Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Class 23 (12/16/02)
Semantics
➥ What aspects of meaning have to be learned, and what do we ‘get for free’ as part of the
Universal Grammar that we’re born with?
Either there is a book on the table, or there isn’t a book on the table.
Every hedgehog is a hedgehog.
Every six-pointed triangle is a six-pointed triangle.
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➥ Truth value doesn’t depend on whether there are hedgehogs or whether triangles are
six-pointed.
Lois read the book, and Lois didn’t read the book.
No hedgehog is a hedgehog.
• What is semantically true may not be necessarily the same as physically true, morally true,
legally true, etc.
The moon is made of green cheese. (Could be true in some fairy-tale world.)
Cf. The moon is made of green cheese, and the moon is not made of green cheese.
Nothing travels faster than the speed of light. (Could be false in some science fiction
world.)
➥ Many of the most important relations that a sentence enters into are purely linguistic.
Beyond the scope of linguistic theory to say whether “I have a yellow pencil” is true.
Not beyond the scope of linguistic theory to account for the fact that if “I have a yellow
pencil” is true, then so is “I have a pencil.”
• We can define a number of relations pertaining to the truth-values of sentences, about which
native speakers have intuitions. We can make use of these relations to investigate how the
meanings of expressions are computed on the basis of the meanings of words.
(4) Entailment
• Sentence S1 entails sentence S2 if and only if whenever S1 is true in a situation, S2 is also
true in that situation. (Or whenever S2 is false in a situation, S1 is also false in that
situation.)
➥ Part of knowing the meaning of a sentence is knowing what the sentence entails.
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In some cases, entailment is determined by meaning relations between words: If word X
includes the meaning of word Y, then a sentence containing X will entail a sentence in which
X has been replaced by Y:
• Does negating a sentence cancel the assertion? Does it cancel the presuppositions?
• More examples:
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(6) Intersection and meaning composition
(S1) I bought a green sweater entails
(S2) I bought a sweater”
“green sweater” refers to anything which is in the intersection of these two sets (Venn
diagram):
[[ sweater ]] ∩ [[ green ]]
a big planet
a big elephant
a big grasshopper (cf. “tall midget” vs. “short giant”)
[NP AP NP ] is interpreted as [[ AP ]] ∩ [[ NP ]]
• We can apply this set theory approach to other kinds of meaning composition:
• Can two expressions have the same extension but different meanings?
Q: Do they pick out the same entity in the world (at least, our possible world)? I.e., do they
have the same extension?
(S1) My crazy aunt thought she was the first person to walk on the moon
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(S2) My crazy aunt thought she was Neil Armstrong
➥ Frege’s observation: Expressions with identical extensions can produce different truth
values.
Extension: The set of entities/events/etc. in the world to which an expression refers (its
referents, denotation)
Intension: The ‘inherent sense’ conveyed by an expression.
How about:
Every student is happy.
Some students are happy.
No student is happy.
Two students are happy.
Fewer than five students are happy.
Most students are happy.
• Determiners specify relations between sets (of individuals) and sets (of properties)
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Every student is happy can be paraphrased as
Every student is a student who is happy