Semantics & Pragmatics PDF

# Semantics & Pragmatics - **Semantics**: - Study of sentence meaning and word meaning, not tied to context. - Study of words and their meaning in a language. - Focuses mainly on the significance on the meaning of words in a literal sense. - Studies the literal meaning. - Is the...

# Semantics & Pragmatics - **Semantics**: - Study of sentence meaning and word meaning, not tied to context. - Study of words and their meaning in a language. - Focuses mainly on the significance on the meaning of words in a literal sense. - Studies the literal meaning. - Is the study of the "toolkit" for meaning. - Knowledge encoded in the vocabulary of the language and its patterns for building more elaborate meanings, up to the level of sentence meanings. - **Pragmatics**: - Study of utterance meaning, Utterances are expressions identified only by their contexts. - Study of words and their meaning in a language with concern to their context. - Additionally focuses on the meaning of words according to the context and their inferred meaning. - Studies the intended or the inferred meaning as well. - Is concerned with the use of these tools in meaningful communication. - Is about the interaction of semantic knowledge with our knowledge of the world, taking into account contexts of use. - "Not so loud" ## Difference Between Sentences and Utterances - The essential difference between sentences and utterances is that sentences are abstract, not tied to context, whereas utterances are identified by context. ## Three Stages of Interpretation - **1st stage**: Literal meaning (Semantic) - Its meaning is based on the semantic information that you know from your knowledge of English. - The meaning can be recognized without wondering who might say or write the words, where or when. - No consideration of context is involved. - "That was the last bus" - **2nd stage**: Explicature (Pragmatic) - Goes beyond the literal meaning. - It's a basic interpretation of an utterance, using contextual information and world knowledge to work out what is being referred to and which way to understand ambiguous expressions. - "That was the last bus" - **3rd stage**: Implicature (Pragmatic) - It goes further and looks for what is hinted at by an utterance in its particular context. - What the speaker means. - "That was the last bus" ## Types of Meaning - **Sender's meaning**: - Is the meaning that the speaker or writer intends to convey (intended meaning) by means of an utterance. - Sender's meaning is something that addressees are continually having to make informed guesses about (interpretation). - Sender's thoughts are private, but utterances are publicly observable. ## What is a Sentence - A sentence is a complete thought or statement which conveys a complete meaning. - This can either be in the spoken or written form. - Thus, a sentence at least primarily consists of a subject, a verb, and an object. - Addition to this fundamental parts in a sentence, there may be phrases and clauses as well. - However, what should be kept in mind is that a sentence is a group of words that give a complete meaning. - In linguistics, sentence structures with regard to varied languages are learned. - In the English language, the structure of a sentence is as follows: Subject + Verb + Object - Accordingly, a sentence should consist at least these three fundamental components in order to categorize it as a sentence, or it must at least have a main clause to stand independently. - He went to school. - We study English. ## What is an Utterance - An utterance is considered the smallest unit of speech. - It can be defined as "a natural unit of speech bounded by breaths or pauses." - Thus, it necessarily doesn't covey a complete meaning. - An utterance can, therefore, be a clause, a single word, pause, and even a meaningful statement. - However, unlike a sentence that can exist in both oral and written form, utterance exists only in the oral form. - However, they can be represented and delineated in the written form using many ways. - An utterance, since it happens primarily in the oral speech, has several related features such as facial expressions, gestures, and posture. - These include stress, intonation, and tone of voice, as well as ellipsis, which are words that the listener inserts in spoken language to fill gaps. - In addition to these, an utterance may also include voiced/un-voiced pauses like “umm”, tag questions, false starts, fillers like "and stuff", deictic expressions such as "over there" with other simple conjunctions like "and," "but," etc. ## Sentence VS Utterance - The difference between a sentence and utterance is that while a sentence conveys a complete meaning through a combination of clauses, an utterance conveys a meaning through a few words that may not even compile a clause. - A sentence is in both written and spoken language, but an utterance is in spoken language only. - Sentence coveys a complete meaning, either spoken or written, whereas utterance usually does not necessarily convey a complete meaning. | Sentence | Utterance | |---|---| | A group of words that convey a complete meaning | A natural unit of speech bounded by breaths or pauses, thus usually not conveying a complete meaning | | Exists in both spoken and written form | Exists only in the spoken form | | Basic structure is semantics | Smallest unit of speech | | The semantic structure varies according to the language. however, a sentence basically has a subject, a verb and an object. | Does not have a specific semantic structure since even a burp, or a pause is categorized as an utterance | - Conclusion: Both sentence and utterance bear significance in linguistics and in communication among humans. Though they appear similar, they have distinct differences between them. The main difference between sentence and utterance is that sentence coveys a complete meaning expressed either in the spoken or written form whereas utterance usually does not convey a complete meaning and it is primarily expressed in the spoken form. ## **What do you understand by paraphrase?** - Sentences with the same meaning are called paraphrases. - She is always agile. - She is always active. - She is always full of energy. ## **Complementary (antonyms)**: - Expressions which come in pairs and which, between them, exhaust all the relevant possibilities. - Being "not X" automatically means being "Y" and being "not Y" means being "X", if X and Y are complementary antonyms. - EXAMPLES: - Dead/alive - On/off - Married/unmarried - Male/female ## **Antonyms** - The term antonymy is mean any kind of oppo - Antonymy is defined by a pattern of entailments such as the one in (2.8c): if we know that (2.8a) is true, then we can be sure that, with regard to the same (part of) the same street at the same time, (2.8b) is false, or equivalently that the negation of (2.8b) is true (2.8a →NOT2.8b). And if we know that (2.8b) is true, it follows – again provided that we keep the place and time constant – that the street was not noisy (NOT 2.8а). ## **Converses**: - Expressions which express a relationship between two things such that one of the expressions conveys the relationship in one order and the other expression conveys the relationship in the opposite order. - EXAMPLES: - Buy/sell - Husband (of)/wife (of) - Above/below ## **(Gradable) Antonyms**: - Expressions are gradable antonyms if they are at opposite ends of a continuous scale of values (a scale which can vary according to the context of use). - Thus, with gradable antonyms it is possible to be both "not X" and "not Y", but somewhere in the middle. - EXAMPLES: - Hot/cold - Tall/short - Love/hate ## Gradable and Non-gradable Adjectives - Most adjectives are gradable. - This means that their meaning can be modified (made stronger, weaker, or otherwise altered) by placing one or more adverbs in front of them. - Write three examples of gradable adjectives. - For example: - An expensive car - A very expensive car - A fairly expensive car - An extremely expensive car - **Non-gradable adjectives** are those with meanings which cannot be modified by adverbs. - For example: - The western side of the mountain - Electronic devices - A nuclear reactor