Semantics can
be defined as "the study of the meaning of morphemes, words, phrases and
sentences."
You will sometimes see
definitions for semantics like "the analysis of meaning," To see why
this is too broad, consider the following. Kim, returning home after a long
day, discovers that the new puppy has crapped on the rug, and says "Oh,
lovely."
We don't normally take this to
mean that Kim believes that dog feces has pleasing or attractive qualities, or
is delightful. Someone who doesn't know English will search the dictionary in
vain for what Kim means by saying "lovely":
(ADJECTIVE): [love-li-er, love-li-est].
1. Full of love; loving.
2. Inspiring love or affection.
3. Having pleasing or attractive qualities.
4. Enjoyable; delightful.
Obviously this is because Kim is
being ironic, in the sense of "using words to convey the opposite of their
literal meaning". Kim might have said "great," or
"wonderful," or "beautiful", or "how exquisite",
and none of the dictionary entries for these words will help us understand that
Kim means to express disgust and annoyance. That's because a word's meaning is
one thing, and Kim's meaning -- what Kim means by using the word -- is
something else.
There are lots of other ways
besides irony to use words to mean something different from what you get by
putting their dictionary entries together. Yogi Berra was famous for this:
"if you can't imitate him, don't copy him;" and "you can observe
a lot just by watching" and dozens of others.
In fact, even when we mean what
we literally say, we often -- maybe always -- mean something more as well. The
study of "speaker meaning" -- the
meaning of language in its context of use -- is called pragmatics,
and will be the subject of the next lecture.
Philosophers have argued about
"the meaning of
meaning," and especially about whether this
distinction between what words mean and what people mean is fundamentally
sound, or is just a convenient way of talking. Most linguists find the
distinction useful, and we will follow general practice in maintaining it.
However, as we will see, it is not always easy to draw the line.
Word
meaning and processes for extending it
Word meanings are somewhat like
game trails. Some can easily be mapped because they are used enough that a
clear path has been worn. Unused trails may become overgrown and disappear. And
one is always free to strike out across virgin territory; if enough other
animals follow, a new trail is gradually created.
Since word meanings are not
useful unless they are shared, how does this creation of new meanings work?
There are a variety of common processes by which existing conventional word
meanings are creatively extended or modified. When one of processes is applied
commonly enough in a particular case, a new convention is created; a new
"path" is worn.
Metaphor
Consider the difference in
meaning between "He's a leech" and. "he's a louse." Both
leech and louse are parasites that suck blood through the skin of their host,
and we -- being among their hosts -- dislike them for it. Both words have
developed extended meanings in application to humans who are portrayed as like
a leech or like a louse -- but the extensions are quite different.
According to the American
Heritage Dictionary, a leech is "one who preys on or clings to
another", whereas a louse is "a mean or despicable person."
These extended meanings have an element of arbitrariness. Most of us regard
leeches as "despicable," and lice certainly "prey on" and
"cling to" their hosts. Nevertheless, a human "leech" must
be needy or exploitative, whereas a human "louse" is just an object
of distaste.
Therefore it's appropriate for
the dictionary to include these extended meanings as part of the meaning of the
word. All the same, we can see that these words originally acquired their
extended meanings by the completely general process of metaphor. A
metaphor is "a figure of speech in which a term is transferred from the
object it ordinarily designates to an object it may designate only by implicit
comparison or analogy." For instance, if we speak of "the evening of
her life", we're making an analogy between the time span of a day and the
time span of a life, and naming part of life by reference to a part of the day.
In calling someone a leech, we're
making an implicit analogy between interpersonal relationships and a particular
kind of parasite/host relationship.
This kind of naming -- and
thinking -- by analogy is ubiquitous. Sometimes the metaphoric relationship is
a completely new one, and then the process is arguably part of pragmatics--
the way speakers use language to express themselves. However, these metaphors
often become fossilized or frozen, and new word senses are created. Consider
what it means to call someone a chicken, or a goose,
or a cow, or a dog, or a cat, or
a crab, or a bitch. For many common
animal names, English usage a conventionalized metaphor for application to
humans. Some more exotic animals also have conventional use as epithets
("you baboon!" "what a hyena!") No such commonplace
metaphors exist for some common or barnyard animals ("what a duck she
is"?), or for most rarer or more exotic animals, such as wildebeest or
emus. Therefore, these are available for more creative use. The infamous
‘water' of a
few years ago was apparently a case where what was began as a fossilized
metaphor coming from a language other than English was interpreted as a much
more offensive novel usage.
Sometimes the metaphoric sense is
retained and the original meaning disappears, as in the case of muscle,
which comes from Latin musculus "small mouse".
Metonymy
and synecdoche
Metonymy is
"a figure of speech in which an attribute or commonly associated feature
is used to name or designate something."
Synecdoche is
"a figure of speech by which a more inclusive term is used for a less
inclusive one, or vice versa."
Like metaphors, many examples of
metonymy and synecdoche become fossilized: gumshoe, hand (as in "all hands
on deck"), "the law" referring to a policeman. However, the
processes can be applied in a creative way: "the amputation in room
23".
It often requires some creativity
to figure out what level of specificity, or what associated object or attribute,
is designated by a particular expression. "I bought the Inquirer" (a
copy of the newspaper); "Knight-Ridder bought the Inquirer" (the
newspaper-publishing company); "The Inquirer endorsed Rendell" (the
newspaper's editorial staff); etc. "Lee is parked on 33rd St." (i.e.
Lee's car, perhaps said at a point when Lee in person is far away from 33rd
St.).
For more examples, consider
the guidelines for
annotating "geographical/social/political entities" in the ACE project (extract from
this longer document).
Connotation/denotation
The word "sea" denotes
a large body of water, but its connotative meaning includes the sense of
overwhelming space, danger, instability; whereas "earth" connotes
safety, fertility and stability. Of many potential connotations, the particular
ones evoked depend upon the context in which words are used. Specific kinds of
language (such as archaisms) also have special connotations, carrying a sense
of the context in which those words are usually found.
Over time, connotation can become
denotation. Thus trivial subjects were originally the subjects
in the trivium, consisting of grammar, rhetoric and logic. These
were the first subjects taught to younger students; therefore the connotation
arises that the trivium is relatively easy, since it is taught to mere kiddies;
therefore something easy is trivial.
Other
terminology in lexical semantics
In discussing semantics,
linguists sometimes use the term lexeme (as opposed to word), so that word can
be retained for the inflected variants. Thus one can say that the words walk,
walks, walked, and walking are different forms of the same lexeme.
There are several kinds of sense
relations among lexemes. First is the opposition betweensyntagmatic relations
(the way lexemes are related in sentences) and paradigmaticrelations
(the way words can substitute for each other in the same sentence context).
Important paradigmatic relations
include:
1. synonymy -
"sameness of meaning" (pavement is a synonym of sidewalk)
2. hyponymy -
"inclusion of meaning" (cat is a hyponym of animal)
3. antonymy -
"oppositeness of meaning" (big is an antonym of small)
4. incompatibility -
"mutual exclusiveness within the same superordinate category" (e.g.
red and green)
We also need to distinguish homonymy from polysemy: two words are
homonyms if they are (accidentally) pronounced the same (e.g. "too"
and "two"); a single word is polysemous if it has several meanings
(e.g. "louse" the bug and "louse" the despicable person).
Lexical
Semantics vs. Compositional Semantics
In the syntax lectures, we used
the example of a desk calculator, where the semantics of complex expressions
can be calculated recursively from the semantics of simpler ones. In the world
of the desk calculator, all meanings are numbers, and the process of recursive
combination is defined in terms of the operations on numbers such as addition,
multiplication, etc.
The same problem of compositional
semantics arises in the case of natural language meaning. How do we
determine the meaning of complex phrases from the meaning of simpler one?
There have been many systematic
efforts to address this problem, going back to the work of Frege and Russell
before the turn of the 20th century. Many aspects of the problem have been
solved. Here is a simple sketch of one approach. Suppose we take the meaning of
"red" to be associated with the set of red things, and the meaning of
"cow" to be associated with the set of things that are cows. Then the
meaning of "red cow" is the intersection of the first set (the set of
red things) with the second set (the set of things that are cows). Proceeding
along these lines, we can reconstruct in terms of set theory an account of the
meaning of predicates ("eat"), quantifiers ("all"), and so
forth, and eventually give a set-theoretic account of "all cows eat
grass" analogous to the account we might give for "((3 + 4) *
6)".
This sort of analysis -- which
can become very complex and sophisticated -- does not tell us anything about
the meanings of the words involved, but only about how to calculate the
denotation of complex expressions from the denotation of simple ones. The
denotation of the primitive elements -- the lexemes -- is simply stipulated (as
in "the set of all red things").
Since this account of meaning
expressed denotations in terms of sets of things in the word -- known as
"extensions" -- it is called "extensional".
Sense and
Reference
One trouble with this line of
inquiry was raised more than 100 years ago by Frege. There is a difference
between the reference (or extension) of a concept
-- what it corresponds to in the world -- and the sense (or intension)
of a concept -- what we know about its meaning, whether or not we know anything
about its extension, and indeed whether or not it has an extension.
We know something about the
meaning of the word "dog" that is not captured by making a big pile
of all the dogs in the world. There were other dogs in the past, there will be
other dogs in the future, there are dogs in fiction, etc. One technique that
has been used to generalize "extensional" accounts of meaning is
known as possible worlds semantics. In this approach, we imagine
that there are indefinitely many possible worlds in addition to the actual one,
and now a concept -- such as dog -- is no longer just a set, but rather is a
function from worlds to sets. This function says, "Give me a possible
world, and I'll give you the set of dogs in that world."
Like many mathematical
constructs, this is not a very practical arrangement, but it permits
interesting and general mathematics to continue to be used in modeling natural
language meaning in a wider variety of cases, including counterfactual
sentences ("If you had paid me yesterday, I would not be broke
today").
