Semantics & Pragmatics
Focus of this course:
- Cognitive and lexical semantics together with some concepts from the philosophy of
language (denotation, sense, etc.)
- Pragmatics in the tradition of the philosophy of language: Reference and Deixis,
Presupposition, Implicature.
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Topic 1 & 2: Introduction
Definition of Semantics:
Semantics is an academic discipline concerned with meaning, typically, the meaning of
words and propositions.
Propositions: cases of entailments (2) and contradictions (3):
1) Where did you buy/purchase the bag? (semantics studies the relation between these
two verbs: they express the same sense in this context)
2) !! If I saw a person, then, obviously, I saw a boy. (semantically odd, no logical relation
between these two propositions. The meaning of person does not entail the meaning of
boy. It’s the other way around)
3) !! I know Mary is ill, but she wasn’t. (semantically odd, no logical relation between
these two clauses. In this case it’s not entailment, but a case of contradiction)
Semanticists are interested in what words mean, why they mean what they mean, how they
are represented in speakers’ minds and how they are used in text and discourse.
Fields of Semantics: Structuralist semantics, truth conditional semantics, componential
analysis, lexical semantics, cognitive semantics.
Key Concepts: Words and concepts; Categories, prototypes, frames; Lexical relations; The
mental lexicon; Cultural models and encyclopaedic knowledge; Lexicology and
lexicography*. Corpus linguistics; Cognitive linguistics.
*Lexicographical products: dictionaries, thesauruses, lexicons, etc. (Info on the word’s
orthography, meaning, pronunciation, grammar; info on words historical roots; derivations,
synonyms and antonyms; info on usage and some examples.
Corpus: “A corpus (pl: corpora) is a collection of linguistic material that can be searched,
usually using specialized computer software”. A corpus is a large collection of real language,
of authentic written or oral texts. In corpora use can find, for example, collocations (words
that frequently appear together e.g. heavy smoker)
- The British National Corpus (BNC) http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/
- The Corpus of Contemporary American English: https://www.english-
corpora.org/coca/
,Words and Concepts
The notion of “word” is extremely problematics. It is not always connected to the notion of
“meaning”.
(1) The mouse ran across the floor.
(2) I always use the touch pad – never the mouse.
(3) I like white wine.
(4) I don’t like white coffee.
(5) I closed my savings account with the local bank
yesterday.
(6) I closed the door and went away
(Lexical) knowledge is organized as concepts in people’s minds.
A concept can be understood as a structured mental representation.
Concepts provide the necessary contextual knowledge for our understanding of the world
around us. This knowledge is referred to as “domain/schema” or “frame”.
The mental structures of the domains are wider and more general than the mental structures of
concepts.
For example, the concept BREAKFAST is to be found in the domain (THE DAILY MEAL
SYSTEM) that contains other concepts such as LUNCH & DINNER. Domains are culturally
based. My daily meal system could be different from that of a British Person, for example.
Two types of domains:
- Basic domains: abstract structures based on our bodily/ inborn experiences (colours,
tastes, smells, tactile sensations, spatial extensionality, etc…)
- Complex domains: combination of several domains of any kind of complexity. Most
concepts require specifications in more than one domain for their characterization.
Example the concept BANANA:
shape in the spatial (and/or visual) domain;
, a colour configuration;
a location in the domain of taste/smell sensations;
other domains, such as the knowledge that bananas are eaten, that they grow in bunches on
trees, that they come from tropical areas, and so on.
Words, then, get their meaning(s) by activating one or several domains and focusing
on some parts of them Foregrounding and Backgrounding. (The word
“breakfast” highlights one specific meal as figure against the ground of the DAILY
MEAL SYSTEM frame)
Definition of Pragmatics:
Pragmatics is an academic discipline concerned with meaning in context, with language in
use.
4) Speaker A: The phone!
Speaker B: I’m in the shower
Semantically, this dialogue is rather odd. The utterance of speaker A corresponds to the
meaning of phone, so the hearer in principle should recall the image of a phone, yet he
doesn’t. The dialogue, however, is completely meaningful in the context and we all
understand it well thanks to the principles of pragmatics.
Pragmaticists are interested in what words mean in specific contexts of use, how implicit
meanings are created in interaction, why people are indirect and do not say explicitly what
they mean, how people understand each other if meaning is not said explicitly, etc.
Fields of Pragmatics: The philosophy of language (Presupposition, Reference and Deixis,
Implicature, Illocutionary Force and Speech Acts); Ethnography of speaking and
communication; Conversation Analysis; Sociolinguistics (Politeness, Cross-cultural and
Intercultural Pragmatics)
Application of Semantics and Pragmatics
- The creation of dictionaries
- The study of how words are learned and acquired
- The creation of databases for NLP* systems such as machines translators, search
engines, etc.
- The study of how words and utterances are used in contexts.
- The study of similarities and differences across cultures and languages; of how
meaning relations are understood and used in different social contexts.
- The creation of labels, brands, etc. for advertising or marketing agencies.
, *Natural language processing: it’s a branch of artificial intelligence companies are hiring
linguists to build machines, to accomplish and design implement programmes that process
languages the way we do it.
Topic 3: Language, Meaning and Culture
Words and lexemes
In order to understand meaning, it’s important to compare the notions of word and lexeme, as
well as the concepts of reference, sense, denotation and connotation.
A word is a kind of “pointer” to something in the world.
Four types of words:
- Orthographic words: distinguished by their spelling.
- Phonological words: distinguished by their pronunciation.
- Lexemes: items of meaning or headwords of dictionary entries.
- Word-forms: each grammatical variant of a lexeme.
- Multi-word lexemes: put up with or kick the bucket (to die).
Lexeme:
- A lexeme is the name of the abstract term which unites all the grammatical variants
of a single word and indicates its core meaning or sense. It’s “a minimal unit that can
take part in referring or predicating”.
Ex: ask, asks, asked, asking, (have) asked are all word-forms for the same lexeme ASK.
- Lexeme = headword, base form or citation form.
- All the lexemes of a language make its lexicon; all the lexemes that you know make
up your personal or mental lexicon.
- The lexeme-word distinction has applications in various aspects of study, especially
in lexicography and corpus studies.
Reference and sense; Denotation and connotation
Reference:
