but not even be aware of the second. Frege’s solution was to
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propose that all referring expressions with a denotation also have what he
calls
sense- a way that the denotation is presented or known to the language
user. For
instance, you might know a person as “the lady who lives next door” without
knowing her as “the principal of Martha Graham Elementary School.”

6. Meaning as behavioral response

Behavioral theory of meaning says that the meaning of an expression is the
behavioral response it evokes. Put simply, the way you react to a stimulus is the
meaning of the expression. This theory is neither perfect. The identity of stimulus
situation does not guarantee identity in linguistic behavior. Secondly, differences
between stimulus situations do not invariably correlate with differences of
linguistic
behavior. Finally, meanings are not stimuli or responses. Let us have an example:
An utterance of the expression “Help!” is typically provoked by danger and the
typical response is to rush to the aid of the speaker. But the meaning of “Help!” is
not danger. Danger can be mild or acute; but meaning can be none of these.

7. Use Theory of Meaning

The idea that meaning should be explained in terms of use was introduced by
Wittgenstein (1933). He says that “the meaning of a word is its use in the
language.”
In other words, the meaning of an expression is determined by its use in the
language community, and to specify that use is to specify its meaning.
Wittgenstein
says that language is integrated into our behavior and our interactions with others
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in an intimate way. We use language to give commands, to answer questions, to

agree each other, to argue, etc. So language is a tool like a hammer. So the
Characterization of an expression must include an account of how it is used and
what it is used for. This theory does not suffer all the weaknesses of the previous
“entity” theories of meaning. The immediate advantage of the Use Theory is that
it

appears not to exclude any class of meaningful expressions. Words like “if, for,
the,
an, hello, etc which have no referent or evoke mental images or characteristic
responses are considered because they do have use. The main problems with the
Use theory of meaning are:
a) The notion of a use is too broad to be useful: it does not limit the usage.
b) Synonymous words have different meanings because of different uses.
e.g: rabbit / bunny / hare
ripe / mature
piss / urinate
shit / feces / stool / excreta
c) The theory cannot explain ambiguities or differentiate antonyms. For example:

Tolerate
Bear produce
Animal

This theory equates the meaning and use and therefore cannot show these three
meanings.
d) It can neither explain the ironical and literal meanings.
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A sexually attractive woman. E .g: John’s girlfriend is quite a

fox.
A fox A wild animal belonging to the dog family
Clever and good at deceiving people. So humans are compared
to
them.
e.g Some Presidents are very crafty, just like a fox .
Are you sure you can trust him – he is such a cunning / sly/
wild
fox.

8. Verification theory of meaning

‘The meaning of a proposition is its method of verification”( Schlick 1936). This theory deals in the
meaning of the whole sentence: the meanings of other expressions are characterized indirectly in
terms of their contribution to the meanings of the sentence in which they appear.
The theory is restricted to the meanings of declarative sentences since it relates the meaning of a
sentence to its use in stating something true or false about the world.
Example sentences:
1. The grass is green T / F
2. It is raining T/F
All these can be verified, but as Schlick says the identification of meaning with the method of
verification leads to absurdities because the meaning of “ It is raining” is not putting one’s hand out
of the window or calling the weather bureau. So the meaning of a sentence in the future is not a
matter of waiting for the occurrence of the event it describes.
3. “God exists” is an analytic expression and is a proposition which cannot be verified or
tested.
This theory suffers from a lot of weaknesses:
- Not all expressions can be verified.
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- The theory is limited to synthetic expressions only.

- It focuses on primary use of language.
- Many methods of verification would bring about a lot of meanings.
- It presupposes absurdities. Ex: The river is deep.

9. Meaning as Speech Acts

It has been argued that to specify the speech acts for which a sentence is used is to specify the
meaning of that sentence. There are three kinds of speech acts.
1. A LOCUTIONARY ACT
It is an act of uttering a sentence with a particular sense and referents for the terms it contains. It is
an act of saying something, of making an assertion. For example: He said to me , “Shoot her !”
meaning by ‘shoot’ shoot and referring by ‘her’ to her.

2. AN ILLOCUTIONARY ACT
It is an act performed IN saying something. For example in asking a question, in giving a warning, in
making a prediction etc… He urged me to shoot her.( advised, ordered etc).

3. A PERLOCUTIONARY ACT
This is an act of persuading someone to do something, of annoying someone, of bringing someone to
his senses. It is an act performed BY saying something.
e.g.: He persuaded me to shoot her.
If you do not shoot her, she will spill the beans.
Shooting her would please Mother.
Two sentences can be used to perform the same locutionary act if they have the same meaning
(sense) and two sentences have the same meaning if they can be used to perform the same
locutionary act.
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Grice reformulated the meaning of perlocutionary theory of meaning in terms of intentionality. Grice
argued that a speaker A meant something by an utterance of an expression X is to say something
like:
A intended the utterance of X to produce some effect in his audience. To say what A meant is to
specify the intended effect. An important condition is that the effect produced in the hearer should be
at least partly ascribable to his recognition of the speaker’s intention to produce that effect.
Grice rests his analysis on the intentions with which speakers utter sentences. He has also based his
theory on how we often succeed in meaning more than we actually say. He then outlined the maxims
of conversation = the cooperative principle. Grice’s theory of utterer’s meaning offers explanation of
what it is for a sentence to have meaning.
“The meaning of an expression X is a matter of what effects speakers intend to bring in hearers by
uttering X and the hearer must recognize the effect.”

This theory exhibits some weaknesses:

- The theory throws no light on the conventional aspect of meaning. This is because the meaning
of a linguistic expression is a matter of the conventions in the language community, it is not
typically determined by a speaker’s intentions.
- The most familiar attempt to illuminate the nature of meaning by reference to speech acts is
founded on illocutionary acts such as warning, asking, ordering. But meanings do not correlate
with any illocutionary acts because acts are specific, dateable events.
- The identity conditions on meanings correlate with the conditions on range of illocutionary act
types. Ex: “Shoot that old lady!” differs in meaning from “Shoot her!” because the meaning of
the former is specific. And this correlates with the fact that it can be used for a narrower range of
illocutionary acts. Thus, the relation between the meanings of two expressions does not seem to
be paralleled by the relation between the ranges of illocutionary acts for which they are
standardly used.
There are other two theories:
Meaning as truth according to which “ the meaning of an expression is its truth conditions”.
Possible world theory of meaning according to which “the meaning of an expression is its extension
in all possible worlds”.
There is also the Non-Reductionist Theory of meaning.
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Etc
In conclusion, it is fair to say that researchers do not have a very clear idea what meaning is. All of
the theories we have surveyed are in various states of disarray. The situation is not hopeless, as there
are still promising avenues of approach to this topic. As a student, you should not be deterred by
present limitations on understanding.

Chapter Three: Scope of a Semantic Theory

This chapter indicates that there are facts for a semantic theory to describe, and it leads us to
consider what kinds of information are central to the description of the semantics of a language. The
focus is going to be put on Meaning Properties, Meaning Relations, Meaning Properties and
Relations, Truth Properties and Truth Relations.

A. Meaning Properties
There are a lot of meaning properties of words but we are going to focus on four of them. Perhaps
the central semantic property of words is the property of being meaningful or being meaningless.
Any adequate account of the lexicon of a language must specify the meaningful words of the
language and must represent the meaning of those words in some fashion. For example, at the very
least, an adequate account of the English lexicon must tell us that procrastinate means ‘put things
off’, bachelor means ‘unmarried adult male’, mother means ‘female parent’, and so on. In learning
our native language, we obviously learn a large set of words that we know to be meaningful in the
language, and at the same time we come to distinguish between meaningful words and meaningless
expressions. Here our earlier distinction between linguistic meaning and speaker meaning is crucial
– how could a description of a language anticipate all the things a speaker might mean in uttering an
expression from it on some occasion?
Another important semantic property of words is ambiguity, in particular what is referred to as
lexical ambiguity. Look at the following illustrations:
a. He found a bat.
( bat: baseball bat; flying rodent )
b. She couldn’t bear children.
( bear: give birth to; put up with )
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In each case, the italicized word is ambiguous in that it has more than one meaning. The ability to detect
ambiguity is crucial in the communicative process, and successful communication can depend on both
speaker and hearer recognizing the same meaning for a potentially ambiguous word.

The third property is polysemy, which is often defined as the property of having more than one related
meaning. Thus, ‘table’ can mean a certain kind of furniture, or it can be the act of putting an item at a
meeting on hold, e.g: She tabled the motion. Someone may argue that these are two different words
because the same word cannot be both a noun and verb, and so there are no relations here between the
meanings of a word. Still, there are examples of relations between the meanings of words from a single
syntactic category. For instance, Time can be bought for one dollar or 35million dollars; the first is
something you can read and later start a fire with, the second is a particular company that produces the
magazine you just read. Such polysemy can give rise to a special ambiguity, e.g: He left the bank five
minutes ago, He left the bank five years ago. Sometimes dictionaries use history to decide whether a
particular entry is a case of one word with two related meanings or two separate words, but this can be
tricky. Even though pupil ( eye) and pupil ( student) are historically linked, they are as intuitively as
unrelated as bat (implement) and bat (animal).

Another important semantic property of words, in particular words put together into phrases, is anomaly.
An expression is anomalous when the meanings of its individual words are incompatible.
a. gradually plummet
b. colorless green idea
c. dream diagonally
Of course, it is almost always possible to impose a meaning on such expressions – certain forms of
poetry demand that the reader impose a meaning on anomalous expressions. For example, to dream
diagonally might be taken to mean ‘to lie diagonally in a bed while dreaming’, but this is the result of a
special and forced interpretation, which speakers could argue at length. The point is that the above
expressions have no conventional interpretation in English. It is important to notice that a semantically
anomalous expression can nevertheless be syntactically well formed (e.g., colorless green idea is formed
on a regular syntactic pattern of English exemplified by phrases such as colorful red flower ), and this
may be a major factor that makes it feasible for speakers to invent meanings for such anomalous
expressions.
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B. Meaning Relations

Not only do words have meaning properties, they also bear various meaning relations to one another.
Just as words can be related morphologically by word formation rules, so they can also be related
semantically, and words related by virtue of meaning form subgroups within the lexicon of a language.

The first central meaning relation is synonymy, or ‘sameness’ of meaning or identity of meaning.
Thus, we say that automobile is synonymous with car, plane (in one of its senses) is synonymous with
aircraft, kid ( in one of its senses ) is synonymous with child, and so on. Synonymy is a relation that
structures the lexicon of a language into sets of words sharing a meaning. However, it is doubtful
whether there are lexemes in a language which can be regarded as completely identical in meaning. As a
consequence, linguists often distinguish different types of synonymy, and among these, cognitive
synonymy can be defined in terms of entailment, as in the following statement where S(L) means that L
occurs in a sentential context S:
Lexemes L1 and L2 are cognitive synonyms if and only if S(L1)entails S(L2) and S(L2) entails S(L1)
To illustrate, consider the pair of lexemes HORSE and STEED (a horse which is ridden). These are
cognitive synonyms because if we consider a sentential context such as Sir Lancelot rode a white …both
entailments obtain:

a. Sir Lancelot rode a white horse’ entails ‘Sir Lancelot rode a white steed’
b. ‘Sir Lancelot rode a white steed’ entails ‘Sir Lancelot rode a white horse’
Obviously, synonymous lexemes exhibit considerable overlap of meaning.

Words may also be homophonous; that is, they may have identical pronunciation but be different
words with different meanings. An often- cited example of homophony is the word bank referring to the
side of a river, versus the word bank referring to a financial institution. Homophonous words often have
distinct spellings in the written language, such as Mary, marry, and merry. Of course, certain questions
immediately arise. Is there a single word bank with two distinct meanings? Or are there two distinct, but
homophonous words, each with a single meaning? It is no means easy to resolve such issues, and we can
provide no firm solution here.
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The third meaning relation is meaning inclusion or hyponymy.

Let us start by an illustration.
a. The meaning of sister includes the meaning of female
b. The meaning of murder includes the meaning of illegal
c. The meaning of kill includes the meaning of dead
When we put the words together that are related by meaning inclusion, we derive expressions that are
redundant (such as female sister, illegal murder, she killed him dead).

Even if two expressions are not synonymous and the meaning of one does not include the meaning of
the other, they still may be semantically related in that they overlap, or share some aspect of meaning.
For example:
a. Father, uncle, bull, and stallion all express the property “male”.
b. Say, speak, whisper, yell, shout, and scream all express the property “vocalization”.
c. Fortunately, luckily, happily, and fortuitously all express the property “good for” something or
someone.
Groups of words in the lexicon can be semantically related by being members of a set known as
semantic field. We can say that the words in a semantic field, though not synonymous, are used to talk
about the same general phenomenon, and there is meaning inclusion relation between the items in the
field and the field category itself. Classical examples of semantic fields include color terms (red, green,
blue, yellow), kinship terms (mother, father, sister, brother), and cooking terms ( boil, fry bake, broil,
steam). The notion of semantic field can be extended intuitively to any set of terms with a close relation
in meaning. Thus, in addition to the specific semantic fields cited, we could also refer to labels such as
nautical terms, plant names, animal names, automobile terms, and so on, specifying semantic field. It is
difficult to be very precise about what counts as a semantic field. Do all time words form a semantic
field? How about wearing apparel for the feet? Although there have been interesting attempts to make
the notion of semantic field more precise ( Katz1972, Miller and Johnson-Laird1976 and Grandy 1987),
so far they have not created much consensus for research. The kinds of semantic fields we find in the
 22

lexicon of any given language, i.e., the kinds of general labels that define the particular semantic fields,
may vary from culture to culture.

Hyponymy and Entailment

Let us consider some simple examples of entailment relations, which will help us to understand how the
lexicon might be structured. That (a) examples entail (b) examples is uncontroversial:
a. The thing in the cage is a lion
b. The thing in the cage is an animal

a. The thing in the grass is a snake

b. The thing in the grass is a reptile

a. The thing in the tree is a sparrow

b. The thing in the tree is a bird

In each case, what we have is a relation of entailment between pairs of sentences which is due to the
presence of particular pairs of words: lion and animal, snake and reptile, and, sparrow and bird.
Focusing on the first pair, we can deduce the general schema as
‘X is a lion’ entails ‘X is an animal’ where X is an expression which identifies an individual, the
thing in the cage, Simba, etc.

When we find this situation, we say that lion is a hyponym of animal. Equivalently lion and animal are
in the semantic relationship of hyponymy, sometimes referred to as meaning inclusion. On the basis of
the second and the third pairs, we can also assert that snake is the hyponym of reptile and sparrow is a
hyponym of bird. Looking at the semantic relation from the converse perspective, we say that animal,
reptile and bird are superordinates of lion, snake and sparrow respectively. A very straightforward test
for many examples of hyponymy is to use the following phrase: An X is a kind / type of Y
 23

Thus, a lion is a type of animal, a snake is a type of reptile, a sparrow is a type of bird, etc.

An important property of hyponymy is that it is ‘a one – way’ relation. Thus, while a. entails b. in each
pair, it is not the case that b. also entails a.. There are possible states of affairs in which a designated
creature is an animal without it being a lion, and relying on the above phrase of test, this corresponds to
the fact that an animal is not a type of lion. To put this another way, being an animal is a necessary
condition for being a lion; it is not, however, a sufficient condition.

Recognition of hyponymy as a semantic relation which holds between some words raises a number of
issues. First, we must recognize that as well as animal being a superordinate of lion, it is also itself a
hyponym of creature. As well as ‘X is a lion’ entails ‘X is an animal’ we have
‘X is an animal’ entails ‘X is a creature’
This means that for this part of the English lexicon, the taxonomy ( a structure in which we meet more
general terms as we ascend to higher levels) defined by the semantic relation of hyponymy is multiply
layered. The following is a part of this taxonomy:

Creature

Animal bird fish reptile

Lion dog cow sparrow eagle ostrich trout eel shark snake lizard newt

In the above chart for example, lion, dog, cow are co-hyponyms of the superordinate animal, which is a
co-hyponym of creature along with bird, fish and reptile.

It is readily apparent that this taxonomy can be further extended at certain points to include another
level. For instance, dog has spaniel, corgi, rottweiler, etc. and snake has cobra, viper, anaconda, etc. as
 24

co-hyponyms. However, this is not the case for all the items at the lowest level of the above chart ( e.g.
ostrich), and for other cases, extension of the taxonomy involves a resort to morphologically complex
forms such as white shark, blue shark, basking shark, etc.•

All the words appearing in the taxonomy in the chart are nouns. Do members of other word classes enter
into hyponymy relations? For verbs there are some clear instances. Consider the following two
examples:

a. X borrowed / stole / found / bought Y

b. X got Y

a. X walked / ran / staggered / crawled to Z

b. X moved to Z
In both cases, the various sentences in (a) entail the sentence in (b) : there is no possible state of affairs
in which someone can borrow something and not get it , etc., so we can justify the partial taxonomies as
follows:

Get

Borrow steal find buy

Move
 25

Walk run stagger crawl

Here , if we manipulate the syntax appropriately, we can easily come up with a formulation which
produces a simple test for whether a verb X is a hyponym of another verb Y. The following sentence
will serve this purpose:
X-ing is a sort of / type of Y-ing
The semantic relation of hyponymy must be distinguished from another semantic relation which is
illustrated by pairs such as the following.
a. body, arm
b. arm, elbow
c. house, roof
d. engine, carburetor
It is easy to see that the one- way entailment that we have seen to be characteristic of hyponymy does
not obtain for cases such as these .Thus, even the following tests do not obtain:
a. ‘X is a body’ entails ‘X is an arm’
b. ‘X is an arm’ entails ‘X is a body’

The relationship between arm and body is one whereby the objects to which they refer are in a part-
whole relation, and the term used for this relationship is meronymy. We also say that arm is a meronym
of body and that arm, leg, etc. are co-meronyms. It is important to note that it is possible to have
meronymic structures with more than one level, as the following:

Body

Arm leg

Elbow wrist knee ankle

 26

Note, however, that structures such as this are not to be confused with taxonomies- as we move up such
a structure, we encounter larger entities, not more general category.•

While large sections of the vocabulary of a language can be analyzed in terms of relations such as
hyponymy and meronymy, such analysis is not always straightforward. For instance, consider the
following set of verbs.
Think, believe, hope, wish, know, realize
These verbs (and the set could be extended) are known as propositional attitude verbs, i.e. they are all
used to express something about the nature of the attitude of someone to a particular proposition, and the
fact that they are labeled in this way indicates that they are perceived as having something in common
semantically. However, there is no verb in English which qualifies as a superordinate for members of
this class. In these circumstances, there is a lexical gap, and if we wished to represent the fact that these
verbs do form a natural set, we could use the following diagram where ф indicates the position of the
gap.•

Think believe hope wish know realize

The forth meaning relation is oppositeness. Oppositeness of meaning is a pervasive semantic relation
in the lexicons of human languages and it comes in several varieties. Consider the following pairs of
dimensional adjectives:
Tall-short; high-low; wide-narrow; fat-thin; old-young; old-new

We can readily agree that each of these pairs illustrates oppositeness of meaning, but it is worthwhile to
use our entailment relation to pursue the properties of such pairs in a little more detail. Thus, taking just
tall and short (the other pairs behave identically), we have the entailments which make explicit that these
are really semantic opposites:
a .‘X is tall’ entails ‘X is not short’
 27

b. ‘X is short’ entails ‘X is not tall’

Now, we might expect that these entailments could be reversed, but this is not the case.

a. ‘X is not short’ does not entail ‘X is tall’

b. ‘X is not tall’ does not entail ‘ X is short’
The reason for this is easy to see. If we imagine all of those objects which can be described using tall
and short, they fall into not two but three categories : there are tall things, there are short things and
there are things in between which are neither tall nor short. Pairs of opposites which behave like tall and
short with respect to entailment are known as antonyms and they exhibit the semantic relation of
antonymy. Other typical examples of words antonymy include the following:
a. small and large share the notion ‘ SIZE’ but differ in degree.
b. cold and hot share the notion ‘TEMPERATURE’ but differ in degree.

The sense in which words such as hot and cold are ‘opposites’ is not just that they are incompatible in
meaning. Many words are semantically incompatible in the sense that they cannot both be true of
something at the same time. For example, the words cat and dog are semantically incompatible ( they
cannot both be truly applied to the same thing at the same time); nevertheless, they are not ‘opposites’ in
the sense of being antonyms. The examples given above are antonyms essentially because there is a
scale containing the opposites at either end, with a midpoint between them:

________________________________________________________
Cold cool lukewarm warm hot

Thus, the words hot and cold can be said to be antonyms since they define the extremities of a scale ( of
temperature in this case) that has mid-interval between them ( in this case , represented by the word
lukewarm, a word which that can be to refer to things that are neither hot nor cold).

Remaining with adjective, opposite pairs such as the following behave rather differently to antonyms:
Open-closed (of a store); married-single; dead-alive; broken-unbroken
Here we find these entailments:
 28

a. ‘The store is open’ entails ‘The store is not closed’

b. ‘The store is closed’ entails ‘ The store is not open’

For this case, however, the converse entailments do obtain:

a. ‘ The store is not closed’ entails ‘The store is open’
b. ‘The store is not open’ entails ‘ The store is closed’

This reflects the facts that for a store, there is no state of being neither open nor closed. Opposites like
the above pairs are referred to as complementaries and the corresponding semantic relation is
complementarity.•

Other Lexical relations

Prototypes
While the words canary, cormorant, dove, duck, flamingo, parrot, pelican and robin are all
equally co-hyponyms of the superordinate bird, they are not all considered to be equally good
examples of the category “bird.” According to some researchers, the most characteristic instance
of the category “bird” is robin. The idea of “the characteristic instance” of a category is known as
the prototype. The concept of a prototype helps explain the meaning of certain words, like bird,
not in terms of component features (e.g. “has feathers,” “has wings”), but in terms of
resemblance to the clearest example. Thus, even native speakers of English might wonder if
ostrich or penguin should be hyponyms of bird (technically they are), but have no trouble
deciding about sparrow or pigeon. These last two are much closer to the prototype.

Given the category label furniture, we are quick to recognize chair as a better example than
bench or stool. Given clothing, people recognize shirts quicker than shoes, and given vegetable,
they accept carrot before potato or tomato. It is clear that there is some general pattern to the
categorization process involved in prototypes and that it determines our interpretation of word
meaning. However, this is one area where individual experience can lead to substantial variation
in interpretation and people may disagree over the categorization of a word like avocado or
 29

tomato as fruit or vegetable. These words seem to be treated as co-hyponyms of both fruit and
vegetable in different contexts.

Homophones and homonyms

When two or more different (written) forms have the same pronunciation, they are
described as homophones. Common examples are bare/bear, meat/meet, flour/
flower, pail/pale, right/write, sew/so and to/too/two.

We use the term homonyms when one form (written or spoken) has two or more
unrelated meanings, as in these examples:
bank (of a river) – bank (financial institution)
bat (flying creature) – bat (used in sports)
mole (on skin) – mole (small animal)
pupil (at school) – pupil (in the eye)
race (contest of speed) – race (ethnic group)
The temptation is to think that the two types of bank must be related in meaning. They
are not. Homonyms are words that have separate histories and meanings, but have
accidentally come to have exactly the same form.

MEANING PROPERTIES AND RELATIONS AT THE SENTENCE LEVEL

Since sentences are composed of words and phrases, we can expect that certain semantic properties and
relations of words and phrases will carry over to sentences as well. However, as traditional grammarians
put it, a sentence expresses a “complete thought”. This is not a very useful definition of a sentence, but it
does suggest that sentences have a unique function, and thus we might expect to find semantic properties
and relations that are distinctive to sentences, or expressions that are elliptical for sentences.

Among the meaning properties and relations of words and phrases that carry over to sentences are
ambiguity and synonymy:
 30

a. Synonymy
His pants were too small.
His pants were not big enough.
b. Ambiguity
She visited a little girl’s school.
Notice that in some cases the ambiguity of a sentence is caused by the ambiguity of a word in it, but
in other cases no particular word is ambiguous - ambiguity is due to structural relations in the

sentence. For example, in (b) above, it is not clear whether little modifies only the word girl or the
phrase girl’s school. As we can notice, speakers often disambiguate such sentences for their hearers
by using stress and pauses.

Ambiguity can give rise to humorous double meanings, especially when unintended, as in these
newspaper headlines:
DRUNK GETS NINE MONTHS IN VIOLIN CASE
IRAQI HEAD SEEKS ARMS
TEACHERS STRIKE IDLE KIDS
STOLEN PAINTING FOUND BY TREE

TRUTH PROPERTIES

Not only do expressions in a language have meaning and denotation, they are also used to say things
that are true or false. Of course no semantic theory can predict which sentences are used to say
something true and which are used to say something false, in part because truth and falsity depend
upon what is being referred to, and because the same words can be used in identical sentences to
refer to different things. Does this mean that the semantics of natural language cannot deal with truth
and falsity? The answer is no, because some truth properties and truth relations hold regardless of
reference, provided meaning is constant.

Consider first the property of being linguistically true (also called analytically true) or linguistically
false (also called contradictory). A sentence is linguistically true or false if its truth or falsehood is
 31

determined solely by the semantics of the language and it is not necessary to check any facts about
the non linguistic world in order to determine its truth or falsehood. A sentence is empirically true or
false if it not linguistically true or false – that is if it is necessary to check the world in order to verify
or falsify it; knowledge of the language alone does not settle the matter. Semantics is not concerned
to explain empirical truths or falsehoods, but it is concerned to explain those sentences that are
linguistically true or false. In each of the groups (15), (16) and (17) it is possible to determine truth
values without regard to the actual state of the world:
(15) a. Either it is raining here or it is not raining here. (T)
b. If John is sick and Mary is sick, then John is sick. (T)
c. It is raining here and it is not raining here. (F)
d. If John is sick and Mary is sick, then John is not sick. (F)

(16) a. All people that are sick are people. (T)

b. If every person is sick, then it is not true that no person is sick. (T)
c. Some people that are sick are not people. (F)
d. Every person is sick, but some person is not sick. (F)

(17)
a. If john is bachelor, then John is unmarried. (T)
b. If John killed the bear, then the bear died. (T)
c. If the car is red, then it has a color. (T)
d. John is a bachelor, but he is married. (F)
e. John killed the bear and it is still alive. (F)
f. The car is red, but it has no color. (F)

Again, knowing the language seems to be sufficient for knowing the truth or falsity of
these sentences, and this being so, the semantics of these sorts of sentences will be
relevant to a semantic theory that attempts to characterize the knowledge that speakers
have about their language.
 32

TRUTH RELATIONS

We have noted that there are truth relations as well as truth properties that fall within the scope of
semantics. The most central truth relation for semantics is entailment. One sentence S is said to entail
another sentence S’ when the truth of the first guarantees the truth of the second and the falsity of the
second guarantees the falsity of the first, as in the following pairs of sentences:

The car is red entails The car has a color.

a. The needle is too short entails The needle is not long enough.

We can see that the first sentence in each example is true, guarantees the truth of the second; and the
falsity of the second sentence in each example guarantees the falsity of the first.

Closely related to entailment is another truth relation, semantic presupposition. The basic idea
behind semantic presupposition is that the falsity of the presupposed sentence causes the
presupposing sentence not to have a truth value ( true or false ). Furthermore, both a sentence and its
denial have the same semantic presupposition. Although this truth relation is somewhat
controversial, the following typical examples of semantic presupposition in which both the positive
(a) and the negative (b) sentences have the same presupposition (c):

a. The present king of France is bold.

b. The present king of France is not bald.
c. There is a king of France.
 33

a. John realizes that his car has been stolen.

b. John does not realize that his car has been stolen.
c. John’s car has been stolen.

In sum, in addition to truth properties, there are at least two truth relations that an adequate semantic
theory must explain, namely, entailment and semantic presupposition.

GOALS OF A SEMANTIC THEORY

We now come to the question of the goals of a semantic theory. What should a semantic theory do,
and how?
The short answer to the first question is that a semantic theory should attribute to each expression in
the language the semantic properties and relations that it has; moreover, it should define those
properties and relations. Thus, if an expression is meaningful, the semantic theory should say so. If it
has a specific set of meanings, the semantic theory should specify them. If it is ambiguous, the
semantic theory should record that. Moreover, if two expressions are synonymous, if one entails the
other, the semantic theory should mark these semantic relations. We can organize these demands on
a semantic theory by saying that an adequate theory of a language must generate every true instance
of the following schemes for arbitrary expression E:

a. Meaning properties and relations

E means_______________.
E is meaningful.
E is ambiguous.
E is polysemous.
E is anomalous ( nonsense ).
E is redundant.
E and E’ are synonymous.
E and E’ are homonymous.
E includes the meaning of E’.
 34

E and E’ overlap in meaning.

E and E’ are antonymous.
E is literally used to______.
b. Truth properties and relations
E is linguistically true ( or false )
E is analytic.
E is contradictory.
E entails E’.
E semantically presupposes E’.

We can say in sum that the domain of a semantic theory is at least the set of properties and relations
listed under (a) above.
The second question concerning the goals of a semantic theory is, How should the theory handle these
semantic properties and relations? What kinds of constraints on a semantic theory are reasonable to
impose? We will note just two. First, it is generally conceded that even though a natural language
contains an infinite number of phrases and sentences, a semantic theory of a natural language should be
finite: people are capable of storing only a finite amount of information, but they nevertheless learn the
semantics of natural languages. The second constraint on a semantic theory of a natural language is that
it should reflect the fact that, except for idioms, phrases and sentences are compositional – in other
words, the meaning of a syntactically complex expression is determined by the meaning of its
constituents and their grammatical relations. Compositionality rests on the fact that a finite number of
familiar words and expressions can be combined in novel ways to form an infinite number of new
phrases and sentences; hence, a finite semantic theory that reflect compositionality can describe
meanings for an infinite number of complex expressions.

The existence of compositionality is most dramatic when compositional expressions are contrasted with
expressions that lack compositionality. In (a) below, the expression kick the bucket has two meanings:
a. John kicked the bucket.
b. John kicked the pail.
c. John died.
 35

One of the meanings of (a) is compositional: it is determined on the basis of the meaning of the words
and is synonymous with (b). The other meaning of (a) is idiomatic and can be paraphrased as (c).
Idiomatic meanings are not compositional in the sense of being determined from the meaning of the
constituent words and their grammatical relations. That is, one could not determine the idiomatic
meaning of (a) on the basis of the meaning of the words and recognizing familiar grammatical structure
– an idiomatic meaning must be learned separately as a unit. Idioms behave as though they were
syntactically complex words whose meaning cannot be predicted, since their syntactic structure is doing
no semantic work.

Semantic Features

The semantic relations we have introduced above are clearly important in suggesting that there may
well be links of different kinds between lexical entries, i.e., the lexicon in a grammar is more than
just a list of lexical entries. However, we have not sought to look inside a lexical entry and see how
semantic information is represented there. Let us attempt an answer to this problem.

A proposal which many linguists have found attractive over the years is that the meaning of a
lexeme should be decomposable into a set of semantic features. The best way to illustrate what this
involves is to immediately consider the following triples of words:

a. ram, ewe, lamb

b. bull, cow, calf
c. stallion, mare, foal

In these triples, the first two words are opposite and for concreteness we can regard them as
complementaries. However, they are not merely opposites: for each pair, it appears that the same
fundamental distinction underlies their oppositeness. This is the distinction of gender, so we might
propose a two-valued gender feature with values [ male ] and [ female ].
 36

Such a feature can then function as part of the meaning of a word, and our intuition that ram differs
in meaning from ewe in the same way as does bull from cow and stallion from mare is now
explicated: the distinction in each case comes down to the presence of [ male ] and [ female ] in the
presentation of the word’s meanings.

Now, consider the relationship between ram and ewe, on the one hand, and lamb on the other. We
have not offered a name for this semantic relationship, but this does not matter, since all we need to
recognize is that it is the same relationship as that obtaining between the pair bull and cow and the
single word calf, and of course this observation can be extended to ( c ) in the items above. Again,
we can then propose a two-valued ‘maturity’ feature with values [ adult ] and [ non-adult ], with the
former being part of the meaning of ram, ewe, bull, stallion and mare and the latter part of the
meaning of lamb, calf and foal. Proceeding in this fashion, we can begin to build up representation
of the meanings of our lexical items, as indicated below.

a. ram - [ male, adult,….]

b. ewe – [ female, adult,….]
c. lamb – [ non-adult, ….]
The function of the lexicon is to provide the information we need for each word of the language
concerning its role in meaning interpretation. The word has a grammatical portion and a
semantic portion. The grammatical portion tells us whether the word is a noun, a verb, adjective,
adverb…etc. The semantic portion of the lexicon provides us with semantic components of each
word.To illustrate this, we should study the following examples:

Man= + human + male + adult

Woman= + human –male + adult
Child= + human ± male – adult
Bull= + bovine + male + adult
Cow = + bovine – male + adult
Calf= + bovine ± male –adult
Ram = ovine + male + adult
Ewe= ovine– male + adult
Lamb= + ovine ± male – adult
Stallion= + equine + male+ adult
Mare= + equine – male + adult
Foal= + equine ± male – adult
 37

On the basis of these semantic markers, the meaning of these words can be
distinguished. Here the lexicon specifies the selectional restrictions applicable to each word.
They help the user of language why a particular expression in a language is semantically
anomalous. For example, green ideas sleep, is anomalous because we know that “green” has the
feature+ physical object and “ideas” has the feature –physical object, so the meaning of these
two words together is anomalous in standard English. Similarly, the word “sleep” has the feature
+ animate and it is the incompatibility of the selectional restriction between these two words that
makes the sentence “ideas sleep” a semantically anomalous expression. The selectional
restrictions help us in choosing one of the two or more meanings of a particular word in a
sentence, for example, the word ball has two different meanings. It means “a round physical
object” and it also means “ a dance”. If we have a semantic like, “Murad kicked the ball”, we
choose the meaning “round physical object” based on sectional restrictions. The verb “kicked”
can only take an object which has the feature + physical object. The word “ball” in the sense of
dance has the feature – physical object.
In the latter example, lamb does not of course have either [female] or [male] in its semantic
representation, as it is not gender specific. There are a number of reasons why this general program
might be attractive. Let us have a look at two of them.

……………………………………………………………………