Chapter 1: Semantics in Linguistics

Utterances

It is The most concrete, and it is created by speaking (or writing) a piece of language. If I say Linguistics is my favorite subject, this is one utterance. If another person in the same room also says Linguistics is my favorite subject, then we would be dealing with two utterances. An utterance can be a sentence or part of a sentence but it has to be meaningful and belongs to a language.

Sentences

It is an abstract grammatical element obtained from utterances. Also the same sentence can produce different utterances. For example, if three other persons said Linguistics is my favorite subject, then we have 5 utterances of the same sentence. In other words, sentences are abstracted, or generalized, from actual language use. From the point of view of the speaker, sentences are abstract elements to be made real by uttering them; from the hearer's point of view, they are abstract elements reached by filtering out certain kinds of information from utterances.

What establishes semantics as a branch of linguistics?

To answer this question, we have to investigate the relationship between semantics and some other closely-related fields.

When studying meaning we have to bear in mind three points:

1. circularity; using words to define the meaning of words. Example: ferret in a monolingual English dictionary means "Domesticated albino variety of the polecat, ... To understand this, we have to understand the words in the definition. Domesticated may be defined as "of animals, tame, living with human beings." We have to define these words, also. And so on. 2. exactness) of the definition of a word's meaning, i.e., differentiating between linguistic knowledge (about the meaning of words) and encyclopedic knowledge (about the way the world is). For example, if I believe that a whale is a fish, and you believe that it is a mammal, do our words have different meanings when we both use the noun whale? 3. context. It comes from looking at what particular utterances mean in context. For example: if someone says to you Marvelous weather you have here in Ramallah, you might interpret it differently on a cloudless sunny day than when the rain is pouring down. Similarly He's dying might mean one thing when said of a terminally ill patient, and another as a comment watching a stand-up comedian failing to get laughs. Or again: It's getting late if said to a friend at a party might be used to mean Let's leave.

What is meaning?

A phenomenon by which we can say that something (words, signals) etc. stand for something else. We can call all of these, signs. the relationship between all these signs is called meaning.

Word meaning

Concern of semantics - relationship between word meaning and sentence meaning. Word meaning: Knowing a language means that a person knows thousands of words which she/he keeps in a mental store, a lexicon, similar to dictionaries. The mental lexicon is a large but finite body of knowledge, part of which must be semantic. This lexicon is not completely static because we are continually learning and forgetting words.

Prepositions

It is another further step of abstraction. A proposition is a description of an event, a situation or a state of affairs shared by different grammatical sentences or different language systems. In forming propositions, we may delete verb endings, articles, and other grammatical elements. A proposition can be a shared element in different sentence types. For example the statement Joan made the cake, the question Did Joan make the cake?, and the command: Joan, make the cake share a propositional element: JOAN MAKE THE CAKE. In this view, these different sentences allow the speaker to do different things with the same proposition: to assert it as a past event; to question it; or to request someone to bring it about.

Literal meaning

Literal meaning refers to instances where the speaker speaks in a neutral, factually accurate way.

Sentence meaning

Phrases and sentences also have meaning but it differs from word meaning in productivity and compositionality.

■ Semantics and Semiotics

Semantics focuses on only the linguistic meaning, which is one part of what meaning actually is. Linguistic meaning is just a subset of the more general human ability to use signs (words). Consider the use and interpretation of the word mean in the following examples: 1. Those vultures mean there's a dead animal up ahead. 2. His high temperature may mean he has a virus. 3. The red flag means it's dangerous to swim. 4. Those stripes on his uniform mean that he is a sergeant. The verb mean indicates cause and effect, and shows knowledge of symbols used in public signs. The process of creating and interpreting symbols, sometimes called signification, is wider and more general than language. Linguistic meaning is a part of this general study of the use of sign systems. This general study of meaning is called semiotics. Semioticians investigate the types of relationship that may hold between a sign and the object it represents, between a signifier and its signified. In semiotics, we differentiate between icon, index, and symbol. Icon: It is where there is a similarity between a signifier (sign) and its signified, as for example between a portrait and its real life subject, or a diagram of an engine and the real engine. Index: It is where the signifier is closely associated with its signified, often in a causal relationship; thus smoke is an index of fire. Symbol: It is where there is only a conventional link between the signifier and its signified, as in the use of insignia to denote military ranks, or wearing black or white clothes to symbolize mourning. According to semiotics, words are considered examples of verbal symbols.

Semantics in linguistics

Semantics: It is the study of meaning communicated through language. It is one of the linguistic levels a semanticist investigates. Meaning is one of the main components of language in addition to sound and form.

Productivity

Speakers regularly create sentences that they have never used or heard before, confident that their audience will understand them.

Semanticist and knowledge

The semanticist is committed to describing a speaker's semantic knowledge since linguistic description is an attempt to reflect that knowledge. Our semantic knowledge tells us that some sentences have the same meaning, some contradict each other, some are ambiguous, and one sentence may entail another.

Utterances, Sentences, and Propositions

These three terms are used to describe different levels of language.

Semantics and Pregmatics

They denote related and complementary fields of study, both concerning the transmission of meaning through language. Pragmatics is the study of the speaker's/hearer's interpretation of language. Interpretation of the sentence meaning depends on speaker's wishes and the situation the participants find themselves in. For example, if a speaker says to a listener, The place is closing, this could have different meanings. It may be used as a simple statement, or as a warning to hurry and get that last purchase (if they're in a department store) or drink (if in a bar). It could also be an invitation or command to leave. Some semanticists would claim that the non-situation-specific meaning is what semantics is concerned with. Another difference between semantics and pragmatics is to distinguish between sentence meaning and speaker meaning. Semantics is concerned with sentence meaning and pragmatics with speaker meaning. Semantics mainly focuses on linguistic knowledge whereas pragmatics investigates the interaction between purely linguistic knowledge and general or encyclopedic knowledge. Pragmatics is the field that studies how hearers fill out the semantic structure with contextual information (e.g., work out who the speaker is referring to by pronouns, etc.) and make inferences that go beyond the meaning of what was said to them (e.g. that I'm tired might mean Let's go home).

Compositionality

This means that the meaning of a sentence or an expression is determined by the meaning of its component parts and the way in which they are combined using combinatorial rules. Therefore, meanings of sentences cannot be listed in a lexicon like the meanings of words: they must be created by rules of combination too. Sentence meaning is compositional. Semantic rules are in some sense linked to grammatical rules.

Semantics and grammar

Two positions Some semanticists consider semantics as a component of grammar like other components such as syntax, morphology, phonology etc. They consider meaning a product of all linguistic levels. Changing one phoneme for another, one verb ending for another, or one word order for another will produce differences of meaning. This view leads some writers to believe that meaning cannot be identified as a separate level, autonomous from the study of other levels of grammar. Many other linguists still maintain the distinction between linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge; and within linguistic knowledge, identifying distinct linguistic level of analysis, i.e., separate knowledge about pronunciation, from grammar, and meaning.

Non-literal Meaning

refers to instances where the speaker deliberately describes something in untrue or impossible terms in order to achieve special effects. Non-literal uses of language are traditionally called figurative and are described by a host of rhetorical terms including metaphor, irony, metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole, and litotes