2. BASIC IDEAS IN SEMANTICS
SEMANTICS is the study of MEANING in
LANGUAGE.
Hopelessly I hope to convince you that by careful thought
about language you speak and the way it is used, definite
conclusions CAN be arrived at concerning meaning.
3. SPEAKER MEANING is what a speaker means (i.e.
intends to convey) when he uses a piece of language.
SENTENCE MEANING (or WORD MEANING) is what a
sentence or word means, i.e. what it counts as the
equivalent of in the language concerned.
4. A THEORY is a precisely specified coherent and
economical framework of interdependent statements and
definitions, constructed so that as large a number as
possible of particular basic facts can either be seen to
follow from it or be describable in terms of it.
5. SENTENCE, UTTERANCES AND
PROPOSITIONS
An UTTERANCE is any stretch of talk, by one person,
before and after which there is silence on the part of that
person.
An utterance is the use by a particular speaker, on a
particular occasion, of a piece of language, such as a
sequence of sentences, or a single word.
6. A SENTENCE is neither a physical event nor a physical
object. It is conceived abstractly, a string of words put
together by the grammatical rules of a language. A
sentence can be thought of as the IDEAL string of words
behind various realizations in utterances and inscriptions.
7. A SENTENCE is a grammatically complete string of words
expressing a complete thought.
Example :
I would like a cup of tea.
8. A PROPOSITION is that part of the meaning of the
utterance of a declarative sentence which describes some
state of affairs.
True proposition correspond to facts, in the ordinary sense
of the word fact. False propositions do not correspond to
facts.
9. REFERENCE AND SENSE
By means of reference, a speaker indicates which things in
the world (including persons) are being talked about.
Example :
“My friends is in the court”
10. A SENCE of an expression is its place in a system of
semantics relationships with other expressions in the
language.
Example :
I {almost/ nearly} fell over
11. REFERRING EXPRESSIONS
REFERRING EXPRESSION is any expression used in an
utterance to refer to something or someone (used with a
particular referent in mind).
Fred in ‘Fred hit me’, but not in ‘There’s no Fred at this address’.
• Indefinite noun phrases can be referring expressions,
depending on the context: a man in ‘A man came looking for
you’, but not in ‘A man has to watch his back’.ambiguos cases-
resolved by the use of certain following the indefinite article.
• Definite noun phrases (proper names, personal pronouns,
longer descriptiveexpressions) are most frequently used as
referring expressions, but not always (the Fred example)
12. OPAQUE CONTEXT- part of a sentence which could be
made into a complete sentence by adding a referring
expression, but where the addition of different referring
• expressions, even though they refer to the same thing or
person, will result in sentences with different meanings. O.
contexts usually involve verbs such as want, think,
believe, wonder about.
• Laura Bush thinks that...is a genius- opaque context
resolved by adding e.g. President or the Leader of the
Republican Party. If Laura erroneously believes that the
President is not the Leader of the Republican Party, then
the sentences have different meanings.
13. EQUATIVE SENTENCE- used to assert the identity of the
referents of two referring expressions , i.e. to assert that
two referring expressions have the same referent. Equative
sentences can be false.
• Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is the President of the
Indonesia.
• George W. Bush is the President of the United States.
14. PREDICATES
2 major semantic roles of simple declarative sentences’
subparts: role of argument(s) (played by referring expression(s))
and role of predicator
• Despite some overlap, semantic analysis of a sentence into
predicator and argument(s) # grammatical analysis into subject
and predicate.
• PREDICATOR of a simple declarative sentence is the word or
group of words which does not belong to any of the referring
expressions and which, of the remainder, makes the most
specific contribution to the meaning of the sentence. It describes
the state or process in which the referring expressions are
involved. genius in Einstein was a genius, in in Jakarta is in
Indonesia are predicators
• Nouns, (main) verbs, adjectives and prepositions can function
as predicators, but conjunctions and articles cannot
15. PREDICATE is any word or sequence of words which (in a given
single sense) can function as the predicator of a sentence
• ‘sequence of words’- wait for, in front of
• ‘in a given single sense’- bank1, bank2- two different predicates
• predicate vs. predicators- predicate identifies elements in the
language independently of particular example sentences;
predicator identifies the semantic role played by a particular
word or words in a particular sentence.
A tall, handsome stranger entered the saloon – enter the only
predicator, at the sametime predicate along with tall, handsome,
stranger, room which can function as predicators in other
sentences. (He is tall, He is handsome, He is a stranger, That
building is a saloon)
16. DEGREE of the predicate is a number indicating the number of
arguments it is normally understood to have in simple sentences
asleep is a predicate of degree one (one-place predicate)
love is a predicate of degree two (two-place predicate)
give is a predicate of degree three (three-place predicate)
• The majority of adjectives are one-place predicates (John is
tall), except for adjectives which require prepositions (Cars are
different from bikes) and are two-place predicates.
• The majority of nouns are one-place predicates (John is a
teacher), except for a few ‘inherently relational’ nouns: father,
mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, neighbour, etc. which are
two-place predicates (John is the brother of the current
President).
17. PREDICATES, REFERRING EXPRESSIONS,
AND UNIVERSE OF DISCOURSE
GENERIC SENTENCE is sentence in which some
statement is made about a whole unrestricted class of
individuals, as opposed to any particular individual. They
can be introduced by either a or the (or neither).
• Man is mortal, but not That man is mortal.
18. UNIVERSE OF DISCOURSE is (defined for any utterance
as) the particular world, real or imaginary, that the speaker
assumes he is talking about at the time although not
accepted by all semanticists, any expression that can be
used to refer to an entity in the real world or in any
imaginary world can be thought of as a referring expression
(unicorn, God)
• interlocutors need to have the same u. of discourse if
communication is to be successful
19. DEIXIS AND DEFINITENESS
DEIXIS (Greek ‘pointing’)- occurrence of deictic words
• DEICTIC WORD is word which which takes some element of
its meaning from the context or situation (speaker, addressee,
time, place) of the utterance (e.g. personal pronouns,
demonstratives, adverbs of time and place, some predicates like
come- ‘toward the speaker’).
• Besides deictic words, there are in English and other
languages grammatical devicestenses which are also regarded
deictic because past, present, and future times are defined by
reference to the time of the utterance: My sister wrote you a
letter. (my sister wrote the letter before the time of my utterance)
• In reported speech, deictic terms occurring in the original
utterance may be translated into other, possibly non-deictic,
terms in order to preserve the original reference.
20. The CONTEXT of an utterances is a small subpart of the
universe of discourse shared by speaker and hearer, and
includes facts about the topic of the conversation in which
the utterances occurs, and also facts about the situation
in which the conversation itself takes place.
21. DEFINITENESS is a feature of a noun phrase selected by
a speaker to convey his assumption that the hearer will be
able to identify the referent of the noun phrase, usually
because it is the only thing of its kind in the context of the
utterance, or because it is unique in the universe of
discourse (this/the book, the Earth).
• However, the use of e.g. definite articles does not
guarantee semantic definiteness: The whale is a mammal
vs The whale just bit off my friend’s leg!
22. WORDS AND THINGS: EXTENSIONS
AND PROTOTYPES
EXTENSION of a one place predicate is the set of all
individuals to which that predicate can truthfully be
applied. It is the set of things which can potentially be
referred to by using an expression whose main element is
that predicate.
Example :
The extension of windows is the set of all windows in the
universe
The extension of cat is the set of all cats in the universe
23. A PROTOTYPE of a predicate is an object which is held to
be very typical of the kind of object which can be referred
to by an expression containing the predicate.
Example :
A man of medium height and average build, between 25
and 30 years old, with blonde hair, with no particularly
distinctive characteristics of defects could be a prototype
of the predicate MAN in certain areas of the world.
24. SENSE PROPERTIES AND
STEREOTYPES
An ANALYTIC sentence is one that is necessarily TRUE,
as a result of the sense of the words in it.
An SYNTHETIC sentence is one which is NOT analytic, but
may be either true or false, depending on the way the
world is.
Example :
Analytic : all whale are mammal. (the true of the sentence
follow from the senses of whale and mammal
Synthetic : Billy is handsome. (there is nothing in the sense
of Billy or Handsome which makes this necessarily true or
false.
25. A CONTRADICTION is a sentence that is necessarily
FALSE, as a an result of the sense of the words in it. Thus
a contradiction is in a way the opposite of analytic
sentence.
Example :
Bambang is a man. (this mush be false, because Bambang
is a woman, not a man)
26. A NECESSARY CONDITION on the sense of a predicate is
a condition which a thing MUST meet in order to qualify
as being correctly described by that predicate.
A SUFFICIENT SET OF CONDITIONS on the sense of a
predicate is a set of condition which, if they are met by a
thing, are enough in themselves to GUARANTEE that the
predicate correctly describes that thing
27. The STEREOTYPE of a predicate is a list of the typical
characteristics of things to which the predicate may be
applied.
Example :
The stereotype of cat would be something like :
Quadruped, domesticated, either black, or white, or grey, or
tortoise shell, or marmalade in colour, or some
combination of these colours, adult speciments about 50
cm long from nose to tip of tail, furry, with sharp
retractable claws, etc.
28. SENSE RELATIONS
SYNONYMS is the similarity of meaning.
The definition of synonymy as a relationship between the
senses of words requires a clear separation of all the
(closely related/different) senses of a word. The sense of
a word does not depend entirely onits part of speech.
Example: stubborn and obstinate are synonyms (in most
dialects of English)
29. HYPONYMY is a sense relation betweenpredicates (or
sometimes longer phrases) suchthat the meaning of one
predicate (or phrase) isincluded in the meaning of the
other.
The meaning of red is included in the meaning of scarlet.
Red is the superordinate term. more general or inclusive
in meaning, abstract, or schematic thanits hyponyms.
scarlet is a hyponym of red. more specific in the kind of
colour it describes
Example :
The meaning of RED is included in the meaning of Scarlet.
Red is the superordinate term; scarlet is a hyponym of red
30. A sentence which expresses the same propositionas
another sentence is a PARAPHRASE of thatsentence
(assuming the same referents for anyreferring
expressions involved).
Paraphrase is to SENTENCES (on individual
interpretations) as SYNONYMY is to PREDICATES
(though some semanticists talk loosely of synonymy in the
case of sentences as well)
e.g. Bachelors prefer redhaired girls is aparaphrase of Girls
with red hair
