The Meaning of

Language

 All of these knowledge about meaning

extends to an unlimited set of
sentences. Part of the job of the linguist
s to reveal and make explicit this
knowledge about meaning that every
speaker has.

TRUTH
Jack swims quickly (False)
Jack doesnt swimquickly (True)
For most sentences it does not make sense to say
that they are always true or always false. Rather,
they are true or false in a given situation, as we
previously saw with Jack swims. But a restricted
number of sentences are indeed always true
regardless of the circumstances. They are called
Tautologies, (e.g. Circles are round or A person
who is single is not married)
Their truth is guaranteed solely by the meaning of
their parts and the way they are put together.

ENTAILMENT AND RELATED NOTIONS

If you know that the sentence Jack swims
beautifully is true, then you also know that the
sentence Jack swims must also be true.
More generally, one sentence entails another if
whenever the first sentence is true the second
one is also true, in all conceivable
circumstances.
Contradictory, whenever one is true, the other is
false, or equivalently, there is no situation in
which they are both true or both false.

AMBIGUITY
our semantic knowledge tells us when words or phrases
(including sentence) have more than one meaning, that
is, when they ambiguous
e.g. The boy saw the man with a telescope (structural
ambiguity)

SEMANTIC RULES
Jack swims
Word
Jack

Meaning
-

Swims -

individual jack
the set of individuals that swim.

 When Compositionality Goes Awry

Not all grammatical sentences have
semantical meanings. Also, the meaning of
a sentence is not always obvious, an
maybe at least, require some imagination
or special knowledge to be apprehended.

Anomaly

A. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

B. Dark green leads rustle furiously.
Both sentences has the same syntactical
structure but in the first example, it is evident
that it has semantic violations. Such sentences
are semantically "anomalous".

 Other English "sentences" makes no sense at all

because they include "words" that are
UNINTERPRETABLE because they do not exist in the
lexicon of the grammar, and probably, they could only
be interpreted if some "meaning" for each nonsense
word can be dreamt up.
Ex.He took his "vorpal" sword in hand.
Without knowing what "vorpal" means, we can
conclude that it means the same thing as
He took his sword, which was "vorpal", in hand. and
It was in his hand that he took the "vorpal" sword.
Probably because the same sounds were used in the
sentence, we can assume that the word vorpal means

Metaphor

When what appears to be an anomaly is

nevertheless understood in terms of a
meaningful concept, the expression becomes a
metaphor.
There is no strict line between anomalies and
metaphors.
To interpret a metaphor, we need to understand
the individual words, the literal meaning of the
whole expression, and facts about the world.

Time is money.
Though the word time is an abstract concept, it
was treated as a concrete object of value.
Therefore, we can say that metaphorical uses of
the language is language creativity as its peak.

Idioms
These typically started out as metaphors and
"caught on" and are repeated so often that it
became a permanent fixture in a language.
Ex.
Drop the ball
Birth of fire
Bite your tongue
Zip your mouth

 Idioms are similar to other ordinary phrases in form except that

idioms tend to be frozen in form and do not readily undergo
rules that change word order or substitutions of their parts.
Ex.
She put her foot in her mouth.
She put her bracelet in her drawer.
We can say that
Her bracelet was put in her drawer.
But not
Her foot was put in her mouth
Because it would disregard the idiomatic sense of the phrase,
and would rather appear stupid and humorous.
All languages have idioms.

Lexical Semantics (Word Meanings)

Lexicon- our mental storehouse of information

about words and morphemes.

Dictionaries like Webster's Collegiate Dictionary

are filled with words and meanings. Dictionaries
give meanings of words using other words.

Theories of Word Meanings

Reference
Referent- a real-world object to which the expression
has association with.
Proper names are noun phrases (NP); you can
substitute a proper name for any NP position and
preserve grammaticality.
It is also the same thing with pronouns.
My friend, that guy, the happy swimmer can all be
referred to as Jack, given that you've seen him
swimmimg. Same as the pronouns I, you and him,
which also functions as NP's.

Sense
There are some expressions and words that have
no real-world reference (unicorns, fairy
godmothers, Severus Snape, etc.)
"Barack Obama" and "the President" may refer to
one individual BUT the NP "the President" means
something to do with the "head of state". This
element of meaning is what we call sense.
Unicorns, fairy godmothers and Severus Snape
have sense but no reference. We may have a clear
image of these in books, movies, etc. and that
may serve as reference for those expressions.

Lexical relations
Synonyms are words or expression that have the
same meaninh in some or all context.
Ex.
A sign in the san diego zoo wild animal park
states :
Please do not annoy , torment , pester, plague,
molest
,worry,badger,harry,harass,heckle,persecute,irk,
bullyrag,vex,disquiet,grate,beset,bother,tease,ne
ttle,tantalize,or ruffle the animals .

Ex .

English
Latin
Manly
Heal

virile

recuperate
Send
transmit
Go down

descend

 Words that are opposite in meaning are

Antonyms these are several kinds of antonymy.
There are Complementary pairs.
Alive/dead present/absent awake/asleep
They are complementary int that alive=not dead
and dead=not alive, and so on.
There are gradable pairs of antonyms:
Big/small hot/cold fast/slow happy/sad
Another kind of opposite involves pairs like
Give/receive buy/sell teacher/pupil

 They are called Relatinal opposites, and they display

symmetry in their meaning. If X gives Y to Z then Z
receives Y from X . If X is Y's teacher, then Y is X's
pupil. Pairs of words ending in -er and -ee are usually
relational opposites. If mary is Bill's employer,then bill
is mary's employee.
Some words are their own antonyms. Theses
"autoantonyms" or "contranyms" are words such as
cleave" to split apart: or "to cling together" and dust "
to remove something " or " to spread something " as in
dusting furniture or dusting crops. Antonymic pairs
that are pronounced the same but spelled differently
are similar to autoantonyms: raise and raze are one
such pair.

 In english there are several ways to form

antonyms. You can add the prefix -un .
Like/unlikely able/unable
fortunate/unfortunate
Or you can add -non.
Entity/nonentity conformist/nonconformist
Or you can add -in.
Tolerant/intolerant discreet/indiscreet
decent/indecent

 Other lexical relations include

homonyms,polysemy, and hyponyms.
Words like bear and bare are homonyms(also
called homophones)
Homonyms are words that have different
meanings but pronounced the same, and may or
may not be spelled the same. ( theyre
homographs when spelled the same , but when
homographs are pronounced differently like pussh
meaning "infected" or pussy meaning "kitten" they
are called heteronyms rather than homonyms)
near nonsense sentences like Entre nous, the new
gnu knew nu is a Greek letter tease us with

 Homonyms can create ambiguity. The sentence:

Ill meet you by the bank.
Ex
How is bread made?
I know that! Alice cried eagerly.
You take some flour- Where do you pick flower? The white queen asked.
In a garden, or in the hedges?
Well,it isnt picked at all,Alice explained; its ground- How many acres of ground? Said the white Queen.

 When a word has multiple meanings that are

related conceptually or historically, it is said
to be polysemous. (Polly-seamus)
Speakers of english know that the words red,
white, and blue are color words. Similarly lion
tiger leopard and lynx are all felines. Such
sets of words are called Hyponyms.

Semantic Features
Decomposing the meanings of words into semantic
features can clarify how certain words relate to
other words.
Semantic features are among the conceptual
elements thag are part of the meanings of words
and sentence. Consider, for example , the
sentence.
The assassin killed Thwacklehurst.

Evidence for Semantic Features

Semantic properties are not directly
observable. Their existence must be inferred
from linguistic evidence. One source of such
evidence is the speech errors, or slips of the
tongue. That we all produce. Consider the
following unintentional word substitutions that
some speakers have actually spoken.

(Error)
Intended utterance
Bridge of the neck
Bridge of the nose
When my tongues bled
When my gums bled
He came too early
Mary was early
He came too late
The lady with the
Marry was young
Volkswagen
The lady with the Dachshund
Thats
a
horse
of
Thats a horse of another color
another race
His ancestors were farmers His descendants were
He has to pay her alimony farmers
He has to pay her rent

 The semantic prolerties that describe the

linguistic meanings of a word should not be
confused with other nonlinguistic properties,
such as physical properties. Scientist know that
water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. But
such knowledge is not oart of a words meaning.
We know that water is an essential ingredient of
lemonade and baths. However we dont need to
know any of these things to know what the word
water means . And to be able to use and
understand it in a sentence.

Semantic Features and Grammar

Futher evidence that wordsare composed of smaller
bits of meaning is the semantic features interact
with different aspects of the grammar such as
morphology or syntax. These effects show uo in
both nouns and verbs.

Semantic Features of Nouns

The same semantic features may be shared by
many words. "FEMALE" Is a semantic feature .
Sometimes indicated by the suffix -ess that makes
up part of the meaning of nouns such as
Tigress hen
Doe

aunt

maiden

mare debutante widow

 The words in the last two columns are also

distinguished by the semantic feature
"human" which is also found in :
Doctor dean professor teenager
Bachelor parent baby child
In some languages though not english nouns
occur with classifiers grammatical
morphemes that indicate the semantic class
of nouns. In Swahili an noun that has

 A noun that has the feature

" human artifact" such as bed , chair , or knife is
prefixed with the cLassifiers Ki if singular and Vi
if plural for example kiti (chair) and viti (chairs).
Semantic properties may have syntactic and
semantix effects too. For example the kinds of
determiners that a noun may occur with are
controlled by whether it is s count noun or a
mass noun.

Consider these data:

I have two dogs.
I have a dog.
* I have a dog.
He has many dogs.
* He has much dogs.
* I have two rice(s)
* I have a rice.
I have a rice.
*He has many rice(s)

 Count nouns can be enumerated and

pluralized -- one potato, two potatoes. They
may be preceded by the indefinite
determiner a and by quantifier many as in
many potatoes but not by much * much
potato. They must occur with a determiner of
some kind. Nouns such as rice , water and
milk which cannot be enumerated or
pluralized, are Mass Nouns.

Semantic features of verbs

Verbs also have semantic features as part of
their meaning . For example "cause" is a
feature of verbs such as darken, kill, uglify
and so on.
Darken cause to become dark
Kill cause to die
Uglify cause to become ugly

 "Go" is a feature of verbs that mean a

change in location or possession such as
swim , crawl, throw,fly , give or buy.
Jack swims.
The baby crawled under the table.
The boy threw the ball over the fence.
Joh Gave Mary a beautiful engagement ring.

 Verbal features like features on nouns may have

syntactic consequences.
For example, verbs can either describe events
such as John kissed mary , John ate Oysters. Or
states such as john knows Mary/John likes oysters.
The eventive/stative difference is mirrored in the
syntax. Eventive sentences still sound natural
when passivized, when expressed progressively,
when used imperatively and with certain adverbs.

Eventives
Mary was kissed by john.
John is kissing Mary.
Kiss Mary!
John deliberately kissed Mary.
Oysters were eaten by John.
John is eating oysters.
Eat oysters!
John deliberately ate oysters.

 The stative sentences seem peculiar if

not ungrammatical or anomalous when
cast in the same form. ( the preceding "?"
Indicates the Strangeness)

Statives
?Mary is known by John.
?John is knowing Mary.
?Know Mary!
?John deliberately knows Mary.
?Oysters are liked by John
?John is liking oysters
?Like oysters!
?John deliberately likes oysters.

 Negation is a particularly interesting

component of the meaning of some verbs.
Expressions such as ever, anymore, have a
red cent and many more are ungrammatical
in certai simple affirmative sentemces, but
grammatical in corresponding negative ones.
* Mary will ever smile. (CF. MARY WILL NOT
EVER SMILE.)
*I can vist you anymore. (CF. I CANNOT VISIT
YOU ANYMORE.)
*Its worth a red cent . (CF. ITS NOT WORTH A

 Such expressions are called negative polarity

items because a negative element such as
"not" elsewhere in the sentences allows
them to appear. Consider the data :
*John thinks that hell ever fly a plane again.
*John hopes that hell ever fly a plane again .
John doubts that hell ever fly a plane again.
John despairs that hell ever fly a plane again.

 This suggest that verbs such as doubt and

despair but not think and hope have
negative as a component of their meaning.
DOUBT may be analyzed as " think that not"
and despair as " has no hope" the negative
feature in the verb allows the negative
polarity item ever to occur grammatically
without the overt presence of NOT.

Argument Structure
Verbs differ in terms of number and types of NPs
they can take as complements.
Transitive verbs take a direct object complement
while transitive verbs do not. Ditransitive verbs
take two object complements.
The argument structure of a verb is part of its
meaning and is included in its lexical entry.
The verb determines the number of arguments in
a sentence and also limits the semantic
properties of both its subject and its
complements.

Thematic Roles
The NP arguments in the VP, which include the subject in any
objects, are semantically related in various ways to the verb.
The relations depend on the meaning of the particular verb.
Thematic roles explains the kind of relation that holds
between the arguments of the verb and the type of situation
that the verb describes.
Thematic roles:
Agent and theme
Agent, theme and goal
Source, experience and instrument
Thematic role assignment or theta assignment is also
connected to syntactic structure.

Pragmatics
Is concerned with our understanding of language in
context.

2 kinds of context
Linguistic context- the discourse that precedes the
phrase or sentence to be interpreted.
Situational context- virtually everything non-linguistic in
the environment of the speaker.
Speakers know how to combine words to form sentences,
and they also know how to combine sentences into a
larger discourse top express a larger thoughts and ideas.
Discourse analysis concerned with a broad speech units
comprising multiple sentences

 Pronouns are lexical items that can get their

meaning from other enties in the sentence or in
the larger discourse. Any NP that a pronoun
depends on for its meaning is called antecedent.

Pronouns and Syntax

Pronouns are sensitive to syntax, discourse and
situational context for their interpretation.
There are reflexive pronouns and there are not.

Pronouns and Discourse

Pronouns maybe used to refer to entities
previously mentioned or to entities that are
presumably known to the participants of the
discourse.
Often in discourse, the use of pronouns is a
stylistic decision, which is part of
pragmatics.

Pronouns and Situational Context

When a pronoun gets its reference from an
NP antecedent in the same sentence, we

Deixis
In all languages, the reference of certain
words and expressions relies entirely on
the situational context of the utterance,
and can only be understood in light of
these circumstances. Pronouns are
deictic. Their reference is ultimately
context dependent.

Situational context
knowledge of who is speaking, who is
listening, what objects are being
discussed, and general facts about the
world we live in.
"Can pass the salt"
"You're standing on my foot"
"It's cold in here"

Maxims of Conversation
When a series of sentences hangs together. This maxim
was first discussed byH. Paul Grice. Sometimes called as
Gricean Maxims

Maxim of Quantity
States that a speaker's contribution to discourse should
be as informative as required neither more or less.

Maxim of Relevance
States that a speaker's contribution to discourse should
be relevant.

Maxim of Manner
States that a speak brief and orderly; avoid ambiguity

Maxims of Quality
Do not lie; do not make unsupported claims.
Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, word.
Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet: Between who?
Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
Hamlet: Slanders, sir: for the satirical rogue says here that
old men have gray beards, that their faces are wrinkled,
their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum, and
that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most
weak hams: all which, sir, though I most powerfully and
potently believe, yet I hold it not honestly to have it thus

Presuppositions
Situations that must exist for utterances to be
appropriate.
" Take some more tea" the March Hare said very
ernestly.
"I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an
offended tone, "so I can't take more."
" You mean you can' t take less," said the Hatter:
"It's very easy to more than nothing.

Implicatures

 Speaker A: Smith does have any girlfriends

these days.
Speaker B: He been driving over to the West
End a lot lately.

Speech Acts
Tells us that people use language to do
things such as lay bets, issue warnings, or
nominate candidates.
Performative verb - verbs that "do things"