Semantics, Semiotics and Language

Semantics

• Branch of linguistics from Greek, it studies meaning and signification.

Sign (Ferdinand de Saussure)

• Signifier: The form the sign takes.
• Signified: The concept it represents.
• Sign: Association of signifier with signified.

Semiotics (Ferdinand de Saussure)

• The relationship between the sign and the object it represents.

Langue and Parole (Ferdinand de Saussure)

• Langue (language): System of signs, shared knowledge of speech.
• Parole (speaking): Use of language by speakers, dynamic social activity.

Triadic Model (Charles Sanders Peirce)

• Sign: Representamen (RED LIGHT).
• Interpretant: Mental concept, meaning (THE NEED TO STOP).
• Object: Real object (YOU STOP THE CAR).

Three Types of Signs (Charles Sanders Peirce)

• Icon: bears a resemblance (portrait, photograph, onomatopoeia).
• Index: shows a cause-effect relationship (smoke & fire).
• Symbol: shows no resemblance (red flag for danger).

Language Properties

• Duality: Two simultaneous levels of sound production and meaning.
• Arbitrariness: No natural connection between sound and meaning.
• Productivity: Combines words into expressions and sentences.

Convention

• Meaning is based on convention.
• Maluma vs Takete (Koehler): Illustrates sound symbolism.
• Talking Heads: Utterances convey concepts between minds.

Semantics in Linguistics

• Phonology: Languages have different sounds and combinations.
• Syntax: Languages are built up with structures.
• Semantics: Language refers to things, makes them meaningful.
• Pragmatics: Language is produced in context.
• Signification: Identifies and creates signs.

Meaning

• Linguistic meaning and speaker meaning differ.
• "It's getting late" means someone should leave.
• Chinese Room Experiment (Searle): Meaning-making involves mental activity.

Entailment

• If X is true, Y must be true. Example: John assassinated Jack entails Jack is dead.
• A "contains" B.

Syntactic Entailment

• Truth of A implies truth of B through grammar. Example: "Jack cooked the meal" entails "The meal was cooked by Jack".

Lexical Entailment

• Requires knowledge of meaning (paraphrase). Example: "I played records on a turntable" entails "I listened to LPs".
• Entailments are unidirectional.
• The opposite of entailment is contradictory. Example: "Jack reads fast" contradicts "Jack cannot read".

Saeed Examples of Entailment

• a. Olivia passed her driving test. -> b. Olivia didn't fail her driving test.
• a. Cassidy inherited a farm. -> b. Cassidy owned a farm.
• a. Arnold poisoned his wife. -> b. Arnold killed his wife.
• a. We brought this champagne. -> b. This champagne was brought by us.

Valence (Valency, Complementation)

• Verb's capacity to take specific arguments, depends on context.
• Avalent: Intransitive
• Monovalent: Monotransitive
• Divalent: Ditransitive

Thematic Role / Theta Role (Ray Jackendoff)

• Indicates semantic relationship between NP and V in a sentence.
• Characterizes entities in speech situations.

Lexeme

• Semantic word uniting morphological variants of a single word.
• One lexeme can have grammatical and phonological forms. Example: walk, walks, walked, walking.

Semantic Properties of Words

• Words are meaningful or meaningless.
• Ambiguity exists.
• Meaning includes sense and reference.
  • Sense: General concept.
  • Reference: Object referred to.
  • Denotation: Class of objects a word refers to.
  • Connotation: Meaning not affecting sense but secondary factors.

Aristotelian Logic

• Involves logical rules of inferencing.

Truth

• Correspondence with facts.

Four Types of Truth Relations (Saeed)

• Modus ponens (If A, then B; A is true, so B is true).
• Modus tollens (If A, then B; B is false, so A is false).
• Hypothetical syllogism (If A, then B, and if B, then C; so if A, then C).
• Disjunctive syllogism (Either A or B; not A, so B).

Truth Value

• Property of a sentence being true or false.
• Truth conditions are facts making a sentence true or false.
• Only sentences with truth value are statements.
• Negation reverses a statement's truth value.
  • Sentence is true: Truth-value is TRUE ('T').
  • Sentence is false: Truth-value is FALSE ('⊥').

Connectives

• Determine truth-value of compound sentences.

Conjunctions

• Both statements true, the whole is true.

Contradictions

• Sentences that cannot be true. Example: "She was assassinated last week but fortunately she's still alive."

Tautologies

• Statements that are always true. Example: "My father is my father."

Thematic Roles

• Agent: Performer of action.
• Patient: Undergoer of action.
• Theme: Entity moved by action.
• Experiencer: Entity affected but not in control.
• Goal: Location towards which something moves.
• Source: Location from which something moves.
• Benefactive: Entity benefiting from the action.
• Instrument: Medium by action.
• Location: Place of action.
• Stimulus: Entity causing psychological effect.

Thematic Roles Examples

• "David cooked the shrimps" (David is Agent, shrimps are Patient).
• "Kevin felt ill" (Kevin is Experiencer).
• "Robert filled in the form for his grandmother" (Robert is Agent, form is Patient, grandmother is Beneficiary).
• "Felix carried the bag to the house" (Felix is Agent, bag is Theme, house is Goal).
• One NP can have roles.

Information/Thematic Structure

• Given vs. New information.
• Mentioned information can be referenced using pronouns.

Giveness Hierarchy (Grundel et al.)

• Focus > activated > familiar > uniquely identifiable > referential indefinite > type identifiable.

Focus

• New information, alternative selection.

Topic

• Usually given information, tends to be at the beginning of sentences.

Concepts Shared by All Humans

• Leibniz (1666): Set of universal concepts, "alphabet of human thoughts".
• Wierzbicka: "Alphabet of human thoughts is catalogue of primitive concepts".
• Natural Semantic Metalanguage (Wierzbicka, Goddard): Core of universal meanings expressed linguistically.

65 Semantic Primes

• Essential for explaining words/grammatical constructions.
• Meanings are conceptually simple.

Language Games (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

• Speaking is an activity with varied uses.
• Meaning depends on context and is for insiders.

Semantics vs. Pragmatics

• Semantics: Dyadic, meaning of something, sentences, complete clause.
• Pragmatics: Triadic, speaker meaning, utterances, meaningful in context.

Context

• Shared discourse, facts, and situation.

Contexts

• Situational: Knowledge of surroundings.
• Experiential: Knowledge of each other and the world.
• Co-text: What participants know from what they have been saying.

Deixis

• Words and expressions rely on situational context.
• Includes spatial, personal, temporal, and discourse references.

Deictic Projection/Shift of Point of View (Charles Fillmore)

• Deictic center shifts to addressee in the speech event.

Common Ground

• Shared knowledge participants have.
• Includes understandings and assumptions.
• Can be dynamic, universal, or restricted.
• Variables: role/status/space/time, level of formality, register, channel, style.

Inference

• Listener draws implicit meaning.

Presuppositions (Gottlob Frege)

• Assumptions taken for granted.
• Implicit meaning and speaker background.
• Information assumed to be meaningful.
• Remains true despite negation.

Pragmatic Presupposition

• Success requires hearer's assumptions, shared knowledge, and world knowledge.

Presupposition Triggers

• Constructions signaling a presupposition.
  • Factive verbs.
  • Phase change verbs.
  • Iterative adverbs.
  • Additive particles.
  • Definite descriptions.

Types of Presuppositions

• Existential: Entities speaker names.
• Factive: What is true.
• Lexical: One word indicating another meaning.
• Structural: Information assumed in questions
• Non-factive: Untrue information
• Counterfactual: Opposite of true.

Presupposition Tests: Negation

• Negation leaves presupposition constant.

Presuppositions vs. Entailments

• Negation doesn't negate presupposition.
• Negation produces contradictions.

Presuppositional Lying

• Claiming ignorance about trying something without even attempting it.

Presuppositions/Accommodation/Framing (George Lakoff)

• Every word has a frame that is evoked/reinforced.

Conversational Score (David Lewis)

• Participants add presuppositions.

Implicatures

• Conventional: Part of linguistic meaning, non-cancellable, with sentence carrying the implicature.

Gricean Maxims

• Quantity: Be informative, but not overly so.
• Quality: Be truthful.
• Relevance: Be relevant.
• Manner: Be clear, unambiguous, brief, and orderly.

Violation and Flouting

• Disobeying maxims.

Opting Out

• Explicitly stating a maxim cannot be satisfied.

Conversational Implicatures

• Related to cooperative principle, context-dependent, implicit, and non-detachable.
• Can be cancelled.

Implicatures vs. Entailments

• Entailment: Cannot be cancelled.
• Conversational: Can be cancelled.

Calculability Assumption

• Need literal meaning and assumption of cooperation.

Hedging

• Speaker avoids implying.

Grice's Modified Occam's Razor Principle

• No multiplying senses unnecessarily.

Erving Goffman

• Introduced "facework" and politeness.

Face

• Claimed social value with interpersonal interactions to save "face."

Politeness (Brown and Levinson)

• Cooperative behavior presenting face.

First- and Second-Order Politeness

• 1st: Social behavior
• 2nd: linguistic forms reflecting standing.

Face

• The public self-image claimed.
• Positive face expresses wanting achievements to be desirable.
• Negative face avoids imposition.

Face-Saving Acts

• Negative indirectness is when language shows concern about imposition.
• Positive indirectness expresses solidarity.

Face-Threatening Acts (FTAs)

• H's negative face, making requests etc.
• H's positive face, disagreements etc.
• S's negative face, responses to thanks, etc.
• S's positive face, apologies, etc.

Mitigation Strategies

• On record: Direct, bald speech acts.
• Off record: Indirect speech acts.
• Positive indirectness is offering help.
• Negative indirectness avoids causing trouble.

Bald-On-Record Strategy

• Speaking in line with Grice's maxims.

Hyperbole and Litotes

• Figures of speech/scales.
• Hyperbole overstates (Quality).
• Litotes understates (Quality).
• Both violate the Cooperative Principle.
• Pollyanna Principle: Being optimistic.

Euphemism

• Describing unpleasant things harmlessly.

Conceptual Metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson)

• Understanding one thing through another.
• Source Domain: Used to understand something.
• Target Domain: What is understood.

Types of Conceptual Metaphor:

-Orientational (Happy is up) -Ontological (Activities as containers) -Structural (Love is a journey)

Discourse (Candlin)

• Language situated in society and connecting beyond isolated sentences.

3 notions of Discourse analysis

• Beyond literal meaning
• Language and interraction are best in context
• Social reality is socially constructed

Ethnomethodology (Harold Garfinkel)

• Understanding objective reality through social interaction.
• Documenting and creating social order.

Communicative Acts

• What is done by saying something.
  • Declarative: Statement
  • Interrogative: Question
  • Imperative: Command

Speech Act Theory (John Austin, John Searle)

• Words perform actions.

Direct and Indirect Speech Acts

• Direct: Structure matches function.
• Indirect: Structure doesn't match function.

Types of Speech Acts

• Locutionary: Meaning
• Illocutionary: Social convention.
• Perlocutionary: Effect on listener.

Classes of Speech Acts

• Representatives: Assertions, statements, claims.
• Directives: Commands, requests, invitations, dares.
• Commissives: Promises, vows, threats, pledges.
• Expressives: Apologies, compliments, condolences.
• Verdictives: Assessments, judgments, rankings.
• Declarations: Sentencing, blessing, firing, arresting.

Felicity Conditions (Austin)

• Conditions for valid speech act.
  • Sincerity, rationality, intentions of speakers.
  • Words match meaning, and appropriate context is necessary.