Transcript That`s Just Semantics

THAT’S JUST SEMANTICS
Katie Welch, PhD
LING3311-001
How do we know what words mean?
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When we want to know what a word means, we
often turn a familiar source—the dictionary.
Why is the dictionary not a sufficient method for
determining meaning?
Semantics: The Meaning of Meaning
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Semantics is a subfield of linguistics that deals with
meaning
Looks at meaning on both the word (lexical) and
phrasal (compositional) level
Meaning involves two aspects: sense and reference
Reference
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Reference is the actual thing the word refers to
The referent of proper nouns are generally easy to
identify (ex. White House, Hawaii)
Common nouns are much more difficult to identify
(woman, dog)
But, what do we do with words that don’t have a
referent? (unicorn, nonexistent)
Sense
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Sense is the aspect of the word’s meaning that is
independent from what the word actually refers to
in the “real world”
It is considered the speaker’s mental conception of
the word (goes beyond the “mental image” of the
word)
Take out of a piece of paper and draw your mental
image of the following words:
Flower
Teacher
Eat
the
Activity
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Both sense and reference are necessary components
to the theory of meaning
But, neither one is sufficient in and of itself.
With a partner, take 20 minutes to determine why
reference/sense are:
 Necessary
 Insufficient
Cite specific data to support your position. (Hint: Look at
Section 6.1 in your textbook)
Lexical Semantics: Meaning Relationships
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Syntonomy= two words have the same meaning (ex.
couch, sofa)
Hyponomy= a certain subset of words is always
contained within a larger set (ex. Poodles, Dogs)
Antonymy= “opposites”
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Complementary pairs (x or y or neither but not both)
Gradable pairs (“not x” does not imply “not y”)
Reverses (x undoes y)
Converses (if x has reference, y must, too)
Lexical Semantics: Features
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Lexical decomposition is a process by which we break
down words into smaller parts (features)
Boy/Girl & Man/Woman can be broken down into its
features
 +human
 +female/+male
 +child/+adult
Any time that we use a word yet deny some of its
semantic features, the sentence is semantically
anomalous (p. 246)
Review
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What is semantics? What is lexical semantics?
How do we encode meaning in our lexicon?
When we perform lexical decomposition, we break
the meaning of a word down into its ___________.
What is sense? What is reference? What are the
limitations of each?
Describe two words in a hyponomous relationship.
Compositional Semantics
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Lexical semantics does not give us a full picture of
meaning
We communicate on the phrasal/sentence level
The compositional level is both infinite and
productive
We learn words independently and individually, but
we don’t “learn” sentence meaning
Instead, we compute them via compositional rules
Compositional Semantics
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Understanding a sentence’s meaning involves the
use of truth conditions and truth meanings
Truth conditions are the conditions that would have
to exist for the sentence to be true
 See example p. 249
 Allows referents to exist in nonactual scenarios
Truth value refers to whether or not the sentence is
actually true
Principle of Compositionality
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The meaning of a sentence is determined by the
meaning of its words in conjunction with the way
they are put together syntactically