LING 101: Semantics
This page was prepared by William
Idsardi as a study resource for his LING 101 course at UDel. You may
find it useful when preparing for exams. Note that the material covered
by these notes may not exactly match the topics covered in LING 101 when
taught by other instructors. To return to the "Study notes" page
use the navigation bar at the left.
Semantics: Meanings of Words and Sentences
- There are two components of meaning:
- Meanings of the parts (lexical meaning)
- Meanings of the combinations (phrase meaning)
Pragmatics and Semantics
- There is a continuum between Semantics (things that are true by the
DEFINITIONS and RULES) and Pragrmatics (things that are true by virtue of
the REAL WORLD).
- Consider the following sentences:
- The rock ate my lunch.
Semantically false, because "eat" requires an ANIMATE subject.
- The giraffe ate the hyena.
Grey area, does SEMANTICS include the concept VEGETARIAN??
- The giraffe ate one hundred pounds of grass today.
Pragmatics, how much DOES a giraffe eat in a day?
Lexical Meaning
- Each one of us knows thousands of words. Some of these words have very
complicated meanings. We feel that these words can be defined in terms of
"simpler" words.
- An "assassin" is "someone who kills someone who is prominent"
- We can take this idea further and develop a conception of SEMANTIC
FEATURES which encode the CORE PROPERTIES of words. Since the semantic
features cover only core properties, they will NOT capture every nuance
of meaning.
- For example FEMALE and HUMAN are characteristics shared by words such
as "woman", "mother", and "widow".
- FEMALE and NONHUMAN characterize "lioness", "ewe" and "mare".
- The border between including a concept in the definition and not doing
so can be very fuzzy.
- "bachelor = UNMARRIED (ADULT) (HUMAN) MALE
- "The most eligible bachelor I know is that ____"
- two-year old
- priest
- divorced man
- widower
- The quality of NEVER-MARRIED and MARRY-ABLE might be part of the meaning as well.
- Verbs have semantic features too, giving classes of verbs such as:
- motion -- "walk", "arrive", "leave"
- sensation -- "taste", "feel", "see"
- propositional attitude -- "believe", "know"
- There is abundant psychological evidence for semantic features:
- Slips of the tongue:
"bridge of the neck (nose)" (body parts)
"he came too early (late)" (time)
"the lady with the VW (dachshund)" (SMALL and GERMAN)
- Semantic Features are NOT based on scientific/biological taxonomies.
- Rather, items are often classified with respect to HUMANS.
- For example relative size, bigger/smaller than a human being.
- Or, whether something is dangerous to human beings.
- There is little (if any) evidence for semantic features for MAMMAL
(including whales especially) or RODENT (biologically defined as a subclass
with the special characteristic of ever-growing teeth).
- Thus, though for SCIENTIFIC purposes (biology, etc.) we make up
categories such as MAMMAL and RODENT to explain facts of species and
evolution, these categories do NOT necessarily plan a role in the
cognitive (mental) classification of animals.
- Some semantic feature IMPLY the presence of others:
HUMAN ==> ANIMATE
ANIMATE ==> NOT ABSTRACT
- Verbs and adjectives encode features of their ARGUMENTS:
"swim" -- medium is a liquid
"splash" -- object is a liquid
"viscous" -- object is a liquid
- Likewise, we know whn actions or properties are incompatible, thus
one cannot "cut" a liquid or "bend" a liquid.
Synonyms and Homophones
- Two words with the same semantic features (meaning) but which sound
different are called SYNONYMS (e.g. "sofa"/"couch").
- Two words that sound (or are spelled) the same but which have different
semantic features (meanings) are called HOMONYMS or HOMOPHONES (e.g. "bear"/"bare").
- One word with multiple related meanings is called POLYSEMOUS.
- In practice it can be difficult to distinguish homophony from polysemy.
- Homonyms are one source of AMBIGUITY. One sentence can be understood in different
ways if the meaning of one of the words changes.
- "He hit the bat with the ball."
bat1 -- the flying animal
bat2 -- baseball bat
- "She cannot bear children."
bear1 -- give birth to
bear2 -- tolerate
- Polysemous words can also lead to ambiguity:
marry1 -- to take as a spouse
marry2 -- declare to be marry1-ed
- Jane marry1-ed Bill.
- Jane and Bill marry1-ed.
- Lanny marry2-ed Jane and Bill.
- Lanny marry2-ed Jane.
- So "X married Y" is ambiguous between marry1 and marry2.
- Consider the following sentences:
John sold the house to Bill.
John sold the house.
Bill bought the house from John.
Bill bought the house.
- Now consider the analogous sentences for renting instead of buying, with
John and Bill playing the analogous roles again:
John rented the house to Bill.
John rented the house.
Bill rented the house from John.
Bill rented the house.
- Thus, "X rented the house" is ambigous in a way which "buy"/"sell" are not.
- Synonyms are different words with the same (or similar) meaning.
- Some people claim that there are no perfect synonyms, by which they mean words
X and Y such that every sentence with X can be changed to a sentence with Y without
changing the meaning. But this is too strong a requirement, because it requires
ALL meanings of X and Y to be the same, and ALL grammatical properties of X and Y to
be the same.
Antonyms
- ANTONYMS are NOT words with totally different meanings. Rather they are words
which are different along ONE DIMENSION.
- For example, "bachelor" is ADULT UNMARRIED HUMAN MALE.
- The antonym of "bachelor" is NOT a NONADULT MARRIED NONHUMAN FEMALE.
- One possibility for an antonym for "bacholor" is "husband", changing only
the UNMARRIED feature.
- Another possibility would be to change the MALE to FEMALE, giving "spinster".
- Changing ADULT or HUMAN do not seem to yield antonyms, leading us to
speculate that the features might be more or less SALIENT.
- There are several kinds of antonyms:
- Complementary pairs (X, not X)
dead/alive, awake/asleep
- Gradable pairs (opposite sides of a scale)
hot/cold, big/small
Such pairs seem to be approximately samne magnitude from the middle, warm/cool.
Usually one end of the scale is less marked--
How tall is he? (no implication)
How short is he? (implies that he IS short)
- Relational opposites (opposite roles in a relation)
teacher/pupil, employer/employee, buy/sell
Names
- Naming is not only a linguistic function, many other factors are involved.
- There are very few real constraints on names.
- Anything Goes
- The The
- UB40
- Toad the Wet Sprocket
Meanings in Combination
- The meanings of combinations of words is largely a product of the conbinations
of the meanings of the words.
- meaning(A + B) = meaning(A) + meaning(B)
- However, since some words have NEGATIVE meanings, the meaning of the
composite can get complicated.
- Some adjectives have a meaning that is largely independent of the noun
that they modify. One example is color words--
a red balloon
a red house
are both "red" in the same way.
- Other adjectives (for example size words) have a context (prototype) set
up by the noun, and the adjectives compare to the prototype--
a big balloon
a big house
As someone said, a big mouse is still smaller than a small elephant.
- As in morphology the HEAD sets up the main component of meaning and the context
modifies the meaning--
a bluebird -- a type of bird
a house with a white picket fence -- a type of house
John sold the house to Bill -- an event of selling
Thematic Roles
- In the case of sentences, the parts of the sentence play specific roles in the
meaning, as determined by the verb.
John put the book on the table
==== ======== ============
Agent Theme Goal (a Location)
- The themeatic roles for "put" are Agent (for the subject), Theme (for
the object) and Goal (for the prepositional phrase).
- Notice that the PP must be of the correct type:
*John put the book in the morning.
*John put the book at five o'clock.
- Some thematic roles:
- Agent -- doer of action
- Theme -- thing done to
- Location -- place
- Source -- original place
- Goal -- destination place
- Instrument -- something that aids Agent in doing
- Another example:
The boy carried the red brick from the wall to the wagon.
======= ============= ============= ============
Agent Theme Sourc Goal
Semantics and Syntax
Semantic restrictions on Transformations
- Recall that there is a transformational rule of passive that can apply to
(1) to make (2).
- John told Bill about the house.
- Bill was told abou the house by John.
- The passive transformation moves the Object NP into Subject position and
moves the Subject NP to a "by" phrase.
- However, passive cannot apply to STATIVE verbs:
John resembles Bill.
*Bill is resembled by John.
The book costs ten dollars.
*Ten dollars is cost by the book.
- Thus, there can be semantic restrictions on the application of transfomational
rules.
Truth
- Truth is a complicated matter. For the purposes of this course, we are only
interested in a few distinctions about truth.
- The distinctions we are interested in are:
- True by definition (analytic truth)
A bachelor is a bachelor.
A bachelor is an unmarried man.
- True by implication
John killed Bill, so Bill is dead.
- Real world truth (synthetic, contingent)
This document is about semantics.
Sense and Reference
- Reference -- the actual item in the world (extension)
- Sense -- the means for determining the reference (intension)
- Frege noticed that we have different reactions to the following
sentences:
- The morning star is the morning star.
- The morning star is the evening star.
- But Venus is both the morning star and the evening star, so "the morning star"
and "the evening star" have the same reference (refer to the same actual item).
- But we don't feel that sentence (2) is tautologous.
- Therefore the meaning of a sentence involves more than reference, it also
involves how one determines reference.
- It is also possible for a NP to have sense without having reference:
The present king of France is bald.
- "The present king of France" fails to refer -- there is no such actual person.
- But sense of it is clear: a person who presently rules the country of France
as a monarch.
- So we know how to go about determining the reference of "the present king
of France" though that search actually comes up empty.
Broken Rules
- Nonsense -- "My brother was an only child."
False by definition.
- Metaphor -- "The dryer ate my sock."
Violates semantic selectional restrictions.
- Idioms -- "John let the cat out of the bag."
Meaning of the whole is not just the meaning of the parts put together.
- Passive sometimes works with idioms --
The cat was let out of the bag.
- But not always --
She put her foot in her mouth.
* Her foot was put in her mouth.
Conversational Maxims
- Grice discovered a number of conversational maxims (rules) that people generally
obey. Two of them are: Be cooperative and Be relevant.
- The following discourse representations a failure of cooperation:
A: Do you know what time it is?
B: Yes.
- Or, if you know for sure that you're leaving on Tuesday it's misleading to say:
I'm leaving on Monday or Tuesday.
Speech Acts
- Austin noticed that some sentences are special in that they DO things.
- One class is PERFORMATIVES. When spoken such sentences do the work:
I (hereby) declare the fair open. ("hereby" is a good diagnostic of performatives)
- Another case is the use of questions and statements as requests for action:
Can you pass the salt?
Don't you think it's hot in here? (= Open the window, please.)
Boy it's hot in here.
Presuppositions
- Statements or questions that presuppose a related sentence.
- "Leading" questions or statements.
- "When did you stop beating your donkey?" presupposes:
- You stopped beating your donkey.
- You did beat your donkey.
- You beat something.
- You have a donkey.
- ...
- "I'll have some more coffee." presupposes that you have already had some.
Deixis
- Deixis means pointing out.
- Deitic elements rely on the speech act circumstances to be interpreted.
Their interpretation is variable depending on where, when, by whom, etc. the
sentence is uttered.
- I am a man. (pronoun is deitic -- refers to the speaker)
- Today is Wednesday.
- This class meets here.
De dicto and de re
- "I want a hamburger." usually means
I want something that I will accept as an instance of a hamburger.
(de dicto reading)
- NOT, I want a particular hamburger, that one right there.
(de re reading)
- "Martha wants to marry a Swede." can be true if:
- there's a particular person, say Bjorn, that Martha wants to marry, and
he happens to be Swedish. (de re reading)
- Martha doesn't have anybody in particular in mind, it's just one of her
criteria for who she would marry. (de dicto reading)