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Semantics and Pragmatics: Understanding Meaning in Language, Summaries of Formal Semantics

King Abdul Aziz University (KAU)Formal Semantics

summaries for semantics and pragmatics course

Typology: Summaries

2021/2022

Uploaded on 01/14/2022

wedyan-alsadi
wedyan-alsadi 🇸🇦

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1. Studying meaning
By: Wedyan Alssadi
*Orientation:
1. Semantics: Studies meaning in isolation (literal meaning of a sentence)
Example: Today is Friday
It means “today is the weekend”
2. Pragmatics: Studies meaning in context (intended meaning of a speaker)
Example: Today is Friday
It may imply invitation, suggestions… etc.
3. denote: It labels the connections between meaningful items of language and aspects of the world – real or
imagined – that language users talk and write about.
Example: Hold out your arm denotes a situation that the speaker wants;
hold out denotes an action;
arm denotes a part of a person;
your arm denotes ‘the arm of the person being spoken to’.
4. An expression: is any meaningful language unit or sequence of meaningful units, from a sentence down:
a clause, a phrase, a word, or meaningful part of a word
Example: the parts hope, -ful and -ly that go together to make the word hopefully
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pf9
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1. Studying meaning

By: Wedyan Alssadi

*Orientation:

1. Semantics: Studies meaning in isolation (literal meaning of a sentence)

Example: Today is Friday It means “today is the weekend”

  1. Pragmatics: Studies meaning in context (intended meaning of a speaker) Example: Today is Friday It may imply invitation, suggestions… etc.
  2. denote: It labels the connections between meaningful items of language and aspects of the world – real or imagined – that language users talk and write about. Example : Hold out your arm denotes a situation that the speaker wants; hold out denotes an action; arm denotes a part of a person; your arm denotes ‘the arm of the person being spoken to’.
  3. An expression: is any meaningful language unit or sequence of meaningful units, from a sentence down: a clause, a phrase, a word, or meaningful part of a word Example : the parts hope, - ful and - ly that go together to make the word hopefully

Semantics VS Pragmatics *The difference between semantics and pragmatics: Semantics Pragmatics Meanings Study sentence meaning and word meaning, not tied to context. A sentence is in both written and spoken language. Study utterance meaning. Utterances are expressions identified only by their contexts. An utterance is in spoken language only. There’s a car coming.→ This sentence out of context simply gives information that a car is coming, but in a specific context it can be understood as a warning …………………………………….. Q: What is the difference between speaker’s meaning and sentence’s meaning?

Another Example: A (to passer by): I am out of gas. B: There is a gas station 'round the corner. Here, B does not say, but implicates , that the gas station is open, because otherwise his utterance would not be relevant in the context

*Types of meaning Denotation, sense, reference and deixis 1. Denotation:

  • The direct definition of the word that you find in the dictionary.
  • The denotation of an expression is whatever it denotes. o Example: What is ostension? In early childhood our first words are mostly learnt by such processes of live demonstration and pointing, known as ostension.
  • BUT, It is not plausible as a general approach to meaning because: o It ignores the fact that after early childhood we usually use language, not ostension. o There are all kinds of abstract and relational denotations that cannot conveniently be shown. (Think of the denotations of memory , absence , yeti ) 2. Sense
  • In this approach the central concept is sense : those aspects of the meaning of an expression that give it the denotation it has.
  • Differences in sense make for differences in denotation
  • The Denotation of an expression is its reference, the object to which it refers.
  • The Sense of an expression is the aspect, or the description, under which the speaker refers to the object. It is something that the speaker knows, and that serves the speaker to fix the reference of the stated expression. sense relations:
  • the meaning of any expression varies with context, what other expressions it occurs with and what expressions it contrasts with
  • The meaning that a lexeme has because of these relationships is the sense of that lexeme.
  • Part of this relationship is seen in the way words do, or do not, go together meaningfully.
  • Sense is the relations of meaning between words.
  • It deals with relationships inside the language.

3. Semantics

  • Semantics is the study of word meaning and sentence meaning, abstracted away from contexts of use.
  • It is a descriptive subject.
  • It is an attempt to describe and understand the nature of the knowledge about meaning in their language that people have from knowing the language.
  • One can know a language perfectly well without knowing its history.
  • While it is fascinating to find out about the historical currents and changes that explain why there are similarities in the pronunciations or spellings of words that share similarities in meaning – o for example: arms(body parts), arms(weapons), army, armada and armadillo
  • Historical linguists investigating language change over time sometimes concern themselves with semantic (and pragmatic) matters. *Propositions:
  • Different sentences can carry the same meaning, as in
  1. Ali ate the banana.
  2. The banana was eaten by Ali.
  3. Did Ali eat the banana?
  4. Ali, eat the banana.
  • Proposition is the term for a kind of core sentence meaning, the abstract idea that remains the same.
  • Proposition is the semantic content shared by the four expressions.
  • The proposition expressed by a sentence is not known until an explicature has been worked out for it: reference and ambiguities both cleared up using contextual information.
  • The sentences in (1.2.) declaratives , (In English, a declarative sentence is a sentence that makes a statement, provides a fact, offers an explanation, or conveys information)
  • (3) = interrogative= ask a question
  • (4)= imperative = command
  • Another type is exclamatory= shows strong feelings + end with (!) →The semantic content is the same

Q: what is the difference between a sentence, an utterance, and a proposition? *Compositionality:

  • Grammar (morphology and syntax) generates new words, phrases and sentences
  • This gives us a potentially infinite number of words, phrases and sentences that can have meaning
  • In order to explain how an infinite number of pieces of language can be meaningful, and how we, as language users, can figure out the meanings of new ones, semanticists apply the Principle of Compositionality.
  • The semantic meaning of any unit of language is determined by the semantic meanings of its parts along with the way they are put together.
  • The meaningful parts of a sentence are clauses, phrases and words; and the meaningful parts of words are morphemes. o Example (sentence): Sara liked you the meaning is determined by (a) the meanings of the individual morphemes that make it up (Sara, like, “past”, you) (B) the morphological and syntactic structures of the sentence o Example (Adj): (a) un(lock able) ‘not able to be locked’ (b) (un lock)able ‘able to be unlocked’ o Example (syntactic-semantic): (a) A blue pen (b) A criminal lawyer (c) a beautiful dancer The syntax-semantics relationship isn’t always straightforward

Summary ✓ Listeners and readers have the task of guessing what the sender of an utterance intends to communicate. As soon as a satisfactory guess has been made, the sender has succeeded in conveying the meaning. ✓ Pragmatics is about how we interpret utterances and produce interpretable utterances, either way taking account of context and background knowledge. ✓ Such interpretations are informed guesses. They can be mistaken. ✓ Explicature is the basic stage of pragmatic interpretation, involving disambiguation and working out what is being referred to. ✓ Referring and understanding other people’s acts of reference usually require us to use and pragmatically interpret deictic words, ones that have meanings tied to the situation of utterance. ✓ A further stage of pragmatic elaboration yields implicatures, guesses as to what the point of an utterance is. ✓ Semantics is the study of context-independent knowledge that users of a language have of word and sentence meaning. ✓ The meanings of constructions are compositionally assembled out of the meanings of smaller units. ✓ Semantics is descriptive, and not concerned with how words came historically to have the meanings they do. ✓ Nor do semanticists aim to write encyclopedic summaries of all human knowledge. ✓ An explicated utterance (based on a declarative sentence) expresses a proposition, which can be true or false. ✓ The central kind of inference in semantics is entailment. ✓ Entailments are propositions guaranteed to be true when a given proposition is true. ✓ The sense of a word determines what it denotes (how it relates to the world outside of language) and the entailment possibilities that the word gives to sentences.