Introduction to Semantics

Semantics
Compiled by Azman

A. Five Approaches to Meaning

1. Meaning as Reference
2. Meaning as Logical Form
3. Meaning as Context and Use
4. Meaning as Culture
5. Meaning as Conceptual Structure

B. Conceptions of meaning
Words → things: This view is found in the Cratylus of Plato (427-347 BC). Words “name” or “refer to” things. It works well for proper nouns like London, Everton FC and Ford Fiesta. It is less clear when applied to abstractions, to verbs and to adjec-tives - indeed wherever there is no immediately existing referent (thing) in the physical world, to correspond to the symbol (word).
Words → concepts → things: This theory was classically expressed by C.K. Ogden and I. A . Richards, in The Meaning of Meaning (1923). It states that there is no direct connection of symbol and referent, but an indirect connection in our minds. For each word there is a related concept.

C. Kinds of Meaning
Three kinds of meaning by Fromkin

Various levels of formalization of meaning could be taken into account:

1. Lexical meaning (meaning of words) e.g. A cat is a name of a furry animal that has a long tail and sharp claws which are often kept as pets. A lexicon is a database of information about words. This information can take many shapes:

* Definitions of the meaning of words
* Grammatical information (part of speech, inflectional information)
* Antonyms, Synonyms (hot is an antonym of cold, superfluous is a synonym of redundant)
* Hypernyms, hyponyms (a robin is a bird; the bird is the hypernym, the robin is the hyponym)
* Meronyms (part/whole relationships: An elbow is a part of an arm, a car-steering wheel is a part of a car)

2. Conceptual meaning (meaning of concepts, embodied in type-hierarchies or ontologies). A concept can be viewed as a category. For example, "Elephant" is a concept, or a category, just as "knife", "car", "idea", "theorem", "number", "relationship", and "motherhood" are all concepts or categories.

3. Propositional meaning (meaning of sentences). Example: I eat rice three times a day. Propositional meaning is meaning that can be expressed by one or more sen-tences. For example, the sentence: Birds are singing in a sycamore tree

Seven Kinds of Meaning according to Geoffrey Leech

1. Conceptual meaning: Logical, cognitive, or denotative content
2. Associative meaning:

a. Connotative meaning is “the communicative value an expression has by virtue of what it refers to” (Leech 1981: 12). It embraces the properties of the referent and is, therefore, peripheral. In English, the word dog may have the connotation loyalty, apart from its referential meaning. In another culture, the word that denotes the same animal may have different connotations. The word winter refers to the season between autumn and spring, but its connotation to people in Hawaii is definitely different from the people in Moscow. So, as a kind of associative meaning, connotative meaning is subject to culture and experience.

b. Social meaning (sometimes termed stylistic meaning) is what is conveyed about the social circumstances of the use of a linguistic expression, including regional or/and social overtones and formality. Pavement is used in British English and sidewalk in American English. Residence is formal and home is casual.

c. Affective meaning is what is communicated of the feeling or attitude of the speaker/writer toward what is referred to. Statesman is commending in sense while politician is derogatory.

d. Reflected meaning is what is communicated through association with another sense of the same expression. In order to avoid reflected meaning some expressions are deliberately replaced by others. For example, chicken thighs are labeled as drumsticks in Western supermarkets, and chicken breast is called white meat. Words that have a taboo meaning tend to be replaced. Cock is now substituted by rooster.

e. Collocative meaning is the associated meaning a word acquires in line with the meaning of words which tend to co-occur with it. Both pretty and handsome mean good-looking but they differ in collocative meaning. Pretty often co-occurs with girl, woman, flower, skirt, etc. Handsome often collocates with boy, man, car, overcoat, etc.

3. Thematic meaning concerns itself with how the order of words spoken affects the meaning that is entailed.

D. Kinds of semantic relations are as follows:
1. Active relation: A semantic relation between two concepts, one of which expresses the performance of an operation or process affecting the other.
2. Antonymy (A is the opposite of B; e.g. cold is the opposite of warm)
3. Associative relation: A relation which is defined psychologically: that (some) people associate concepts (A is mentally associated with B by somebody). Of-ten are associative relations just unspecified relations.
4. Causal relation: A is the cause of B. For example: Scurvy is caused by lack of vitamin C.
5. Homonym. Two concepts, A and B, are expressed by the same symbol. Ex-ample: Both a financial institution and a edge of a river are expressed by the word bank (the word has two senses).
6. Hyponymous relationships ("is a" relation or hyponym-hyperonym), generic relation, genus-species relation: a hierarchical subordinate relation. (A is kind of B; A is subordinate to B; A is narrower than B; B is broader than A). The "is a" relation denotes what class an object is a member of. For example, "CAR - is a - VEHICLE" and "CHICKEN - is a - BIRD". It can be thought of as being a shorthand for "is a type of". When all the relationships in a system are "is a", is the system a taxonomy. The "generic of" option allows you to indicate all the particular types (species, hyponyms) of a concept. The "specific of" option al-lows you to indicate the common genus (hypernym) of all the particular types.
7. Instance-of relation. (“instance”, example relation) designates the semantic relations between a general concept and individual instances of that concept. A is an example of B. Example: Copenhagen is an instance of the general con-cept 'capital'.
8. Locative relation: A semantic relation in which a concept indicates a location of a thing designated by another concept. A is located in B; example: Minori-ties in Denmark.
9. Meronymy, partitive relation (part-whole relation): a relationship between the whole and its parts (A is part of B) A meronym is the name of a constituent part of, the substance of, or a member of something. Meronymy is opposite to holonymy (B has A as part of itself). (A is narrower than B; B is broader than A).
10. Passive relation: A semantic relation between two concepts, one of which is affected by or subjected to an operation or process expressed by the other.
11. Paradigmatic relation. Wellisch (2000, p. 50): “A semantic relation between two concepts, that is considered to be either fixed by nature, self-evident, or established by convention. Examples: mother / child; fat /obesity; a state /its capital city”.
12. Polysemy: A polysemous (or polysemantic) word is a word that has several sub-senses which are related with one another. (A1, A2 and A3 shares the same expression)
13. Possessive: a relation between a possessor and what is possessed.
14. Synonymy (A denotes the same as B; A is equivalent with B).
15. Temporal relation: A semantic relation in which a concept indicates a time or period of an event designated by another concept. Example: Second World War, 1939-1945.

E. Semantic Change
1. Extension
Extension is the widening of a word's range of meanings, often by analogy or simplification. For example, virtue was initially a quality that could only be applied to men, like our modern word manliness, but in contemporary society, it can equally be applied to women as well. Maverick used to be a rancher's term for an unbranded cow but can now mean a person who doesn't conform to the conventions of a group (Jeffers & Lehiste).

2. Narrowing
Narrowing is the reduction in a word's range of meanings, often limiting a generic word to a more specialised or technical use. For example, broadcast originally meant "to cast seeds out;" with the advent of radio and television, the word was extended to indicate the transmission of audio and video sig-nals. Today, because of narrowing, very few people outside of agricultural circles use broadcast in the earlier sense (Jeffers & Lehiste).

3. Amelioration
Amelioration occurs as a word loses negative connotations or gains positive ones. For example, mischievous used to mean "disastrous", where it now only means "playfully annoying".

4. Pejoration
Pejoration occurs as a word develops negative connotations or loses positive ones. For example, notorious initially meant "widely known". Yet it has gone through the process of extension to now mean "widely and unfavourably known". A much more famous example is of the word gay, which can mean happy or colorful and was used commonly until it became a reference to homosexuals. While this may or may not have been a euphemisation in itself, the word in the original sense is avoided. Gay is also extended in certain slang vocabularies as a pejorative adjective. See also euphemism treadmill.

5. Semantic Shift
Semantic shift occurs as a word moves from one set of circumstances to an-other, resulting in an extension of the range of meanings. An example of this is navigator, which once applied only to ships but, with the development of planes and cars, now applies to multiple forms of travel. Another example is Old English, meat, (or rather mete), which referred to all forms of solid food while flesh (flæsc) referred to animal tissue, and food (foda) referred to animal fodder. Meat was eventually restricted to flesh of animals, then flesh restricted to the tissue of humans and food was generalized to refer to all forms of solid food (Jeffers & Lehiste).

6. Semantic Drift
Semantic drift is the movement of the entire meaning of a lexeme to a new meaning, and is particularly evidenced by semantic differences between cognates.
For instance, the English word to starve is cognate with the German sterben ("to die") and in some parts of England, the word can mean "be cold" (since it evolved through the meaning "to die of cold"). Though both words arose from a common West Germanic root *sterb-a- ("to die"), and their meanings are still somewhat related, semantic drift has caused their specific meanings to differ. The same may occur language-internally, especially when one form is specifically agglutinated. For example, English to hurdle is cognate to hard and is agglutinated with the -le frequentative suffix.

7. Figurative use
Figurative use is a change in meaning that is based on an analogy or likeness between things. For example, a crane is a bird with a long neck, but the word can now also mean a piece of equipment for lifting weights. The earlier ex-amples of maverick and broadcast are also examples of figurative use.

8. Metonymy
A type of extension, metonymy or synecdoche is the use of a part of an object to refer to a whole. In many languages, the word for head can be used as a substitute for the word for person. In English, we have the phrase "a head", resembling the Latin phrase "per capita", which we also use. The word "poll", originally meaning the top of the head, can refer to the whole head, and a "poll tax" is a fixed tax applied to each person. The convention of using capi-tal cities to represent countries or their governments is another example of metonymy.

9. Euphemism
A euphemism is the use of a substitute word in an attempt to replace or mask the negative connotations of the normal word for a certain object or action. The substitute word undergoes an extension, while the word replaced may suffer pejoration by dissimilation. For example, snogging was once an alterna-tive word for sex, though it has now been ameliorated in most registers to mean a french kiss.

10. Political correctness
Political correctness is a real or perceived attempt to refine or restrict language and terms used in public discussion to those deemed acceptable or appropriate. For example "blackboard" is now perceived by some as being "politically incorrect" in the United Kingdom, and so teachers are instructed to call it a "chalkboard" instead.

F. Sentential Relation / The Truth of Sentence (Fromkin et al)

1. Paraphrase: Two sentences that can have the same meaning.
a. The police chased the burglar & The burglar was chased by the police.
b. Paul bought a car from Sue & Sue sold a car to Paul

2. Entailment: a relation in which the truth of one sentence necessarily implies the truth of another.
Examples of asymmetrical entailment.
a. The park wardens killed the tiger & The tiger is dead.
b. Robin is a man & Robin is human

3. Contradiction: When two sentences cannot both be true.
a. Charles is a bachelor.
b. Charles is married.

4. Presupposition
A presupposition is background belief, relating to an utterance, that:

1. must be mutually known or assumed by the speaker and addressee for the utterance to be considered appropriate in context
2. generally will remain a necessary assumption whether the utterance is placed in the form of an assertion, denial, or question, and
3. can generally be associated with a specific lexical item or grammatical feature presupposition trigger) in the utterance.

The utterance John regrets that he stopped doing linguistics before he left Cam-bridge has the following presuppositions:
1. There is someone uniquely identifiable to speaker and addressee as John.
2. John stopped doing linguistics before he left Cambridge.
3. John was doing linguistics before he left Cambridge.
4. John left Cambridge.
5. John had been at Cambridge. (Source: Levinson 1983 179–180)

G. Rule of Truth /Maxims of Conversation (Herbert Paul Grice: 1989)

1. Maxim of Quality:
a. Do not say what you believe to be false.
b. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

2. Maxim of Quantity:
a. Make your contribution to the conversation as informative as necessary.
b. Do not make your contribution to the conversation more informative than nec-essary.

3. Maxim of Relevance:
Be relevant (i.e., say things related to the current topic of the conversation).

4. Maxim of Manner:
a. Avoid obscurity of expression.
b. Avoid ambiguity.
c. Be brief (avoid unnecessary wordiness).
d. Be orderly.

H. Politeness maxims (Steven C. Levinson)
According to Geoffrey Leech, there is a politeness principle with conversational maxims similar to those formulated by Paul Grice. He lists six maxims: tact, generos-ity, approbation, modesty, agreement, and sympathy. Note that these maxims vary from culture-to-culture, meaning, what may be considered as polite in one culture, may be strange or downright rude in another.

1. The Tact maxim
The tact maxim states: 'Minimize the expression of beliefs which imply cost to other; maximize the expression of beliefs which imply benefit to other.' The first part of this maxim fits in with Brown and Levinson's negative politeness strategy of minimizing the imposition, and the second part reflects the positive politeness strat-egy of attending to the hearer's interests, wants, and needs:
e.g. Could I interrupt you for a second?
If I could just clarify this then.

2. The Generosity maxim
Leech's Generosity maxim states: 'Minimize the expression of benefit to self; maximize the expression of cost to self.' Unlike the tact maxim, the maxim of gen-erosity focuses on the speaker, and says that others should be put first instead of the self.
You relax and let me do the dishes.
You must come and have dinner with us.

3. The Approbation maxim
The Approbation maxim states: 'Minimize the expression of beliefs which express dispraise of other; maximize the expression of beliefs which express approval of other.' The operation of this maxim is fairly obvious: all things being equal, we pre-fer to praise others and if we cannot do so, to sidestep the issue, to give some sort of minimal response (possibly through the use of euphemisms or to remain silent. The first part of the maxim avoids disagreement; the second part intends to make other people feel good by showing solidarity.
I heard you singing at the karaoke last night. It was, um... different.
John, I know you're a genius - would you know how to solve this math problem here?

4. The Modesty maxim
The Modesty maxim states: 'Minimize the expression of praise of self; maximize the expression of dispraise of self.'
Oh, I'm so stupid - I didn't make a note of our lecture! Did you?

5. The Agreement maxim
The Agreement maxim runs as follows: 'Minimize the expression of disagreement between self and other; maximize the expression of agreement between self and other.' It is in line with Brown and Levinson's positive politeness strategies of 'seek agreement' and 'avoid disagreement,' to which they attach great importance. How-ever, it is not being claimed that people totally avoid disagreement. It is simply ob-served that they are much more direct in expressing agreement, rather than dis-agreement.
A: I don't want my daughter to do this; I want her to do that.
B: Yes, but ma'am, I thought we resolved this already on your last visit.

6. The Sympathy maxim
The sympathy maxim states: 'minimize antipathy between self and other; maximize sympathy between self and other.' This includes a small group of speech acts such as congratulation, commiseration, and expressing condolences - all of which is in accordance with Brown and Levinson's positive politeness strategy of attending to the hearer's interests, wants, and needs. e.g. I was sorry to hear about your father.

I. Kinds of Antonym according to Geoffrey Leech

1. Gradable antonyms are two ends of the spectrum (slow and fast) but can have variations.
2. Complementary antonyms are pairs that express absolute opposites, like mortal and immortal. alive and dea. Antonyms like alive: dead, male: female, present: absent, innocent: guilty, odd: even, pass: fail ( a test ), hit: miss ( a target ), boy: girl are of this type. In contrast to the first type, the members of a pair in this type are complementary to each other. 3. Relational antonyms are pairs in which one describes a relationship between two objects and the other describes the same relationship when the two objects are reversed, such as parent and child, teacher and student.
3. Auto-antonyms are the same words that can mean the opposite of themselves under different contexts or having separate definitions, examples: enjoin (prohibit & order, fast (move quickly & fixed firmly in a place), cleave (to split & to adhere)
4. Converse antonym shows the reversal of a relationship between two entities. They are pairs of words in which one action causes the other action to happen. buy and sell, take and give.
5. Logical antonym / Contrast is a kind of antonym with many pairs. Examples: white X not white, cat X not cat


J. Kinds of Ambiguity

1. Lexical ambiguity (polisemy) arises when context is insufficient to determine the sense of a single word that has more than one meaning. For example, the word “bank” has several meanings, including “financial institution” and “edge of a river,” but if someone says “I deposited $100 in the bank,” the intended meaning is clear. More problematic are words whose senses express closely related concepts. “Good,” for example, can mean “useful” or “functional” (That’s a good hammer), “exem-plary” (She’s a good student), “pleasing” (This is good soup), “moral” (He is a good person), and probably other similar things. “I have a good daughter” is not clear about which sense is intended. The various ways to apply prefixes and suffixes can also create ambiguity (“undeletable” can mean “possible to undelete” or “impossible to delete”).
2. Syntactic/Grammatical ambiguity arises when a sentence can be parsed in more than one way. “He ate the cookies on the couch,” for example, could mean that he ate those cookies which were on the couch (as opposed to those that were on the table), or it could mean that he was sitting on the couch when he ate the cookies. Spoken language can also contain such ambiguities, where there is more than one way to compose a set of sounds into words, for example “ice cream” and “I scream.” Such ambiguity is generally resolved based on the context. A mishearing of such based on incorrectly-resolved am-biguity is called a mondegreen.

K. Idiom.
An idiom is a group of words which have a different meaning when used to-gether from the one they would have if you took the meaning of each word separately.
Examples:
1. Dog days are very hot summer days.
2. A fat head is a dull, stupid person.
3. When you hit the hay, you go to bed.
4. If someone looks off color, they look ill.
5. Uncle Sam is the government of the USA.