SemanticsSemantics

CONCEPTIONS OF CONCEPTIONS OF MEANINGMEANING

Meaning: words things

Chair

Car

Desk

Traditional concept since Plato

Meaning: words concepts things

Thought

ReferentSymbolOgden and Richards, 1923

Denies a direct link between words and things, arguing that the relationship can be made only through the use of our minds. For every word, there is an associated concept. This approach was criticized due to the difficulty to identify “concepts” for some words.

Desk

"a piece of furniture a flat top and four legs, at which one reads and writes"

Stimuli words responsesLeonard Bloomfield’s view (1933) is that something can be deduced solely from a study of the situation in which speech is used:

S - - - - - - - - - - - - - -> r . . . . . . . . . . . . s - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -> RThe stimulus

(S)Leads

someone to speak

(r)

Speech (s) The response (R)

is the result of (s)

Traditional vs. Modern Linguistics

Words “have meaning”, we can examine the meaning of individual words and sentences, but there is no meaning beyond that

Meaning is studied by making detailed analyses of the way words are used in specific contexts.

“The meaning of a word is its use in the language”

Ludwing Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

G. Leech in a more moderate tone recognizes 7 types of meaning his Semantics (p. 23), first published in 1974, as follows:

• Conceptual meaning: Logical, cognitive, or denotative content (what the words refers to)

• Connotative meaning: What is communicated by virtue of what language refers to.

• Social meaning: What is communicated of the social, circumstances of language use.

• Reflected meaning: What is communicated through association with another sense of the same expression.

• Collocative meaning: What is communicated through association with words which tend to occur in the environment of another word.

• Thematic meaning: What is communicated by the way in which the message is organized in terms of order and emphasis.

• Affective meaning: What is communicated of the feelings and attitudes of the speaker/writer.

Sense vs. ReferenceConnotation

Refers to the abstract properties of an entity

Sense = concept

"a piece of furniture with a flat top and four legs, at which one reads and writes"

denotation

concrete entities

The referential theory

The idea is that linguistic expressions have the meanings they do because they stand for things; what they mean is what they stand for. On this view, words are like labels; they are symbols that represent, designate, name, denote or refer to items in the world: the name “Adolf Hitler” denotes (the person) Hitler.

Objections to the theory

• Objection 1: Not every word does name or denote any actual object.

First, there are the “names” of nonexistent items like Pegasus or the Easter Bunny. “Pegasus” does not denote anything, because there is in reality no winged horse for it to denote.

• Objection 2: According to the Referential theory, a sentence is a list of names. But a mere list of names does not say anything.

Fred Martha Irving Phyllis

• Objection 3: There are specific linguistic phenomena that seem to show that there is more to meaning than reference. In particular, coreferring terms are often not synonymous; that is, two terms can share their referent but differ in meaning -- “John Paul” and “the Pope,” for example.

To some extent, we can say every word has a sense, i.e. some conceptual content, otherwise we will not be able to use it or understand it. But not every word has a reference. Grammatical words like but, if, and do not refer to anything. And words like God, ghost and dragon refer to imaginary things, which do not exist in reality.

It is not convenient to explain the meaning of a word in terms of the thing it refers to. The thing a word stands for may not always be at hand at the time of speaking. Even when it is nearby, it may take the listener some time to work out its main features. For example, chair:

Sense vs. Reference

Should we study meaning in terms of “sense” or “reference”?

Semantic Space

C. E. Osgood, G. Suci, 7 P. Tannenbaum, The measurement of Meaning (1957). Studied “affective” meaning – the emotional reactions attached to a word through a game called “20 questions”

“20 questions”Locate the concept “polite”“polite” in one point in the scale:

WeakRoughActiveSmallColdGoodTenseWet

StrongSmoothPassive LargeHotBadRelaxedDry

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

“20 questions”Locate the concept “MAN”“MAN” in one point in the scale:

WeakRoughActiveGoodTenseFast

StrongSmoothPassive BadRelaxedSlow

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Semantic Structure:Words or Lexemes?Words or Lexemes?

Walk, walks, walking, walkedThese four “words” are variants of the same “word”

These four words are variants of the “lexeme” WALK

Semantic Structure:Words or Lexemes?

The term “word” is useless for the study of idioms. One idiom is a unit of meaning:

Kick the bucket = “die” (it has ONE single unit of meaning)

“kick the bucket” (this lexeme contains three words)

Semantic fields(A way to impose some order to vocabulary)

Vocabulary is usually organized into “fields” of meaning. Within each field, lexemes interrelate and define each other in specific ways:

House

Basement Ground floor First floor

Laundry Garage kitchen bedrooms

Practice

Organize these words in semantic fields, add more if necessary:

Living – vegetable – animal – human – tree – plant – flower – bird – fish – animal – insect