Semantics

Week VII
 Definition
• Semantics is a branch of linguistics which studies meaning.

• What is the meaning of “meaning”?

• Ogden & Richards (1923, p. 186) in their book, The Meaning of

Meaning, presented a “representative list of the main definitions
which reputable students of meaning have favored” . There are 16
major categories of them, with sub-categories all together,
numbering 22.

• Leech (1974, p. 23) in his book, Semantics, recognized 7 types of

meaning.
No. Types of Meaning “Meaning”
1. Conceptual meaning Logical, cognitive, or denotative content

2. Connotative meaning What is communicated by virtue of what language

refers to
3. Social meaning What is communicated of the social circumstances of
language use.
4. Affective meaning What is communicated of the feelings and attitudes of
the speaker/ writer.
5. Reflected meaning What is communicated through association with
another sense of the same expression.
6. Collocative meaning What is communicated through association with words
which tend to occur in the environment of another
word.

7. Thematic meaning What is communicated by the way in which the

message is organized in terms of order and emphasis.
 Types of Semantics

• Lexical semantics is concerned with the meaning of

words and the meaning relationships among words.

• Sentential (phrasal) semantics deals with the

meaning of syntactic unit larger than words, i.e.
Pharses, clauses and sentences, and semantic
relationships between them.
Lexical Semantics
 Meaning Relations among Words:
Synonymy

• Synonyms are traditionally defined as words with the same

meaning.

• Many linguists prefer to define synonymy as extensive semantic

similarity.

• For example, synonyms may differ with regard to stylistic level (buy
– purchase), or soical or regional variety (lift – elevator).

• Thesauruses are dictionaries in which words with similar meanings

are grouped together.
 Meaning Relations among Words:
Antonymy
• Antonymy refers to semantic relationship between words
which are opposite in meaning.

• Antonyms are opposites with respect to at least one

component of their meaning, but share all other aspects of
their meaning.

• For example, come and go are opposites with respect to

direction but involve the notion of movement.
 Major Types of Antonymy

1. Complementary antonymy is characterized by an either-or

relationship between the two members of such a pair, and
by the fact that the negative of one of the word is
synonymous with the other.

• Present – absent (not present is synonymous with absent);

dead – alive (not alive is synonymous with dead).
2. Gradable antonymy (polarity): the opposite of one of the words
is not necessarily synonymous with the other.
• The gradable pairs are often opposite poles of a continuum of
expressions, with one or more intermediate stages between
them. For example: Small – (medium) – large.

• Most gradable pairs are pairs of adjectives that do not by

themselves provide an absolute scale but are always related to
the expression they modify. For example: Even a large bee is still
much smaller in absolute size than a small horse.

• Some pairs of gradable antonyms show an asymmetry with

respect to their usage conditions, that is one of the words can
appear in more contexts than the other. For example How old
are you? How high is the skyscraper? This type of antonyms
differ with respect to markedness.
3. Relational antonyms refer to pair of words which describe
the same situation from opposite perspectives.
• For example, teacher – pupil; buy – sell.
• If X if Y’s pupil, then Y is X’s teacher.

4. Directional opposites refer to a pair of words that describe

the opposite directions of a movement.
• For example, come – go; rise - fall
 Meaning Relations among Words:
Homophony, Polysemy, and Lexical Ambiguity
• Homophones refer to different words with the same pronunciation
(different spelling and meaing). For example, write and right, both
are pronunced as /raIt/.

• Polysemy occurs where one lexeme has a range of different but

related meanings.
For example, I need some paper; I wrote a paper; I read the paper.

• Both polysemy and homophony create lexical ambiguity, that is a

single form (sound or orthographic writing) that has two or more
meanings. The surround­ing words and the wider context usually
make the intended mean­ing clear.
 Meaning Relations among Words:
Homography and Homonymy

• Homographs refer to words that are spelled the same but

have different pronunciation and meanings. For example dove
/dʌv/ [noun, a bird of the pigeon family] and dove /dəʊv/
[past-tense verb of dive].

• Homonymy refers to those words that have both identical

pronunciations and spellings. For example, bank ‘a finacial
institu­tion’ and bank ‘the side of a river’
 Meaning Relations among Words:
Hyponymy, Hyperonymy, and Meronymy
• Hyponymy refers to semantic relation between words in which one
word is the subtype of another word.

• Hyperonymy denotes the word which is the superordinate of the

other words.

• The relation between subtypes/ sub-ordinates in a superordinate is

called as co-hyponymy.

• For example, red is a hyponymy of color; while color is the

hyperonymy of red, yellow, blue, green. The relationship between
red, yellow is called as co-hyponymy.
• Meronymy is a term used to describe a part-whole relationship between
lexical items.

• X is a meronym of Y if X is a part of Y, or Y has X. For example, ‘cover’ and

‘page’ are parts of ‘book’, thus they are meronyms of book.

• Hyponymy is always transitive, meaning that if an item is a part of a part,

then that first item is part of the larger whole. For example: hawk is a
hyponym of bird, and bird is a hyponym of animal, so hawk is a hyponym
of animal.

• Meronymy may or may not be transitive.

Example of transitive meronymy : nail is a meronym of finger, and finger
of hand, we can say that nail is a meronym of hand, for we can say hand
has nails.
Example of Intransitive meronymy: hole is a meronym of button, and
button of shirt, but we can’t say that hole is a meronym of shirt, for we
can not say shirt has holes.
 Word Meaning

Three pairs of terms play an important role in semantic analysis:

• Denotation – Connotation
• Sense – Reference
• Intension - Extension
 Denotation - Connotation
• Denotation refers to the relationship between a linguistic
expression and the concrete language-external entities to which it
refers.

• Connotation denotes the meaning of words that we think of when

we hear the terms.
 Sense - Reference
• The sense of an expression is the meaning it has within a
language. It is essentially defined by its relations with other
expressions, i.e. within its networks of synonyms, antonyms etc.

• The Reference of a word is defined as its direct relationship

between an expression and the persons, objects, entities or
states of affairs in the real world to which it refers.

• The sense of the term cow is ‘a large four-legged animal kept on

farms to produce milk or beef’, whereas the reference are all the
cows in the world, no matter what color or size they are.
• The distinction between sense and reference has its limitations.

• There are some words that clearly have a sense, but no obvious
referents in the real world, such as unicorns and dragons.

• There may also be more than one expression to talk about the
same referent, such as the leader of Indonesian Democratic
Party of Struggle and the head of National Research Agency
(BRIN) Steering Committee.

• An expression with one particular sense may be used to refer to

different entities in the real world and that these referents may
change over time, such as the President of the Republic of
Indonesia.
 Intension - Extension
• The intension of an expression, also called mental image, is the set
of semantic properties/ features which define it.

• For example, bird evokes language-internal definitions according to

its sematic properties as [+animate], [-human], [+wings], and
[+feathers]. In this approach, a word’s intention is broken down into
semantic components, which is called componential analysis.

• Extension refers to the class of entities to which an expression can

be applied. The extension of the term bird would be a list of entities
including robin, dove, parrot, duck, ostrich, etc., but also the
mythical bird phoenix.
 From Structural to Cognitive Semantics
• Structural semantics is the study of meaning which is conducted
based on a predominantly language-internal perspective.

• It is influenced by structural linguistics which is essentially based on

the assumption that every linguistic element is integrated into the
structure of the language system through a network of relations.

• In the 1930s, structuralist assumptions of the relation of words were

applied to a new approach called semantic field theory. This theory
holds that words do not exist in isolation but form so-called sematic
field (or lexical field) with other semantically related words. (For
example, color hyponym).
• Since 1980s, the more recent approach of cognitive
semantics sees language as part of our cognitive ability
through which we organize and classify all aspects of our
experience.

• This view is based on the assumption that meaning is linked to

the way we group all kinds of perceptions and phenomena
into conceptual categories.
 Some concepts in Cognitive Semantics
• Human conceptual category is characterized by fuzziness and typicality.

• Fuzzy concept is a concept which does not have a clear-cut boundary. For
example the notion of “tall”, “strength”, etc.

• Many concepts do not only have fuzzy boundaries, their members can also
be graded according to their typicality, and prototypes are cognitive
reference points in a category.

• For example, the dictionary definitions of birds is ‘creatures that are covered
with feathers, have two wings and two legs, and the majority of which can
fly’. Therefore, our intuition tells us that robins and sparrows are more
typical and thus better examples of birds than are pen­guins or ostriches.
• Metaphor, in linguistics (cognitive semantics) refers to the
interconnection of meaning of one concept which can be understood
in terms of the other’s.

• Metaphor is a part of the conceptual system that is shared by all

human beings. The use of metaphors is so common that most of
them are frequently not even noticed by many speakers.

• For exam­ple, at least in Western languages, the notion of time is often

treated in everyday language as if it were a concrete valuable
commodity. This is illustrated in the following examples from English:
(1) Home cleaning tips and tricks to save time.
(2) Ideas on how to spend time with your kids.
(3) Invest your time profitably and study linguistics.
(4) Time is money.
Sentential Semantics
 Meaning Relation among Sentences:
Paraphrase
• Two sentences that have the same meaning are said to be
paraphrases of each other.

• Common ways to produce paraphrases are, for instance, to replace

one word with a synonymous expression (5a & 5b), or to rephrase
an active sentence in the passive voice or vice versa (6a & 6b).
• Pairs of sentences that are true under the same circumstances (like
5a & 5b, 6a & 6b) are said to have the same truth conditions.

• The type of semantics that approaches meaning by employing the

notion of truth is called formal semantics.

• The part of the meaning of a sentence that can be said to be either

true or false is called the propo­sition (or propositional content).

• Paraphrases at the sentence level are the equivalent of synonyms

at the lexical level. Just like synonyms, paraphrases are never
perfect and that we are actually concerned with sentences that
have very similar meanings.
 Meaning Relation among Sentences:
Entailment

• Entailment refers to the relation between two sentences in

which the truth of one sentence entails (or implies) the truth
of another sentence.
 Meaning Relation among Sentences:
Contradiction
• Contradiction refers to the relation of two sentences in which
the truth of one sentence implies the falseness of the other.

• Contradiction can be also called as negative entailment.

 Sentence Meaning and Syntax
• Principle of Compositionality: the meaning of a phrase or a
sentence is determined by the meaning of its component
parts and the way they are combined structurally.

• This principle emphasizes the importance of lexical semantics

as well as syntax for the interpretation of sentence meaning.

• For example:
(1) Eric kills Emily.
(2) Emily kills Eric.
• Even though the two sentences are made up of exactly the
same words and kills is inflected in exactly the same way in
both sentences, it still requires no further explanation that the
sentences mean something completely different.

• A mere change in word order, i.e. exchanging the subject and

the object, creates semantically quite distinct sentences.
 Structural Ambiguity
• Phrases and sentences that have more than one possible
meaning are thus said to be structurally ambiguous.
 Limitation of compositionality
• In some conditions, we can not immediately infer the meaning of
the whole phrases from the knowledge of the individual
meanings of the words.

• For example, in the case of idiomatic phrases. The meaning of

idiomatic phrases cannot be predicted from the words they are
made up of, they have to be learned just like individual words
(bring about, run into, etc.)

• The same holds true for exocentric compounds such as

blackbird and redneck, which have meanings that cannot be
inferred from the meaning of their components.
 Presuppositions
• Presupposition denotes the assumption underlying a
statement.

• Presuppositions are different from entailment, in that

presuppositions also hold true when the presuppos­ing
sentence is negated or changed into question.
The End