Transcript Lecture1
Lecture 1
Ling 442
What is meaning?
• Meaning – what the speaker wants to convey
• Literal meaning vs. pragmatic meaning
(1)I forgot the paper.
Literal meaning: Some relevant info about “the
paper” disappeared from the memory of the
speaker.
Pragmatic meaning: My hypothesis is wrong.
(See the text for a scenario.)
What is meaning (for this class)?
• We mainly focus on literal meaning or
concrete meaning = denotation, reference
(semantics in the narrow sense)
• In Chapter 1 we cover pragmatics/pragmatic
meaning: implicatures, presuppositions, etc.
Frege and reference/sense
• The President of US is the President of US
obviously true (tautology)
• The president of US is the Commander in
Chief of the US Armed Forces not obviously
true. Something called contingency (or
synthetic statement)
• What we could say about the intuition?
Frege’s solution
• Here is one possible account: A = B stated in a
circumstance w is true if and only if the
extension of A in w is the same as the
extension of B
• ⟦A is B⟧ = true iff the reference of A is the
same as the reference of B.
• This still allows us to say that the sense of A is
not the same as the sense of B.
Frege’s point (big picture)
• The “literal meaning” of some expression A
(forgetting about the pragmatic meaning of A)
has two different layers/levels:
• [1] reference (or extension/denotation) --what A actually refers to (in a particular
situation), concrete meaning
• [2] sense (or intension) --- what A means in
various situations, abstract meaning
Syntax vs. Semantics
• Syntax deals with syntactic intuitions
(grammaticality judgments)
(1) * Likes Mary Sue. (ungrammatical)
• Semantics deals with semantic intuitions (e.g.
entailment judgments, judgments about truth
conditions, etc.) (2) entails (3).
(2) Mary and Bill arrived.
(3) Mary arrived.
Natural Language Semantics
• We investigate the semantic properties of
natural language in a compositional way.
• The idea: The meaning of Mary loves Bill is
contributed by the meaning of each
expression and is arrived at by the rules that
put their meanings together. (We take syntax
seriously.)
Names/Predicates
• Names denote entities
• Adjectives, nouns, intransitive verbs denote
groups (or sets) of entities
E.g. dog denotes {x | x is a dog} (the set of all
dogs)
Truth values / truth conditions
• A sentence denotes a truth value
(1) Mary is in Seattle
(1) Is true if and only if the person Mary is
among those who are located in Seattle.
Semantic relations/notions
• Contradiction
• Analytic statement = Tautology
• Synthetic statement = Contingency
Ambiguity types
• Lexical ambiguity
bank (river bank vs. financial institution)
• Structural ambiguity
The spy saw the cop with the binoculars.
• Scope ambiguity
Every boy likes some rock star.
Implicature (P. Grice)
• Rules of conversation
• Principle of relevance
(22) We don’t want any rows about politics.
• Principle of informativeness
(24a) Most of them passed.
Context Dependency
• Indexicality/deixis
• I, you, here, there, now, then, etc.
Presuppositions
• Some of what a sentence conveys is not
asserted; it is presupposed.
• Russell’s example:
• The King of France is bald.
• Did you stop embezzling public funds?