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Introduction to linguitics

Lecture 5: Semantics

Source

• Crystal, David. The Cambridge Encyclopaedia

of language, pp. 100-106.

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Semantics

• The study of meaning in language.

– For some linguists meaning is the most important

aspect of language.

• Semantics may concentrate on the meaning

of words (

lexical semantics

)

• or on such matters as sense, reference,

presupposition and implication (

logical

semantics

).

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Meaning

• But defining the term ˮmeaning” is not easy.

– Ogden and Richards in their book The Meaning of

Meaning (1923) distinguished 16 different
meanings of the term, e.g.:

– 'intend'

: I mean to be there.

– 'suggest, foretell'

: That cloud can mean thunder.

– 'signify'

: What does 'calligraphy' mean?

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Meaning

• When you hear/read the word

hen

, you think

of a particular bird.

– The mental representation of the word

hen

is the

meaning

of the word.

– The animal in the world that you can meet is the

referent

of the word hen.

• The word

hen

is a

sign

that allows us to

connect the meaning and the referent

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Thought of the

referent

(abstract concept)

Sign (a word,

icon or sounds)

Referent (real

world object)

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Types of meaning

• Sense

– the central (literal) meaning of a

word.

– The sense of

cat

is: carnivorous animal, with 4

legs, fangs, claws and excellent eyesight.

• Sense is often contrasted with

reference

- the

relation between a word and something in the
real world.

– E.g.

ˮThe board in this room is green

.” – board

refers to the flat surface on the class wall.

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Sense vs. reference

• Sense and reference are both parts of

meaning, but:

1. A word with a unique sense may have

different referents in the real world, e.g.

chair

(

one sense, many referents

)

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Sense vs. reference

2. The same referent may be pointed to by different

words, each with different senses (

one referent,

many senses

), e.g.:

Sense 1: a Polish
philosopher

Sense 2: professor of
ethics at the WU

Sense 3: a feminist
author

Sense 4: Magdalena
Środa

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Sense vs. reference

3. All words have sense but not necessarily

reference (

sense, no reference

), e.g.

– ˮThere’s a

dragon

in my kitchen!”

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Sense vs. reference

4. Can there be a situation in which there is

reference but no sense?

– Do you know how this thing is called?

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Durian

Connotative meaning

• Connotation

– a type of word meaning (apart

from its sense) acquired by associations.

– the emotional associations suggested by the word

• E.g.

rugby

– Its central sense: ‘a particular type of football’.

• But, depending on your experience of rugby,

you may have such associations as:

– ‘large men’, ‘manliness’, ‘boorish and bawdy

behaviour’, etc.

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Organizing vocabulary

• into fields of meaning (

semantic fields

):

– sets of words grouped by meaning.

• Within a field, words are interrelated:

– words for parts of the body (

head, shoulders,

knees, toes

, etc.), colour terms, or verbs of

perception – these are examples of semantic
fields.

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Semantic fields

• The semantic field of a given word changes

over time (

semantic shift

):

– In the past, the English word man meant ‘human

being’. Today it means ‘a human male’.

• Semantic fields can overlap when words have

multiple meanings.

– Such words are often untranslatable, especially

with all their connotations.

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Semantic fields

• Semantic fields are useful in translation,

professional writing or solving crosswords.

• For a linguist they are rather useless, because

they give no information about sense relations
between words.

• A better analysis of word meanings involves

sense relations.

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Sense relations

• Synonymy

– two words have similar

definitions (are very close in sense), e.g.

– adult

vs

grown-up

– But perfect synonymy (identical definitions) are

hard to find.

• Antonymy

– relation of opposition or contrast:

– Non-gradable antonymy:

dead/alive, female/male

– Gradable antonymy:

hot/warm/tepid/cool/cold

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Sense relations

• Polysemy

– one lexical item has more than one

definition, e.g.:

– plain

= 'clear', 'unadorned', 'obvious', etc.

• Homonymy

– two words with different meanings

have the same pronunciation, e.g.:

– pupil, bank

.

• Hyponymy

: word X is a more specific instance of

word Y, e.g.:

– dog

is a hyponym of

animal

.

– animal

is a hyperonym of

dog

.

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