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Albu, Semantics 4

PHRASE AND SENTENCE MEANING

"Then you should say what you mean," the March hare went on.
"I do," Alice hastily replied, "at least--I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you
know."
"Not the same thing a bit! said the Hatter. "You might just as well say that 'I see what
I eat' is the same thing as 'I eat what I see'!"
"You might just as well say," added the March Hare, "that 'I like what I get' is the
same thing as 'I get what I like'!"
"You might just as well say," added the Dormouse... "that 'I breathe when I sleep' is
the same thing as 'I sleep when I breathe'!"
"It is the same thing with you," said the Hatter.
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
So far we have dealt with the meaning of lexemes 1; yet, as language users, we hardly ever use
words in isolation. We naturally place them in phrases (e.g. a dog, my dog, these dogs, the dogs in
the street) and sentences (A dog barked. My dog is so cute.) observing specific rules and constraints.
The meaning of a phrase/sentence depends on both the meaning of its words and how these words
are structurally combined.2 In the examples mentioned in brackets the noun phrases pointing to
some entity or group of entities in the world as we know it or as we conceive it are called referring
expressions. In sentences they are commonly accompanied by predicates. The use of language
generally involves naming or referring to some entity and saying, or predicating, something about
that entity. (Kreidler 1998:50)
Some of the knowledge we have already acquired in the previous section, devoted to lexical
semantics, can be extended to the phrasal and sentential level. Thus:
(1) Words with identical (or quasi identical) meaning are called synonyms. If two sentences are
synonymous, i.e., they have the same meaning, they are paraphrases.
(2) Just as words can be homonyms, sentences can be ambiguous. Their source of ambiguity
can be lexical or structural or both.
(3) Some words have opposites. At the sentence level, by using two opposites in the same
verbal context or by negating a sentence, we can generate contradictory sentences
(4) Both words and sentences can be used to refer to objects, and both may have some further
meaning beyond this referring capability.
Combining Words into Sentences. The Principle of Compositionality
1

A lexeme may consist of just one meaningful part (boy, piano, happy) or more than one meaningful part (boyish,
pianist, unhappy). Both boy, piano, happy and ish, -ist, -un are called morphemes. The former are free morphemes
and the latter are bound morphemes. They are the smallest meaningful units in language.
2
Idioms are exceptional. See section on idioms.

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A statement of the main character in Jonathan Swifts novel Gulliver's Travels is often quoted to
illustrate the nave belief that learning a language is merely learning the words of that language and
what they mean: I placed all my words with their interpretations in alphabetical order. And thus in
a few days, by the help of a very faithful memory, I got some insight into their language. As
students in the area of language studies, we know that we comprehend sentences because we know
the meaning of individual words, and we know the rules for combining their meanings. In linguistic
and philosophic terminology we speak about the principle of compositionality, i.e., the principle that
the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its parts (constituent
expressions) and the rules used to combine these parts into a meaningful whole.

Here is a commonplace example: We know the meanings of red and balloon. The semantic rule to
interpret the combination red balloon adds the property "redness' to the properties of balloon. The
phrase the red balloon, because of the presence of the definite article the, means "a particular
instance of redness and balloonness". A semantic rule for the interpretation of the accounts for this.
On the other hand, the phrase large balloon would be interpreted by a different semantic rule,
because part of the meaning of large is that it is a relative concept. Similarly, we know that a big
mouse is much smaller than a small elephant.
There are many more rules involved in the semantics of noun phrases. For instance, the semantic
rule for prepositions indicates that two objects stand in a relationship determined by the meaning of
the particular preposition. Thus in the house with the green fence and the dog with black ears, the
preposition with indicates that the relationship between the two referring expressions is
"accompanies" or "is part of". Prepositions like on or under indicate a certain spatial relationship;
before and after establish a certain temporal relationship etc.
The syntactic structure of a phrase is essential to its meaning. Obviously, the dog on the bed has a
different meaning from the bed on the dog/; red brick is different from brick red. The last example
shows that the syntactic notion head plays a significant role in semantic rules. Since brick is the
head of the noun phrase the red brick, the meaning of a red brick is a certain kind of brick. On the
other hand, red is the head of the expression brick red, and the meaning of brick red is a certain
kind of red.
The semantic rules for adjectives are complex. A good friend is a kind of friend just as a red brick is
a kind of brick. But a false friend is not any kind of friend at all. The semantic rules for good and
false are quite different when these words modify friend. A third kind of rule governs adjectives like
alleged; the meaning of alleged murderer is someone accused of murder, but the semantic rules in
this case do not tell us whether an alleged murderer is or is not a murderer.
To conclude, meanings build on meanings. Noun phrases are combinations of meanings of nouns,
adjectives, articles, and even sentences. (The NP the fact he knew too much is a combination of the,
fact, and the sentence he knew too much.) In turn, sentences are combinations of Noun Phrases,
Verb Phrases, and so on. All these combinations make sense because the semantic rules of grammar
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combine the meaning of the parts to give the meaning of the whole. (In some cases, such as in
idioms, the whole is not the sum of its parts. as will be shown later.)

Verb Valency and Semantic/Thematic Roles (Thematic Relations)

Each simple sentence has one predicate and a number of Noun Phrases (referring expressions, or
arguments). One Noun Phrase is commonly placed in front of the English verb in the syntactic
structure of the sentence (in Subject position). It has been shown that verbs are subcategorized for
zero, one, or two Noun Phrase "objects", which stand in a certain meaning relation to the verb.
Sleep is an example of a zero object (intransitive) verb, find is subcategorized for one object, and
put for two.
Just as in chemistry valency refers to the ability of an element to combine with other atoms to form
chemical compounds or molecules, in linguistics we speak about the valency of a verb, which
measures the ability of that verb to attract other sentence constituents in order to generate a wellformed meaningful sentence. The following examples illustrate the basic valency types:
Valency 0: It is raining
Valency 1: My brother snores
Valency 2: Mary is washing the dishes.
Valency 3: John put the book on the desk.
A verb is related in several ways to the constituents in a sentence. The relations depend on the
meaning of the particular verb. For example the NP the boy in the boy found a red brick is called
the agent or "doer" of the action of finding. The NP a red brick is the theme, the patient, or the
"recipient" of the action. (The boldfaced terms are technical terms in semantic theory.) Part of the
meaning of find is that its subject is an agent and its direct object is a theme/patient. (The fact is
reflected in the entry for find in the lexicon.)
The noun phrases within a verb phrase whose head is put have the relation of theme and location.
In the verb phrase put the red brick on the wall, the red brick is the theme and on the wall is the
location. The entire verb phrase is interpreted to mean that the theme of put changes its position to
the location. The location, itself a prepositional phrase, will have its own meaning, which is
combined with the meaning of put and the meaning of the red brick. The subject of put is also an
agent, so that in The boy put the brick on the wall, "the boy" performs the action. Semantic rules do
all this work, revealing speaker knowledge about the meaning of such sentences.
Thematic roles/relations is a term used to express the role that a Noun Phrase plays with respect
to the action or state described by the verb of a sentence. So the semantic relationships that we
have called theme/patient, agent, and location are among the thematic roles of the verb. . Other
thematic roles are goal, where the action is directed, source, where the action originated, and
instrument, an object used to accomplish the action. Consider the following example:
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The boy carried the red brick from the wall to the wagon.

The boy is the agent; the red brick is the theme; the wall is the source; the wagon is the goal. In
The boy broke the window with a red brick.
The boy is again the agent, a window is the theme, and the red brick is the instrument. These
examples show that the same noun phrase (the red brick) can function as a different thematic role
depending on the sentence.
The lexical entries for find and put would now look something like this:
find, V,______ NP, (Agent, Theme)
put, V,______ NP, PP, (Agent, Theme, Location)
This is to be read as find is a verb that occurs in the context of a NP Agent and a NP Theme. The
thematic roles are contained in parentheses. The first one states that the subject is an agent. The
remaining thematic roles belong to the categories for which the verb is subcategorized. The direct
object of both find and put will be a theme. The Prepositional Phrase for which put subcategorizes
will be a location.
Our knowledge of verbs includes their syntactic category, how they are subcategorized, and the
thematic roles that their NP subject and object(s) have, and this knowledge is explicitly represented
in the lexicon.
Several remarks are worth considering:
Thematic roles are the same in sentences that are paraphrases. In both these sentences
The dog bit the man.
The man was bitten by the dog.
the dog is the agent and the man is the theme.
Thematic roles may remain the same in sentences that are not paraphrases, as in the
following instances:
The boy opened the door with the key.
The key opened the door.
The door opened.
In all three of these sentences, the door is the theme, the thing that gets opened. In the first two
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sentences, the key, despite its different structural positions, retains the thematic role of instrument.
(Aici ar fi bine de adugat regula lui Fillmore d. cine - ce rol - devine subiect i n ce ordine.)

The three examples illustrate the fact that English allows many different thematic roles to
be the subject of the sentence (that is, the first NP under the S). These sentences had as subjects an
agent (the boy), an instrument (the key), and a theme (the door). The sentences below illustrate
other kinds of subjects.
The hotel forbids dogs.
It seems that Samson has lost his strength.
In the first example, this hotel has the thematic role of location. In the second, the subject it is
"semantically empty", and lacks a semantic role entirely.
Contrast English with German. German is much "stingier" about which thematic roles can be
subjects. For example, in order to express the idea "this hotel forbids dogs" a German speaker
would have to say:
In diesem Hotel sind Hunde verboten.
literally, "in this hotel are dogs forbidden." German does not permit the thematic role of location to
occur as a subject; it must be expressed as a prepositional phrase. If we translated the English
sentence word for word into German, the result would be ungrammatical in German:
*Dieses Hotel verbietet Hunde.
Differences such as these between English and German show that learning a foreign language is not
a matter of simple word-for-word translation. You must learn the grammar, and that includes
learning the syntax and semantics and how the two interact.
In many languages thematic roles are reflected in the case assumed by the noun. The case, or
grammatical case, of a noun is the particular morphological shape that it takes. English does not
have an extensive case system, but the possessive form of a noun, as in the boy's red brick, is called
the genitive or possessive case.
Finnish: koulu- = "school", -sta ending that means "directional source" ---> koulusta = "from the
school". Similarly, kouluun (koulu + un) = "to the school".
Some of the information carried by grammatical case in languages like Finnish is borne by
prepositions in English. Thus from and to often indicate the semantic roles of source and goal.
Instrument is marked by with, Location by prepositions such as on and in, and Agent by in passive
sentences. The role of theme is generally unaccompanied by a preposition, as is agent when it is the
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structural subject of the sentence. What we are calling thematic roles in this section has
sometimes been studied as case theory.

In German, case distinctions appear on articles, as well as on nouns and adjectives. Thus in
Sie liebt den Mann.
"She loves the man", the article den is in the accusative case. In the nominative it would be der. In
Romanian case distinctions usually appear on articles. Languages with a rich system of cases are
often more constraining to which thematic roles can occur in subject position. German, as we saw
above, is one such language.
A universal principle has been proposed called the theta-criterion, which states in part that
a particular thematic role may occur only once in a sentence. Thus sentences like
*The boy opened the door with a key with a lock-pick.
are semantically anomalous because two noun phrases bear the thematic role of instrument.
In English the thematic role of possessive is indicated in two ways syntactically: either as the boy's
red hat or as the red hat of the boy. However, *the boy's red hat of Bill is semantically anomalous
according to the theta-criterion because both the boy and Bill have the semantic role of possessor.
Irrespective of how we label the semantic relations that exist between verbs and noun phrases, they
are part of every speaker's linguistic competence and accounts for much of the meaning of the
language.
Different authors have proposed different lists of thematic roles. This is a selection of relevant
terms3 accepted by many linguists:
1. Agent the initiator of some action, capable of acting with volition 9the prototypical agent is
animate); Mother baked some cakes. The dog bit my neighbour.
Note: If the action is performed without volition or awareness, the doer can be the CAUSE or
FORCE: The wind blew my car door open. In other cases the doer can be the Instigator (The
sergeant-major marched the recruted round the parade ground) or the Effector (John
accidentally knocked the vase on to the floor the agent-like entity supplies the energy but not
the will)
2. Patient the entity undergoing the effect of some action, often undergoing some change in state:
John cut the grass. The teacher punished the naughty boy. The sun melted the ice.
3. Theme the entity which is moved by an action or whose location is described; an unchanged
entity affected: John passed the ball wide. The book is on the table. John put on his hat.
Note: Some authors treat 2 and 3 as different names for the same role, OBJECTIVE,
3

Cf. John Saeed, Semantics, 1997

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4. Exepriencer/Dative the entity that is aware of the action described by the predicate but which
is not in control of that action (or state): Mary saw a rat. I felt ill. My husband heard steps in the
corridor. Mary heard a nightingale. The nightingale enchanted Mary.
5. Beneficiary/ Benifactive the entity for whose benefit the action is performed. He did it for me.
She baked me a cake.
Note: Both 4 and 5 are treated by Fillmore as dative, i.e., the case of the animate being affected by
the state or action identitified by the verb.
6. Instrument the means by which an action is performed or something comes about: She
cleaned the wound with an antiseptic wipe.
7. Location the place in which something is situated or takes place: The cat was hiding under the
bed.
8. Goal the entity towards which something moves, literally or metaphorically: Sheila handed
her licence to the policeman. Paul told a joke to his friends. (RECIPIENT is sometimes treated
as a kind of goal.)
9. Source the entity from which something moves, literally or metaphorically: The plane came
back from Cluj. He got the idea from a French magazine.
Note: 7, 8 and 9 are called LOCATIVE (by Fillmore 1968)

Examples:
Gina raised the car with a jack. = AGENT THEME INSTRUMENT.
They gave the workers a rise. = AGENT BENEFICIARY/RECIPIENT - THEME

A few Remarks on Semantics and Syntax

Syntax is concerned with how words are combined to form phrases and sentences; semantics is
concerned with what these combinations mean. (The theta-criterion is an instance in which
semantics and syntax interact: the semantic constraint that no thematic role may occur more than
once has the effect of restricting the NP's and PP's that may follow the verb in the Verb Phrase.)
We have seen that the same meaning can be expressed syntactically in more than one way; the
semantic property of possession may be expressed by the genitive case such as England's king or by
an "of" construct such as the king of England. Paraphrases result when the same meaning is
expressed by different syntactic structures.
A similar situation arises with certain semantic concepts such as "ability", "permission", or
"obligation". These may be expressed syntactically by means of "auxiliary" or "helping" verbs.
He can go.
He may go.
He must go.
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They may also be expressed without the auxiliaries:

He is able to go./ He has the ability to go.
He is permitted to go./ He has permission to go.
He is obliged to go./ He has an obligation to go.
Active-passive pairs constitute another common type of paraphrase:
The child found the puppy.
The puppy was found by the child.
However some active sentences do not have a well-formed passive counterpart. For example:
John resembles Bill.
The book cost ten dollars.
cannot be "passivized" to give
*Bill was resembled by John.
*Ten dollars was cost by the book.
Semantically, when the subject of an active sentence is in a state described by the verb and direct
object, there is no passive paraphrase. Since John is in a state of resembling Bill - John doesn't do
anything - the sentence fails to passivize. This shows how the semantics of verbal relationships may
affect syntactic relationships.
This is true of many other sentences that contain symmetrical predicates. (For more examples of
symmetrical predicates see Kreidler 1998:107: Line AB is parallel to line CD. = Line CD is parallel
to line AB. = Line AB and line CD are parallel. Pet met Paula at three oclock.= ? =?)
Now note that the following two sentences have different meanings although they are made up of
the same words in the same order:
The Greeks who were philosophers liked to talk.
The Greeks, who were philosophers, liked to talk.
The first means that among the Greeks, the ones who were philosophers liked to talk. The second
means that all Greeks were philosophers and liked to talk. Both sentences contain the "relative
clause" who were philosophers but in different syntactic structures. The difference in syntax
makes the difference in meaning, although both sentences contain the same words in the same
sequence.
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Another example of how syntax and semantics interact has to do with reflexive pronouns, such as
herself or themselves. The meaning of a reflexive pronoun always refers back to some "antecedent".
In Jane bit herself, herself refers to Jane. Syntactically, reflexive pronouns and their antecedents
must occur under the same S in the Phrase Structure tree.
Sentence structure also plays a role in determining when a pronoun and a noun phrase in different
classes can be coreferential, that is, refer to the same object. For example in
John believes that he is a genius.
the pronoun he can be interpreted as John or as some person other than John. However in
He believes that John is a genius.
the coreferential interpretation is impossible. John and he cannot refer to the same person. A
pronoun cannot occur to the left of the noun phrase if the two refer to the same person. However,
the rule is not that simple. In the sentence
The fact that he is considered a genius bothers John.
he and John can be interpreted as coreferential. A somewhat complicated semantic rule that refers
to sentence structure is at work here. A precise statement of this rule goes beyond the scope of this
introductory text. The point is that syntax and semantics interrelate in complex ways.
We have knowledge of syntactic rules, semantic rules, and of how these rules interact. The fact that
we have this knowledge is demonstrated by our ability to make judgements of grammaticality,
recognize ambiguities and paraphrases, and know what the antecedents of pronouns are.
The "Truth" of Sentences
We have seen how sentence meaning is partially based on the meaning of its words and phrases.
Knowing the meaning of a declarative sentence means knowing under what circumstances that sentence
would be true. Those "circumstances" are called truth conditions of the sentence. In the world as we
know it, the sentence
The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776
is true and the sentence
The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1976.
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is false. We know the meaning of both sentences equally well, and knowing their meaning means
knowing their truth conditions. We compare their truth conditions with "the real world" of historical
fact, and can thus say which one is true and which one is false.

This type of approach is specific to truth-conditional semantics, an approach to semantics of

natural language that sees the meaning of assertions as being the same as, or reducible to, their truth
conditions. Truth-conditional theories of semantics attempt to define the meaning of a given
proposition by explaining when the sentence is true. So, for example, because snow is white is true if
and only if snow is white, the meaning of snow is white is snow is white. You can, however,
understand well-formed sentences of your language without knowing their truth value. Knowing the
truth conditions is not the same as knowing the actual facts. Rather, the truth conditions, the
meaning, permit you to examine the world and learn the actual facts. If you did not know the
linguistic meaning--if the sentence were in an unknown language--you could never determine its
truth, even if you had memorized an enciclopaedia. You may not know the truth of
The Macklesburg Charter was signed in 1770.
but if you know its meaning you know in principle how to discover the truth, even if you do not have
the means of actually doing so. For example, consider the sentence
The moon is made of green cheese.
We knew before space travel that going to the moon would test the truth of the sentence.
A special type of assertions are those which are true by virtue of their linguistic meaning alone. The
sentences whose content is of this type are called analytic sentences, e.g., Kings are monarchs. Unlike
this statement, Kings are rich is only circumstantialy true. (See worksheet 5)
Now consider the sentence:
Rufus believes that the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1976.
This sentence is true if some individual named Rufus does indeed believe the statement, and it is false if
he does not. Those are its truth conditions.
It does not matter that a subpart of the sentence is false. An entire sentence may be true even if one or
more of its parts are false, and vice versa. Truth is determined by the semantic rules, which permit you
to combine the subparts of a sentence and still know under what conditions a sentence is true or false.
So knowing a language includes the semantic rules for combining meanings and the conditions under
which sentences are true or false.
Sometimes knowing the truth of one sentence entails the truth of another sentence. For example, if you
know it is true that
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Corday assassinated Marat.

then you know that it is true that
Marat is dead.
The sentence The brick is red entails The brick is not white; John is my uncle entails John is male, and
so on. These entailments are part of the semantic rules we have been discussing. Much of what we
know about the world comes about from knowing the entailments of true sentences.
Please correlate all this with analytic and contradictory sentences. See Worksheet 5.

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