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Next Homework: 7.1, 7.2, 7.4, 7.11, 7.12, 7.14 due at 11 am on Monday (March 20)
Announcements: Semantics quiz date has been changed to Wednesday, April 5th
Quiz review session will be held Tuesday, April 4th 6-7 pm, in Emerson 101
1. Compositionality of Meaning
(2) Semantic compositionality – the key principle in linguistic semantics due to Gottlob Frege:
Meaning is compositional – the meaning of an expression is determined by the meanings of
its parts and by the ways in which those parts are assembled.
In semantics, we want to model the way a speaker/hearer computes the meaning of a whole from the
meanings of its parts in a compositional fashion.
2. Entailment
Speakers have intuitions about truth-value relations between sentences. Any competent English
speaker can recognize that if (S1) is true, then so is (S2), even without knowing anything about the
historical figure Julius Caesar:
(3) Entailment: Sentence S1 entails sentence S2 if, and only if whenever S1 is true in a situation, S2
is also necessarily true in that situation.
Part of our linguistic knowledge is knowing the entailment relations between certain sentences.
1
No hedgehog is a hedgehog.
Some hedgehog is not a hedgehog.
Exercise: which entails which in the following pairs of the sentences (if entailment ever holds)?
(10) Assertion—What the speaker is claiming to be true or false by uttering the sentence.
(11) Presupposition—What the speaker assumes to be true, as ‘background’ to the sentence s/he is
uttering.
When a speaker utters a sentence, the speaker asserts trueness or falseness a certain proposition, but
the speaker cannot make any claim about the trueness or falseness of what is already presupposed (=
assumed to be true).
Whether you answer the question with yes or no, you can’t help getting to admit that you used to beat
your wife. This is because the verb ‘stop’ triggers presupposition that ‘beating your wife’ is assumed
to be true as a background of this conversation.
(12) The negation-test for presupposition: A sentence S1 presupposed S2 if S1 entails and ¬S1
entails S2, too!
2
Exercise: Discuss what presupposition each of the following sentences has.
(14) The thing or the set of the things which bear a property X is called the extension of X:
Q: Can two expressions have the same extension but different meanings?
e.g. ) the first person to walk on the moon
Neil Armstrong
Q: Do they pick out the same entity in the world? I.e., do they have the same extension?
(S1) My crazy aunt thought she was the first person to walk on the moon.
(S2) My crazy aunt thought she was Neil Armstrong.
(15) Frege’s observation: Expressions with identical extensions can produce different
truth values.
Extension: The entity or the set of entities in the world to which an expression refers. (its referece)
Intension: The ‘inherent sense’ conveyed by an expression.
[[ Ann ]] = Ann
[[ John ]] = John
[[ Fido ]] = Fido
etc.
3
etc.
Exercise: Given the extensions of proper names and predicates and the general principle in (19), how
can we derive the fact the sentence “John dances and sings” entails the sentence “John sings”?
6. Modifiers
“green sweater” refers to anything which is in the intersection of these two sets (Venn
diagram): [[ sweater ]] ∩ [[ green ]]
7. Meaning of Determiners
(21) Relational view of quantifying determiners: Determiners specify relations between sets.
4
…etc.
(32a) and (32b) are equivalent (i.e. (32a) entails (32b) and (32b) entails (32a)). ‘Every’ is a
conservative determiner.
(33a) and (33b) are equivalent (i.e. (27a) entails (27b) and (27b) entails (27a)). ‘No’ is a conservative
determiner.
...
-> Conservativity seems to be a universal property of natural language determiners.