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THE DIMENTION OF MEANING
1.
2.
3.
4.
By :
Apriana Diana
Ima Nurhanida
Sri Haryati
Nurmawaty
THE DIMENTION OF MEANING
Reference and denotation
II. Connotation
III. Sense Relations
IV. Lexical and grammatical meanings
V. Morphemes
VI. Homonymy and polysemy
VII.Lexical ambiguity
VIII.Sentence meaning
I.
REFERENCE

Reference is the relation between a language
expression such as this door, both doors, the
dog, another dog and whatever the expression
pertains to in particular situation of language
use, including what a speaker may imagine.

Reference is the way speakers and hearers use
an expressions successfully.
DENOTATION
Denotation is the potential of a word like door
or dog to enter into such language expressions.
e.g: 1. This dog is a Dalmatian.
2. My children have just acquired a dog.
3. Several dogs were fighting over a bone.
 Denotation is the knowledge they have that
makes their use successful.

DENOTATION

Denotation is usually given priority of treatment
in semantics because it often has a complex
organization that lends itself to semantics
analysis.
e.g: the relations between dependency
between armchair and seat and contrast
between sofa and bench.
TENTATIVE DIAGRAM FOR SEAT DOMAIN
Seat
chair armchair stool
(‘for one person’)
chair armchair
(‘with a back)
stool
(‘without back’)
sofa bench
(‘for more than one person’)
sofa
(‘with a back’)
bench
(‘without back’)
CONNOTATION

The affective or emotional associations it
elicits, which clearly need not to be the same
for all people who know and use the word.

Connotation refers to the personal aspect of
meaning, the emotional associations that the
word arouses.
CONNOTATION EXAMPLES
Hjelmslev (1971 : 109-10) pointed out that
(about a dog)
1.
2.
3.
Among Eskimos a dog is an animal that is use
for pulling a sled.
Parsees regard dogs nearly sacred.
Hindus consider them a great pest.
CONNOTATION EXAMPLES
Western Europe and America some members
of the species still perform the original chores
of hunting & guarding while others are
merely ‘pets’.
5. Certain societies, the flesh of dogs is part of a
human diet and others it is not.
The meaning of dog includes the attitudes of a
society and of individuals, the pragmatic aspect.
4.
CONNOTATION
Connotations vary according to the
experience of individuals but because people do
have common experiences, some words have
shared connotation or similar relation.
e.g: 1. that violin and that fiddle
2. automobile and car
3. building and edifice
4. fire and conflagration
5. thin or slender or svelte or skinny.
SUMMARY

Connotation can have the same referent; can
refer the same object on a particular occasion
but they do not have the same meaning, they
differ in connotation.

The connotative meanings of a word exist
together with the denotative meanings.
3.3 SENSE RELATIONS
What a word means depends in part on its
associations with other words, the relational
aspect.
 Lexemes do not merely ‘have’ meanings: they
contribute meanings to utterances in which
they occur, and what meanings they can
contribute depends on what other lexemes they
are associated with in these utterances


The meaning that a lexeme has because of these
relationships is the sense of that lexeme.
Example:
a. John walked. An hour elapsed.
b. John elapsed. An hour walked.

Part of the relationship is seen in the way word
meanings vary with context.
Example:
a. Professor Jones has a rather large library.
b. The library is at the corner of Wilson and Adams
Street.

A number of English verbs can be used in two different ways different grammatical association – and then have slightly different
meanings.
Example:
a. A window broke.
b. Tom broke a window.

A lexeme does not merely ‘have’ meaning; it contributes to the
meaning of a larger unit, a phrase or sentence.
Example:
a. a happy child, a happy family
b. a happy accident, a happy experience
c. a happy story, a happy report

Each lexeme is linked in some way to numerous other
lexemes of the language. There are two kinds of linkage.
1. Syntagmatic relations, the mutual associations of two
or more words in a sequence (not necessarily right next
to one another) so that the meaning of each is affected
by the other(s) and together their meaning of the larger
unit, the phrase or sentence.
Example of syntagmatic relations
happy + child = happy child, happy + accident = happy accident
sit + chair = sit chair
read + book = read book , read +newspaper = read newspaper

2. Paradigmatic relation, a relation of choice. We
choose from among a number of possible words
that can fill the same blank: the words may be
similar in meaning or have a little in common but
each is different from others.
Example of paradigmatic relation:
The judge was arbitrary.
The judge was cautious.
The judge was careless.
Since we are used to writing system that goes from
left to right, syntagmatic relation as horizontal and
paradigmatic relations as vertical.
3.4 LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL MEANINGS
A dog
barked
a refering expression
predicate
A dog is the phrase which refers to a certain animals and is
called as a referring expression (is a piece of language that is
used AS IF it is linked to something outside language, some
living or dead entity or concept or group of entities or
concepts). The entity to which the referring expression is linked
is its referent.
The verb bark is linked to an activity associated with the
referring expression dog and is called as a predicate (The use
of language generally involves something about that entity,
entity and saying, or predicating, something about that entity.

Every language has a grammatical system and different languages have
somewhat different grammatical systems. We can explain what grammatical
meanings by showing how the sentence A dog barked differs from other
sentences that have the same referring expression and the same predicate.
The grammatical system of English make possible the expression of
meaning like these:
statement vs question
A dog barked. Did a dog bark?
affirmative vs negative:
A dog barked. A dog did not bark.
No dog bark
past vs present:
A dog barked
A dog barks.
singular vs plural:
A dog barked. Some dogs barked.
indefinite vs definite:
A dog barked . The dog barked.

Grammatical meanings, are expressed in
various ways: the arrangement of words
(referring expression before the predicate, by
grammatical affixes like the –s attached to the
noun dog and the –ed attached to the verb
bark, and by grammatical words, or function
words, like in these sentences: do (in the form
did), not, a, some and the.

The meanings of dog and bark are not grammatical
but lexical, with association outside language. They
are lexemes. A lexeme is a minimal unit that can take
part in referring or predicating.
Example:
a. Go, going, went, gone
b. Put up with, kick the bucket, dog in the manger
In group (a) there are 4 forms and the forms have four
different meaning, but they have a shared meaning,
which is lexical, and other meanings of a grammatical
nature added to the lexical meaning. These four forms
constitute one lexeme – which we designate as go
In group (b) presents a different sort of
problem. The expression put up with combines
the porms put and up and with, but its meaning
is not combination of the separate meanings.
Therefore put up with , in the sense of ‘endure,
‘tolerate,’ is a single lexeme. Kick the bucket
means ‘die’ and dog in the manger refers to a
person who will not let others share what he
has, even though he does not use it himself
SUMMARY
We recognize several kinds of meaning. Some pieces of
language refer to something, real or fictitious, outside of
language.
Some linguistic forms make comments about referents;
these are predicates. In addition there are grammatical
meanings, expressed by bound morphemes (affixes), by
function words, and by arrangement of forms in a
sentence.
Referring expressions and predicates have lexical meaning
while grammatical morphemes and function words express
grammatical meanings.
The totality of lexemes in the language constitute the
lexicon of the language, and all the lexemes that one
individual knows are his or her personal lexicon.
3.5 MORPHEMES
DEFINITION



A morphemes is the smallest meaningful unit in the
grammatical of a language .
A single word may be composed of one or more morphemes
Examples :
She looked unhappier than the day before.
The word “unhappier” consist s of :
un + happy + er (can be analyzed into 3 morphemes)
un- (a unit of grammatical function in indicating negative)
happy ( one minimal unit)
er ( a unit of grammatical function in indicating
comparison)
MORE EXAMPLES OF
MORPHEMES
guitarist : guitar ( one minimal unit)
-ist (meaning “ person who does
something)
dogs
: dog (one minimal unit)
-s (a unit of grammatical function in a
plural marker on nouns)
CLASSIFICATION OF MORPHEMES
free morphemes
(basic word forms)
bound morphemes
(prefixes and suffixes)
Free Morphemes:morphemes which can be
used as a word on their own.They generally
consist of separate English word forms such as
nouns,verbs and adjectives.
EXAMPLES : girl,system,happy,act,plane,etc.
BOUND MORPHEMES:
•
morphemes which can not occur on their own
as an independent word.They are generally
prefixes and suffixes like re-,-ist,-ed,-s in the
words reprint,typist,talked and boys,for
example and are attached to other forms which
are described as stems-basic word forms
EXAMPLES : un + happy + er(unhappier)
prefix stem
suffix
bound free
bound
EXAMPLES OF INFECTIONAL
AND DERIVATIONAL AFFIXES
Dog
 Dogs
 Bulldog
 Walk
 Walks
 Walked
 Red
 Reddish
 Redder

1 morpheme
2 morphemes
2 morphemes
1 morpheme
2 morphemes
2 morphemes
1 morpheme
2 morphemes
2 morphemes
dog + -s (pl)
bull + dog
walk
walk +s (3rd per sing)
walk+ ed (past tense)
red
red+-ish (deriv.adj)
red +-er (comparative)
3.6 HOMONYMY AND POLYSEMY
HOMONYMY
sense relation in which one form has
different meaning ; different words with the
same form (treated as such in dictionaries)
 no relatedness in meaning
e.g. bank1‐side of a river
bank2‐financial institution
Pronunciation is identical but meaning are
unrelated

MORE EXAMPLES OF HOMONYMY
steak
stake
pronunciation is identically but spelling is
different (different in phonology)
so
POLYSEMY
One word having several closely related
senses (a word or phrase with multiple
meanings)
 Native speaker has clear intuition that the
different senses are related to each other
 Polysemy‐close relatedness in m. which
is usually connected to metaphorical extension

EXAMPLES :


head
seems to have related meanings when we
speak of the head of a person, the head of
company, the head of a table or bed, head of
lettuce or cabbage
pupil =
part of eye, school child
NOTE
The distinction between homonymy and
polysemy is not an easy one to make.
See the following sentences :
1. Fred asked Betty where his golf clubs were
2. Fred asked Donna if she had seen his clubs
3. Fred asked Charles to help him find his clubs

NOTE
Sentence 1 & 2 are about questions, requests
for information. The utterances behind
sentence 1 & 2 would be something like
“Where are my golf clubs, Betty?”
 Sentence 3 is not a request for information but
a request for a kind of action. The utterance
behind sentence 3 might be something “ Help
me to find my clubs, Charles.”

CONCLUSION
A morpheme is the minimal meaningful unit,
possessing both sound and meaning
 Morphemes can be classified into free
morphemes and bound morphemes
 Criteria for absolute homonymy are :
1. Their forms must be unrelated
2. all their forms must be identically
 The distinction between homonymy and polysemy
is not an easy one to make.

LEXICAL AMBIGUITY
When homonyms can occur in the
same position in utterances, the result
is lexical ambiguity,
for example,
“I was on my way to the bank.”
Homonyms belong to different lexical
categories and therefore do not give rise to
ambiguity.
For instance,
seen is a form of the verb see while
scene is an unrelated noun;
feet is a plural noun with concrete reference,
feat is a singular noun, rather abstract in nature;
Ambiguity occurs also because
a longer linguistic form has:
 a literal sense
 and a figurative sense.
There’s a skeleton in our closet.
Skeleton in the closet can mean ‘an
unfortunate event that is kept a family secret.’
With this meaning skeleton in the closet is a
single lexeme;
 with its ‘literal’ meaning it is a phrase
composed of several lexemes.

SENTENCE MEANING
There are two points which are obvious
about ‘sentence meaning’
the meaning of a sentence derives from the
meanings of its constituent lexemes and from
the grammatical meanings it contains.
 Second, at least if the sentence is a statement

‘Albert Thompson opened the first
flour mill in Waterton.’
true or not (contradiction)??
Truth-conditional semantics is based on the
notion that the core meaning of any
sentence (any statement) is its truth
conditions.
Any speaker of the language knows these
conditions.
If a sentence is true (or false), what other
sentences, expressing partly the same,
partly different conditions, can be judged by
this sentence?
In SEMANTIC we are interested in the
instances when the language of the
message implicates some additional
meaning that accounts for our inference.
examples.
a) One team consisted of six students from
Felman College.
b) One team consisted of the six students from
Felman College.
SUMMARY
 If
two homonyms can occur in the same
place in an utterance, the result is lexical
ambiguity.
 Truth-conditional
semantics is the study of
meaning through a consideration of the
conditions that must exist for a sentence
to be true, and how the truth of one
sentence relates to the truth or falsity of
other sentences.
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