Introduction into Linguistics
Semantics
December 14, 2010
Levels of Meaning
● Sentence meaning
● Utterance meaning
● Communicative sense (1) „Ich bin ein Berliner.“
'I am a Berliner'
uttered by JFK on 6/26/1963 in Berlin
Sentence meaning:
● ‚At utterance time, the speaker has the property to belong to the city Berlin'
● Determined by the words ich, bin, ein,
Berliner and the way they are syntactically combined
● Ich, for instance, always refers to the current speaker
Utterance meaning
● On June 6, 1996, John F. Kennedy had the property to belong to the city of Berlin.
● Is determined by sentence meaning and the context of utterance
● context: time, place, speaker, addressee, ...
Communicative sense
● On June 6, 1963 JFK said that he (and thus the United States) would defend the city Berlin as if it was his own.
● Based on utterance meaning, but also requires massive amount of world
knowledge (e.g. that JFK was president of the USA the time, that West Berlin was
threatened by the USSR at the time etc.)
Semantics and pragmatics
● Semantics is concerned with word meanings and sentence meanings
● Pragmatics is concerned with communicative sense
● Utterance meaning is located at borderline between semantics and pragmatics
The semiotic triangle
meaning
expression
denotation means
determ ines
denotes
● Like phonetics, semantics deals with an interface between the linguistic system and the external world
● Phonetic entities can be described physically
● Nature of meanings is less obvious
The nature of meanings
Extreme position:
„We have defined the meaning of a linguistic form as the situation in which the speaker utters it and the response which it calls forth in the hearer. ... In order to give a
scientifically accurate definition of meaning for every form of a language, we should have to have a scientifically
accurate knowledge of everything in the speakers‘ world.
The actual extent of human knowledge is very small compared to this. ...
The statement of meanings is therefore the weak point in language-study, and will remain so until human knowledge advances very far beyond ist present state.
(Bloomfield 1933, 139-140)
The nature of meanings
● Possible approaches
● Behaviorisms: Meanings can be reduced to actions
● Mentalism: Meanings are mental states of the language user
● Truth-conditional semantics: Meanings are truth conditions or parts thereof
Meanings and actions (behaviorist approach)
● Meanings can be identified by actions of language users
● Makes sense for imperatives:
(2) Come here!
If the addressee reacts by coming towards the speaker, he obviously has understood the
meaning of (2).
Meanings and actions
● Generalization to declaratives (3) Your foot is right on my foot.
If the addressee takes his foot from the
speaker's foot, he has probably understood the meaning of (3).
Meanings and actions
● Teacher declares
(4) The capital of Iceland is Rejkjavik.
No obvious relation between meaning of (4) and the actions of the people involved.
Meanings and actions
● Also, it is possible to grasp the meaning of an imperative without obeying it.
● Relation between meanings and actions usually very complex and indirect
● Reduction of meanings to actions is thus not very promising
Meanings and neural states
● Basic assumption: meanings are „inside the head“
● Mental states are based on physical states of the brain
● Ultimately, mentalist approach reduces semantics to neuro-physiology
Meanings and neural states
● Considerable process in recent years in identifying neural processes that happen during language production and
comprehension → Neurolinguistics
● Provide also new insights about processing of meanings
Meanings and neural states
● Neurolinguistic methods
● Positron Emission Tomography (PET)
● functional Magnet Resonance Imaging (fMRI)
● Elekctroencephalography (EEG), especially
● Event Related Potentials (ERP)
Meanings and neural states
● ERP study on contextual appropriateness
Meanings and neural states
● Problems
● Coarse grained
● Does not distinguish between semantics and pragmatics
Meaning and truth
● Most influential approach: reduction of meaning to truth
● Traces back to Gottlob Frege
● Basic idea:
To understand the meaning of a declarative sentence, you must be able to tell whether
Meaning and truth
● Wittgenstein (1922; Tractatus logico- philosophicus):
To understand a proposition means to
know what is the case, if it is true. (One can therefore understand it without knowing
whether it is true or not.)
Meaning and truth
● What is truth? - Truth conditional semantics rests on correspondence theory of truth:
A sentence is true if and only if it
corresponds to a fact. (Where a fact is a portion of reality.)
Meaning and truth
● Seems to be circular
● „Meaning“ is defined with reference to „truth“
● „Truth“ is defined by inderectly referring to
„Meaning“
● however: competent users of a language have intuitions about truth of a sentence in a given situation
● Semantics is ultimately rooted in implicit
knowledge of competent speakers (similar to
Meaning and truth
● Problems:
● Only applicable to declarative sentence
● Implies that two sentences (or rather:
utterances of two sentence) with identical truth conditions have identical meanings
assumption is perhaps too strong
Meaning and truth
● Advantages
● Clear empirical base for semantic theorizing
● Results of truth conditional semantics are perhaps incomplete but methodically sound
Meaning and truth
● Cresswell's „Most certain prinicple“ (MSP):
If a sentence A is true and another sentence B is false in the same situation, then A and B differ in meaning
● It is controversial whether the converse also
holds; MSP is sufficient as methodological base
Meaning and truth
● Truth conditions are meanings of (declarative) sentences
● Smaller expressions (words, phrases)
make a contribution to the meanings of the sentences in which they occur
● Truth conditional semantics identifies meaning of sentence parts with their contribution to the truth conditions of
Meaning and truth
● Background assumption:
Principle of Compositionality
The meaning of a complex expression is
determined by the meaning of its parts and the way they are combined.
Non-descriptive aspects of meaning
● Truth conditional semantics only
investigates those aspects of interpretation that determine the denotation of
expressions
● There are further aspects (that are not systematically covered in this lecture)
Social meaning
● Certain expressions guide social interaction
● Examples:
● Thank you, please, Hello, Good Bye
● du vs. Sie
● Hand me the book! vs. Could you perhaps turn over the book, please?
Expressive meanings
● An expression has an expressive meaning if it serves to directly express subjective
sensations, emotions, valuations and intentions
● Examples:
Expressive meanings
● Ouch!
● This hurts!
● his stupid car
● your f)/(/&(= bag
● Swear words
● ...
Connotations
● Expressions are connected to cultural associations
● E.g. Schindmähre, Pferd, Ross have the
same descriptive Meaning in German,but different connotations
● Avoiding negative connotations is a driving force for euphemisms and „political
correctness“
Meaning relations
● Competent speakers have robust intuitions about meaning relations
● e.g. the following expression pairs are synonym pairs:
buy – purchase sick – ill
Meaning relations
● Adequate theory of meaning must capture meaning relations correctly
● Intuitions about meaning relations are additional empirical base of semantic theory
