semantics

Chapter 5 Semantics

1. Different Approaches to Meaning

1.1 Meaning as naming

◆The meaning of an expression is what it refers to, or names.

(1) One of your friends Holly, a philosophy major, frequently comes up with language questions for you. Recently, she asked, ―Do George Washington and the first president of the United States mean the same thing?‖ What will you tell her?

Answer: The two expressions have the same referent, but the fact that two expressions refer to the same entity does not necessarily entail that they mean the same.

(2) a. the evening star

b. the morning star.

◆Weaknesses of the approach

1.2 Meaning as concept

◆The meaning of an expression is viewed by some linguistics as the concept or idea associated with it. Any symbol is psychologically associated with a particular concept. So when the word chair is spoken, the concept of chair is called upon in the mind of the speaker or the hearer. According to this view, there is no direct link between symbol and referent, that is, between language and world. The link is via thought, the concepts in our minds.

Relation between Concept and Language

From concept to lexical concepts

Lexical concepts are linguistically encoded concepts. Unlike the sort of mental entities referred to by psychologists as ?concepts‘ that cannot find linguistic expressions, lexical concepts are concepts that have a corresponding linguistic expression, or that can be ―externalized via language‖/coded as linguistic expressions. They constitute the semantic pole/value of lexical items.

Language only covers part of the world of concepts which humans have or may have. Lexical concepts are only part of the conceptual world of the human mind, for we have many more concepts and thoughts than there are linguistic expressions to express them. […] Concepts which structure our world of thought are conceptual categories, i.e., concepts of a set as a whole.

◆Weaknesses of the approach

1.3 Meaning as behavior

This approach was adopted by American linguist L. Bloomfield.

The well-known story of Jill and Jack (See Language: 22-26)

◆The meaning of an expression is the observable behaviors connected with the expression when uttered.

1.4 Meaning as context

(3) I went to the bank yesterday.

◆Context determines meaning of words. Or the meaning of expressions is determined not only by the

literal meaning of the expressions but by the context in which they occur.

◆Two kinds of context are recognized: linguistic context and situational context.

i) linguistic context: the discourse or text that surrounds an expression and helps to determine its

meaning. ―We shall know a word by the company it keeps.‖ (J. R. Firth)

(4) a. loud music

b. loud color

ii) situational context: all the circumstances that are involved when an expression is used/uttered.

◆Fillmore：Frame semantics

The frame idea is this: there are certain schemata or frameworks of concepts or terms which link together as a system, which impose structure or coherence on some aspect of human experience, and which may contain elements which are simultaneously parts of other such frameworks. (Fillmore 1975: 123)

These facts about context and perception are relevant to the theory of language in two ways. First, the meanings of words may, more than we are used to thinking, depend on contexted experiences, that is, the contexts within which we have experienced the objects, properties or feelings that provide the perceptual or experiential basis of our knowledge of the meaning of a word (or phrase, or grammatical category)may be inseparable parts of those experiences. (Fillmore 1976a: 24-25)

Second, the process of interpreting an utterance may depend, more than we are used to thinking, on our perception of the context in which the utterance is produced and our memories of the contexts for earlier experiences with the utterance or its constituent parts.

A particularly important notion, figuring especially in recent work in linguistics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence, is the notion that goes by such names as ―frame,‖ ―schema,‖ and ―scenario.‖Briefly, the i dea is that people have in memory an inventory of schemata for structuring, classifying, and interpreting experiences.

The concept of frame does not depend on language, but as applied to language processing the notion figures in the following ways. Particular words or speech formulas, or particular grammatical choices, are associated in memory with particular frames, in such a way that exposure to the linguistic form in an appropriate context activates in the perceiver‘s mind the particular frame—activation of the frame, by turn, enhancing access to the other linguistic material that is associated with the same frame.

(1) Greeting frame

Participants

Social status: initiator; formality

Topics

Distance

Linguistic expressions

Good morning!

Hi! John. How are you doing?

Hello!

Hi, there!

您好！

白老师，您好！

亲爱的（谭）主任，您好！

红哥，哪去？

张老师，你好！好久不见了。

赵兄，好久不见了，在忙些啥？

(2) The frame of the commercial event

1) Elements of a prototypical commercial event frame

i) the buyer

ii) the seller

iii) the money

iv) the goods

v) the buyer has the money and agrees to surrender the money for the goods

vi) the seller has the goods and agrees to surrender the goods for the money

The Commercial Event Frame

2) Expressions associated with the commercial event frame

i) Harry bought the puppy (from Smith).

ii) Smith sold the puppy (to Harry).

---

Any one of the many words like buy, sell, pay, etc. , activates the whole event frame in the mind of the speaker who understands the whole commercial event, even though each of these words highlights or foregrounds only one small section of the frame.

Buy:

Charge:

Spend:

Every memorable experience occurs in a meaningful context and is memorable precisely because the experience has some cognitive schema or frames for interpreting it. This frame identifies the experience as a type and gives structure and coherenc—in short, meaning—to the points and relationships, the objects and events, within the experience.

Individual words are learned within such meaningful contexts, and each word serves to foreground some part of the context. (Fillmore 1976a:29）

Fillmore （1976a:29）

One aspect of a linguistic system […] consists in the ways in which the language users‘ cogni tive and interactional frames are linked up with linguistic material. One way of examining a linguistic system, then, is that of providing an inventory of the frames that have linguistic reflexes, paying attention to the number of frames, to the areas of special elaboration, to the degree to which complex frames have been prepackaged in lexical meaning, to the structure and complexity of the frames, and so on.

1.5 Meaning as conceptualization (cognitive linguistics)

2. Word Meaning

2.1 Sense and reference

Sense and reference are two different, though related, aspects of meaning.

Sense relates to the complex system of relationships that hold between the linguistic elements themselves (mostly the words); it is concerned only with intralinguistic relations. The dictionary is usually concerned with sense relations, those exemplified by the following examples:

(5) a. buy – sell

b. father – son

c. cow – bull

d. pig – piglet

e. hot – cold

f. lion – animal

The sense of a word may be defined as the general meaning or the concept underlying the word. As a first approximation, we can describe this as what we usually think of as contained in a dictionary entry for the word in question. (Riemer 2010)

Reference deals with the relationship between the linguistic elements and the non-linguistic world of experience. It is the essential element of semantics, for semantics is concerned largely with the way we relate our language to our experience.

―We have, then, two kinds of semantics, one that deals with semantic structure and the other that deals with meaning in terms of our experience outside language.‖ (Palmer 1981)

Lyons, John. 1995. Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

指称关系是意义研究中的基本概念之一。然而，长期以来，语言表达的所指对象与语言表达的意义没有得到明确的区分，是德国逻辑学家、数学家弗雷格（1848-1925）首先看到了这样区分的意义。弗雷格最初关心的问题与语言没有什么关系，在他大部分的研究生涯中，他的主要研究目标是要阐明数学的逻辑基础。可是，从大约1891年至1906年之间，他开始对意义的问题产生兴趣，并阐述了意义与所指关系的区别，而随后的哲学和语言学也沿用了这一区分。（Riemer 2010: 90）

[…] reference is one of the fundamental concepts of the study of meaning. However, for a long time the distinction was not explicitly drawn between an expression’s referent (the object to which it refers) and its sense (its general meaning, abstracted from its use to refer). It was the German logician and philosopher of mathematics Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) who first saw the significance of this distinction. Frege’s primary concerns had little to do with language; for much of his career, his main goal was to clarify the logical bases of arithmetic. Between about 1891 and 1906, however, he became interested in questions of meaning, and elaborated the distinction between sense (Sinn) and reference (Bedeutung) that subsequent philosophy and linguistics have inherited.(Riemer 2010: 90)

Sense and reference are not on an equal footing in Frege‘s theory of meaning. For him, sense determines reference. It is the sense of an expression which allows us to know what it refers to. For example, if I know what the word amber can refer to, this is because I have a conception of its sense which allows me to pick out real examples of amber when I am confronted with them. (Riemer 2010: 92)

2.2 Seven types of meaning (See Leech: Semantics: The Study of Meaning)

i) conceptual meaning 概念意义

ii) connotative meaning 内涵意义

iii) social meaning 社会意义

iv) affective meaning 情感意义

v) reflective meaning 反射意义

vi) collocative meaning 搭配意义

vii) thematic meaning 主题意义

◆Conceptual meaning

Conceptual meaning is sometimes referred to as logical meaning, denotative meaning, or cognitive meani ng. It is widely assumed to be the ?central‘ meaning or ?core‘ meaning of a lexical item. Usually conceptual meaning can be studied in terms of contrastive features.

◆Connotative meaning

It is the communicative value that a word conveys by virtue of what it refers to, over and above its purely conceptual content. It varies according to culture, historical period, and the experience of the individual and can be shared by other communicative systems.

(6) woman: ___

i) capable of speech;

ii) gregarious;

iii) frail; "Frailty, thy name is woman."

iv) prone to tears;

v) irrational;

vi) emotional

(7) 狗：____

i) 猪狗不如

ii) 狗眼看人

iii) 狗咬吕洞宾，不识好人心

iv) 子不嫌母丑，狗不嫌家贫

v) Love me, love my dog.

vi) Every dog has his day.

vii) CoolDog

(8) 龙: ___

??

◆What is the ultimate goal of a dictionary?

The ultimate aim of a dictionary is to supply its user with referential meaning/ conceptual meaning. And it is done by relating, via sense relations, a word (whose meaning is unknown) to a word or words whose reference is already understood.

3. Lexical Semantics

3.1 Semantic fields/lexical fields

A semantic field is the organization /grouping of related words and expressions into a system which show their relationship to one another. For example, kinship terms such as father, mother, brother, sister, uncle, aunt belong to a semantic field whose relevant features include generation, sex, membership of the father‘s or mother‘s side of the family. They are a set of words with identifiable semantic affinity.

color terms: red, yellow, green ,---

words denoting emotional states: angry, annoyed, depressed, sad, afraid, ---

The absence of a word in a particular place in a semantic field of a language is called a lexical gap.

舅舅，叔叔，伯伯--- uncle

侄儿，侄女--- cousin

3.2 Sense relations between words

3.3 Componential analysis (of lexical meaning)

It is a way used in semantics to analyze words in terms of a series of identifying semantic features or meaning components.

For example, the meaning of the word boy could be analysed using the following features: +HUMAN, -ADULT, + MALE

More examples:

man: +HUMAN , +ADULT, +ANIMATE, +MALE

woman: +HUMAN , +ADULT, +ANIMATE, - MALE

wife: +HUMAN , +ADULT, +ANIMATE, - MALE, +MARRIED

bachelor: +HUMAN , +ADULT, +ANIMATE, +MALE, -MARRIED

spinster: +HUMAN , +ADULT, +ANIMATE, -MALE, -MARRIED

kill: CAUSE TO DIE

Sticky cases

father: +HUMAN , +ADULT, +ANIMATE, +MALE, ??

stepfather: +HUMAN , +ADULT, +ANIMATE, +MALE, ??

table: ??

desk: ??

Strengths

i) gives a highly explicit account of the lexical meaning of some words;

ii) shows how certain words are related or differentiated.

Weaknesses

i) Can the meaning of a word really be pinned down in terms of a set of semantic features?

Conceptual meaning

associative meaning?

ii) How many semantic features shall we need?

4. Sentence Meaning

The meaning of sentences cannot be determined merely by adding up the meaning of each content word of the sentence.

(9) a. The trainer licked the lion.

b. The lion licked the trainer.

Sentences (9a) and (9b) have different meanings, even though they contain exactly the same words. Clearly adding together the meaning of each word will not produce the full meaning of a sentence.

(10) a. The lion licked the trainer.

b. The trainer was licked by the lion.

At the level of referential meaning/ prepositional meaning, the two sentences describe the same situation.

―Voice is a grammatical category which makes it possible to view the action of a sentence in either of two ways, without change in the facts reported.‖ (Quirk et al. 1985: 159)

But are they completely identical in meaning?

4.1 Meaning as truth conditions

(11) a. George Washington was the first president of the United States.

*b. Thomas Jefferson was the first president of the United States.

Some linguists argue that the meaning of a declarative sentence can be given by stating its truth conditions, that is, the circumstances under which the sentence is true. In simple words, knowing the meaning of a sentence is the same as knowing the conditions under which the sentence is true or false. Such an approach to sentence meaning is summed up as truth-conditional semantics, which clearly draws on formal logic.

――研究句子的真值条件，即研究一个句子在什么场合下为真，在什么场合下为假。凡是陈述性语句都具有真值条件。如果把真值条件当作句子的逻辑语义，就有了句子的真值条件义。

（蒋严，潘海华1998：）

A statement about sentence meaning is always based on the formulation as follows:

(12)―X‖= 1 iff p.

(13) “雪是白的”为真iff 雪是白的。

◆Weaknesses of the truth condition approach:

4.2 Sentence Meaning in Terms of Semantic Roles

The situations denoted by (9a) and (9b) suggest that the crucial factor in how sentence meaning is constructed is the role played by each noun phrase in relation to the verb, so some linguists consider it necessary to introduce the notion semantic role of a noun phrase. Semantic role refers to the way in which the referent of the noun phrase contributes to the state, action, or situation described by the sentence. It

characterizes the meaning relationship between a noun phrase and the verb of a sentence.

◆agent

(14) Peter sliced the bread with a knife.

◆experiencer

(15) John likes pancakes.

◆cause &instrument

(16) a. Michael was injured by a flying stone.

b. Michael was injured with a stone.

◆recipient / benefactive /locative / temporal

(17) I gave Yolanda a puppy.

(18) Please leave a message for me.

(19) The southwest had a quake.

(20) She left home the day before yesterday.

(21) *The key and John opened the door.

(22) *The ball broke the window with a hammer.

(23) a. *George fell down the cliff to save her.

b. George killed the snake.

Agent: The ?doer‘ or instigator of the action denoted by the predicate.

Patient: The ?undergoer‘ of the action or event denote d by the predicate.

Theme: The entity that is moved by the action or event denoted by the predicate.

Experiencer: The living entity that experiences the action or event denoted by the predicate.

Goal: The location or entity in the direction of which something moves.

Benefactive: The entity that benefits from the action or event denoted by the predicate.

Source: The location or entity from which something moves

Instrument: The medium by which the action or event denoted by the predicate is carried out.

Locative: The specification of the place where the action or event denoted by the predicate in situated.

(Aarts 1997: 88)

A given noun phrase can have different semantic roles in different sentences.

(24) a. The trainer licked the lion.

b. The lion licked the trainer.

The semantic role of a noun phrase differs from its syntactic role/grammatical relations (as subject, object, etc.).

(25) a. The lion licked the trainer.

b. The trainer was licked by the lion.

The semantic roles of the subject

The most typical semantic role of a subject is that of the AGENTIVE participant: that is, the animate being instigating or causing the happening denoted by the verb. (Quirk et al. 1985: 741)

(26) Margaret is mowing the grass.

(27) The wind blew my hat off.

(28) I love beer.

(29) He resembles his father very much.

(30) My tent sleeps four people.

The semantic roles of the object

The most typical semantic role of the direct object is that of the AFFECTED participant, a participant that undergoes a change of state under the impact of the action performed by the AGENTIVE.

(31) a. He pushed at the table.

b. He pushed the table.

(32) a. John smeared paint on the wall.

b. John smeared the wall with paint.

c.

(33) John has painted a new picture.

4.3 Sense relations between sentences

5. Metaphor and Metonymy