THATS JUST

SEMANTICS
Katie Welch, PhD
LING3311-001

How do we know what words mean?

When we want to know what a word

means, we often turn a familiar source
the dictionary.
Why is the dictionary not a sufficient
method for determining meaning?

Semantics: The Meaning of Meaning

Semantics is a subfield of linguistics that

deals with meaning
Looks at meaning on both the word
(lexical) and phrasal (compositional)
level
Meaning involves two aspects: sense
and reference

Reference

Reference is the actual thing the word

refers to
The referent of proper nouns are
generally easy to identify (ex. White
House, Hawaii)
Common nouns are much more difficult
to identify (woman, dog)
But, what do we do with words that dont
have a referent? (unicorn, nonexistent)

Sense

Sense is the aspect of the words

meaning that is independent from what
the word actually refers to in the real
world
It is considered the speakers mental
conception of the word (goes beyond the
mental image of the word)
Take out of a piece of paper and draw
your mental image of the following
words:

Flower

Teacher

Eat

the

Activity

Both sense and reference are necessary

components to the theory of meaning
But, neither one is sufficient in and of itself.
With a partner, take 20 minutes to
determine why reference/sense are:

Necessary
Insufficient

Cite specific data to support your position. (Hint:

Look at Section 6.1 in your textbook)

Lexical Semantics: Meaning

Relationships

Syntonomy= two words have the same

meaning (ex. couch, sofa)
Hyponomy= a certain subset of words is
always contained within a larger set (ex.
Poodles, Dogs)
Antonymy= opposites

Complementary pairs (x or y or neither but not

both)
Gradable pairs (not x does not imply not y)
Reverses (x undoes y)
Converses (if x has reference, y must, too)

Lexical Semantics: Features

Lexical decomposition is a process by

which we break down words into smaller
parts (features)
Boy/Girl & Man/Woman can be broken
down into its features
+human
+female/+male
+child/+adult
Any time that we use a word yet deny
some of its semantic features, the
sentence is semantically anomalous (p.

Review

What is semantics? What is lexical

semantics?
How do we encode meaning in our
lexicon?
When we perform lexical decomposition,
we break the meaning of a word down
into its ___________.
What is sense? What is reference? What
are the limitations of each?
Describe two words in a hyponomous
relationship.

Compositional Semantics

Lexical semantics does not give us a full

picture of meaning
We communicate on the
phrasal/sentence level
The compositional level is both infinite
and productive
We learn words independently and
individually, but we dont learn
sentence meaning
Instead, we compute them via
compositional rules

Compositional Semantics

Understanding a sentences meaning

involves the use of truth conditions and
truth meanings
Truth conditions are the conditions that
would have to exist for the sentence to
be true
See example p. 249
Allows referents to exist in nonactual
scenarios
Truth value refers to whether or not the
sentence is actually true

Principle of
Compositionality

The meaning of a sentence is

determined by the meaning of its words
in conjunction with the way they are put
together syntactically