THAT’S JUST SEMANTICS Katie Welch, PhD LING

How do we know what words mean?  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  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  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  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  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  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”  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  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  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  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  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  The meaning of a sentence is determined by the meaning of its words in conjunction with the way they are put together syntactically