Semantics Chapter-1.pptx

SEMANTICS Prudhvi Raju, D Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz university 1  Meaning in the empirical study of language semantics, also called semiotics, semology, or  semasiology, the philosophical and s...

SEMANTICS Prudhvi Raju, D Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz university 1  Meaning in the empirical study of language semantics, also called semiotics, semology, or  semasiology, the philosophical and scientific study of meaning in natural and artificial languages. The term is one of a group of English words formed from the various derivatives of the Greek verb sēmainō (“to.mean” or “to signify”) It is difficult to formulate a distinct definition for each  of these terms, because their use largely overlaps in.the literature despite individual preferences 2  The word semantics has ultimately prevailed as a  name for the doctrine of meaning, of linguistic meaning in particular. Semiotics is still used, however, to denote a broader field: the study of sign-.using behaviour in general 3  MEANING, COMMUNICATION AND SIGNIFICANCE Informally, it is easy to agree that meaning is the heart of language. Meaning, we might say, is what language is for: to have a language without meaning would be like having lungs without air Meaning is also central to the experience of using language, as any- one knows who has ever listened to people talking in an unknown lan- guage. Not only does such a language fail to express any meaning; it is also often hard to catch hold of individual words Without a capacity to express meaning, then, language loses one of its essential aspects. We practically always speak or write in order to.express a meaning of one kind or another 4 Although the study of meaning is extremely ancient, the name semantics was only coined in the late nineteenth century by the French linguist.Michel Bréal Like many other names of branches of linguistics, the word semantics reflects the origins of the Western tradition of linguistic analysis in the.writings of Greek thinkers from the fifth century BC onwards Semantics comes from the ancient Greek word semantikos, an adjective.’meaning ‘relating to signs’, based on the noun sēmeion ‘sign In Ancient Greek, one of the original uses of sēmeion was as a medical.term for the symptoms that were the signs of underlying diseases  This derivation high- lights the close relation between the study of linguistic signs – words, phrases, sentences and utterances – and the study of signs in general: both artificial, conventional signs like road signs, clock faces, the symbols used in computer programs, or the ‘signals’ communicated by different choices of clothes; and natural signs like symptoms of disease, the level of the sun in the sky (a sign of.the time of day) or tracks on the ground (the sign that an animal has passed) The study of signs in general is known as semiotics or semiology (both Greek words also deriving from sēmeion). In the twen- tieth century, the general study of signs became particularly important and the new discipline of semiotics was created, especially as the result of the work of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced ‘purse’; 1839–1914) and of Bréal’s student, the Swiss.linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), often considered as the founder of modern linguistics The meanings we can express through language are infinitely more numerous, detailed and precise than those expressible through other semiotic media. Yet the type of meaning found in language can be seen as a subset of two broader categories of meaningfulness: the significance of human behaviour in.general, and the meaningfulness of communication specifically 6  Meaning in English English uses the verb to mean to refer to a relationship involving at least one of three different types of thing: language, the world (including peo- ple, objects, and everything outside of ourselves) and our own minds or intentions. Here are five typical examples of :mean in English which exem- plify some of these relationships.When I said ‘Dublin has lots of attractions’ I meant Dublin, Ireland, not Dublin, Virginia.1.In Sydney, ‘the bridge’ means the Harbour Bridge.2.’Stout’ means ‘short and fat‘.3.By turning off the music I didn’t mean that you should go.4.Trees mean water.5 Sentence (1) distinguishes two possible places that the speaker could have been referring to by the name ‘Dublin’, and specifies that.only one of them was intended This, then, is a three-way relation between a piece of language, a mind and the world: the world is represented by the two places called.Dublin, language by the sentence ‘Dublin has lots of attrac- tions’, and mind by the speaker’s intention to refer to Dublin, Ireland 7.In Sydney, ‘the bridge’ means the Harbour Bridge.2 The second sentence is a relation between language and world, without any specific reference to people’s intentions. It says that the expression ‘the bridge’ refers to one particular structure – the Sydney Harbour Bridge – rather than any of the other.bridges in Sydney.’Stout’ means ‘short and fat‘.3 In (3), there is no explicit reference to either people’s minds or to the world: the sentence reports an equivalence between two.’linguistic items, the word ‘stout’, according to (3), is simply equivalent in some way to the words ‘short and fat.By turning off the music I didn’t mean that you should go.4 Sentence (4) refers to a mind–world relation: it is thus like sentence (1), except that there is no language: the speaker denies.that the action of turning the music off was the result of any intention for the guests to leave.Trees mean water Sentence (5) names a world–world relationship: the presence of one type of object in the world (trees) reveals the presence.of another (water) sentences (1)–(3) refer to linguistic meaning, sentence (4) refers to communicated meaning, and sentence (5) refers to what.we have called significance 8  The semiotic triangle: language, mind, world and meaning French and English, make an important connection in their standard vocabularies between language and the world of inner conscious processes like volition, perception.and intention All of these relations are important. To describe meaning fully, we seem to have to.make reference to three principal terms: language, the world, and the human mind Following Ogden and Richards (1949: 10), these three aspects of the meaning.phenomenon are often symbolized as the ‘semiotic triangle At the top of the triangle is what Ogden and Richards called ‘thought’. This reflects the fact that language comes from human beings, and is therefore ultimately a product of.processes in the mind or brain 9  The leftmost point of the triangle, the ‘symbol’, is the most straight- forward. The symbol, in this terminology, is whatever perceptible token is chosen to express the speaker’s intended meaning. In the case of spoken language, the symbols will be strings of speech sounds, in the case of written language, they will be marks on the.page, and in the case of sign languages, they will be particular hand signs The last apex of the triangle is the ‘referent’, or whatever things, events or situations in the world the language is about. Thus, the sentence the dogs bark, the caravan goes by has as its referent a particular situation: a situation in which.certain dogs bark and a certain caravan goes by 10  Some Initial Concepts Lexemes: The lexeme is the name of the abstract unit  which unites all the morphological variants of a single word. Thus, we can say that go, goes, went, have gone and to go all.are instantiations (examples) of the lexeme to go We usually refer to the lexeme as a whole using one of the  morphological variants. This differs from language to.language 11  Sense / reference / denotation / connotation English word meaning is vague. One important distinction we can make within the general.notion of a lexeme’s meaning is between its sense and its referent (or reference) The sense of a lexeme 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.A word’s referent is the object which it stands for on a specific occasion of use.For example The queen has fallen off the table If I am talking about a evening at Buckingham Palace, the referent of the word queen is Her Majesty, Elizabeth II, and the referent of the word table is a particular piece of English royal.furniture But if I am talking about Queen Margrethe of Denmark, the words queen and table have different referents: not Elizabeth II and the English piece of furniture, but Margrethe and the.Danish one  A word’s referent is the particular thing, person, place, etc. which an expression stands for on a particular occasion of use, and it changes each time the word is applied to a different object or.situation in the world By contrast, a word’s sense does not change every time the word takes on a new referent. Regardless of whether the referent of queen is Elizabeth II or Margrethe, its sense is something like ‘female.’reigning monarch This would be the sense involved if I uttered while talking about a game of chess in the café, where.queen would refer to a particular chess piece The referents change each time we talk about a different queen, or a different table. The entire class.of objects, etc., to which an expression correctly refers is called the expression’s denotation Sense, reference and denotation are three aspects of what is commonly conveyed by the loose term.’‘meaning A fourth, very important aspect of meaning is connotation. Connotation names those aspects of meaning which do not affect a word’s sense, reference or denotation, but which have to do with.secondary factors such as its emotional force, its level of formality, its character as a euphemism, etc  Compositionality All human languages have the property of productivity.This is simply the fact that the vocabulary of any given language can be used to construct a theoretically infinite.number of sentences by varying the ways in which the words are combined For example, given the words the, a, has, eaten, seen, passing, contemporary, novelist and buffalo, the following figure among the large number of meaningful sentences that :can be constructed.The novelist has seen the buffalo.A novelist has eaten the buffalo.A contemporary novelist has seen a buffalo.The novelist has seen a passing buffalo A buffalo has eaten a passing contemporary novelist We can understand immediately the above sentences.meaning ?How does this ability arise.One answer is that meaning is compositional This is to say that meanings of sentences are composed.of their constituent lexemes We understand novel sentences because we understand the meanings of the words out of which they.are constructed On the contrary, if a novel sentence contains a word which.we do not know, we do not know what the sentence means Ex: if you are told that the distribution of seats was aleatory, and you do not know that aleatory means ‘random’, then the.sentence, taken as a whole, will not be meaningful It is important to note that not all combinations of words are.necessarily compositional One especially important category of non-compositional phrase is idioms  Levels of meaning The distinction between word meaning and sentence meaning defines a basic.contrast between lexical and phrasal semantics We can define sentence meaning as the compositional meaning of the sentence as.constructed out of the meanings of its individual component lexemes But the meaning of a sentence as built up out of its component parts is often.quite different from the meaning it actually has in a particular context.Ex: You’re a very tidy cook, I see The sentence meaning is the literal, compositional meaning as built up from the meanings of the individual words of the sentence. If we did not speak English, we could discover the sentence meaning by finding out what its translation was in our own language. The utterance meaning, by contrast, is the meaning which the words have on a particular occasion of use in the particular context in.which they occur  Object language and metalanguage The study of meaning, semantics is interested in something which cannot be perceived directly through our senses, but which, in one way or another, we experience in using and thinking about language. We cannot see, hear or touch a word’s meaning: meanings are things we understand. It is not meanings that go between speaker and hearer: the only things that are transferred from one speaker to the other are sound waves in the air. This means that in order to get started in semantics, we need a way of identifying meanings and bringing them to light in an unambiguous way so that we can begin to study them. The main way in which we normally reveal the meanings of linguistic expressions is, quite simply, by describing them in language. But since it is language that we’re interested in in the first place, we need to distinguish between the language whose meanings we want to describe and the language in which we couch the descriptions. The language whose meanings we are describing is called the object language. The language in which we describe these meanings is called the metalanguage.  Breaking the Circle It will be useful if we have some initial idea about what meaning is best thought of as being – of how, in other words, we can break the definitional circle. 1. Meaning as Referents / definitions 2. Meaning as Concepts 3. Meaning as brain states 4. Meaning as use  Meanings as referents/denotations One way to break the definitional circle would be to stress the role of the referent or denotation as the main component of the meaning of a linguistic expression. Under this theory, metalanguage explanations of a meaning should be seen as names of the referents of the object language term. Ordinary discourse about language in English often seems to make an implicit identification between an expression’s meaning and its referent: In Sydney, ‘the bridge’ means the Harbour Bridge. The ‘meaning’ of ‘bridge’, the speaker seems to be suggesting, is the actual harbour bridge itself. ‘Bridge’, we might say, means what it refers to; its meaning on any one occasion of use is its referent. Outside of the narrow context of , we could say that the meaning of bridge in general is just its denotation – the class of all bridges. This identification of meaning and referent/denotation succeeds in breaking the circle because it identifies meaning with non-linguistic objects in the world: the meaning of ‘bridge’ on a particular instance of use is the real bolts and metal structure.  Meanings as concepts / mental representations The referential/denotational theory of meaning broke the definitional circle by emphasizing the referent side of the sense/referent pair. Another way out of the circle is to identify meanings with concepts: the metalanguage definitions of an object language meaning are the names of the concepts associated with the object language term. Concepts can be seen as a way of talking about the basic constituents of thought. In the words of Prinz (2002: 1) ‘without concepts, there would be no thoughts. Concepts are the basic timber of our mental lives.’ If we imagine the process of thinking as a sort of internal conversation with ourselves, then concepts are the individual words and expressions of which this conversation consists. Concepts are implicated in practically every aspect of our mental lives.  Meanings as brain states A natural thought about meaning is to identify it with brain states: understanding or intending a certain meaning, on this identification, would just be having the neurons of one’s brain in a particular configuration. This is an attractive position in many ways: brain states must ultimately cause all behaviour, including language. Meanings, the way we normally think of them, have mutual connections to each other – of synonymy, antonymy, class inclusion and so on. For example, the meaning ‘cat’ has the following relations with other meanings: it is an instance of a broader class of meanings, ‘mammals’, ‘domestic animals’, ‘four- legged animals’ and so on; it is, in some sense, the ‘opposite’ of the meaning ‘dog’; it can be synonymous with the meaning ‘feline’. These are facts about the meaning of cat that we will presumably want a theory of semantics to reflect.  Meaning and use An alternative to the three previous theories is the view that a word’s meaning consists simply in the way it is used. This is the use theory of meaning, and it has been advanced, in different forms, by behaviourist psychologists such as Skinner (1957), and linguists such as Bloomfi eld (1933). A rather different, non-behaviourist use theory was advanced by Wittgenstein 1953. Use theorists have claimed that the only objective, scientifi c way to explain language is to avoid postulating unobservable objects called meanings, and to attend only to what may actually be observed, the particular sequences of words and expressions that occur in actual examples of language use, and to describe the relation between these linguistic forms and the situations in which they are used. In the words of Skinner (1957: 5), ‘What happens when a man speaks or responds to speech is clearly a question about human behavior’, and the only correct way to answer it is to proffer a precise account of what linguistic behaviour is likely to be produced in different situations.  Meaning and explanation We’ve now considered four proposals about the nature of meaning: meaning as reference/denotation, meaning as concepts, meaning as brain states and meaning as use. What conclusions can we draw? One particular conclusion concerns the status of the term ‘meaning’ itself. we should consider the possibility that ‘meaning’ is essentially a pretheoretical, informal notion which will not have any precise equivalent in a detailed account of linguistic behaviour on the other two levels. The most obvious way of explaining the use of these words is to associate them with the particular contexts and situations in which they occur, and the use theory of meaning will be the most relevant.