3. Some definitions of semantics
• Semantics is the study of meaning Lyons (1977).
• Semantics is the study of meaning in language
Hurford & Heasley 1983.
• Semantics is the study of meaning communicated
through language Saeed (1997).
• Semantics is the part of linguistics that is concerned
with meaning Löbner (2002).
• Linguistic semantics is the study of literal,
decontextualized, grammatical meaning Frawley
(1992).
• Linguistic semantics is the study of how languages
organize and express meanings Kreidler (1998).
4. The slide provides a selection of definitions.
Something that can be noticed is that there is no
complete agreement. For some, semantics
concerns the study of meaning as
communicated through language, while for some
others, semantics studies all aspects of meaning
and they have to add the label “linguistic” to
arrive at a more precise definition. This
distinction, however, is not generally given much
importance and leaving aside special
formulations, probably all authors would agree
with Kreidler’s definition (to choose just one of
them): linguistic semantics is the study of how
languages organize and express meanings.
5. How could you describe each of these
uses of the word’mean’?
1. It’s a good job he doesn’t know what ‘malaka’
means.
Answer: The interpretation of a word in a language
via its equivalent in a known language.
2. I’m sure she didn’t mean to pour olive oil in your
hair.
Answer: intending a particular action or result.
3. Mean it? I even say it.
Answer: The speaker has said something that
doesn’t correspond with what he really thinks.
6. • what do we understand by
“meaning”? What is that
“meaning” that is organized and
expressed by languages?
7. • Jokes
• Commercials
• Literary scholars quarrel similarly over the
meaning of some poem or story.
8. School joke
• Sarah goes to school, and the teacher says,
"Today we are going to learn multi-syllable
words, class. Does anybody have an example of
a multi-syllable word?" Sarah waves her hand,
"Me, Miss Rogers, me, me!" Miss Rogers says,
"All right, Sarah, what is your multi-syllable
word?" Sarah says, "Mas-tur-bate." Miss Rogers
smiles and says, "Wow, Sarah, that's a
mouthful." Sarah says, "No, Miss Rogers, you're
thinking of a blowjob."
11. Psychologists are interested in how
individual humans learn,how they retain,
recall, or lose information; how they
classify, make judgements and solve
problems—in other words, how the
human mind seeks meanings and works
with them.
12. • Philosophers of language are
concerned with how we know,
how any particular fact that
we know or accept as true is
related to other possible facts
13. • Linguists want to understand how language
works.
• Linguistics is concerned with identifying the
meaningful elements of specific languages
14. for example, English words like paint and happy
and affixes like the -er of painter and the un-
of unhappy. It is concerned with describing
how such elements go together to express
more complex meanings—in phrases like the
unhappy painter and sentences like The
painter is unhappy—and telling how these are
related to each other.
15. The nature of language
Human language differs from these animal
communication systems in two crucial ways
(Hockett 1957:574–85; Bickerton 1990: 10–
16).
16. • First, animals can communicate only in
response to Bees, when they have located a
source of nectar in some group of plants, fly
back to their hive and report this discovery by
doing a dance that indicates the approximate
direction and distance to the site some
particular stimulus.
17. • Non-human communication takes place on
the spot, and is concerned with what is
immediately present
18. • No animal can tell another one about past
experiences.
• Humans alone are able to talk about vast
numbers of things which come from.
accumulated knowledge, memory and
imagination.
• Human language is stimulus-free.
19. • Second, while animals have only a fixed
repertoire of messages, human language is
creative: we are always producing new
utterances which others understand; we
comprehend new sentences which others
have produced (as you understand this
sentence, though it is not likely you have
read it before).
20. Language and the individual
• A child acquires the fundamentals of that
language in the first five or six years of life.
• at about the age of twelve months, begins to
imitate its parents’ ways of naming what is in
the environment (bed, bottle, doll, baby,
mama, etc.) and of telling the characteristics
and events in which these things can be
observed (wet, empty, up, sit, all-gone).
21. • By the age of eighteen months the child is likely
to be producing two-word utterances (Baby up,
Daddy byebye, Mama shoes, Dolly sit). Soon
utterances become more and more complex, and
these utterances are clearly invented, not just
repetitions of what parents may have said.
Processes like making questions and negative
statements are acquired—processes that go
beyond a mere reflection of what is in the
environment and make it possible for the child to
express himself and interact with others
(Lenneberg 1967; Clark and Clark 1977:295–403).
22. • The child acquires the ability to make use, as
speaker and hearer, of the most important
communication system of the community.
Through this possession the individual enjoys
a life of being able to inform, to express
feelings and thoughts, perhaps to influence
others in smaller or larger ways, and to learn.
23. What is the knowledge that a speaker of
a language has about
that language?
A vocabulary and the ways to use it.
speakers have two vocabularies, one that
they use in producing utterances and a
somewhat larger one that is needed for
understanding a variety of people.
24. grammar
• Whether we think of the grammar of a
language as the knowledge that every speaker
of the language has, or the explicit description
made by a linguist, or both, the grammar must
contain three parts.
25. • One part, of course, is semantics, the
knowledge (from the point of view of the
individual who speaks and hears others
speaking), or the description (from a linguist’s
point of view), of meaningful units like words
and meaningful combinations of words like
sentences.
26. Phonology is the knowledge, or the
description, of how speech sounds are
organized in a particular language—there are
units called phonemes which combine in
various possible ways (but not all possible
ways) to express meaningful units such as
words.
27. • Syntax is the knowledge, or the description, of
the classes of words, sometimes called parts of
speech, and of how members of these classes go
together to form phrases and sentences. Syntax
deals with grammatical categories like tense,
number, aspect—categories that differ from
language to language and which yet are present
somehow in all languages.
28. • Another part of grammar is morphology,
the description or the knowledge of word
formation: the account of different forms of
the ‘same’ word (cat, cats; connect,
connecting, connected) and the derivation of
different words which share a basic meaning
(connect, disconnect, connection).
