Semantics

Present by:
- Sumahayani
- Zainuddin Syafari
Point of Subject
Introduction to Semantics
Semantics and Semiotics
Three Challenges in doing Semantics
Meeting the Challenges
Word Meaning and Sentence Meaning
Introduction to
Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning communicated
through language.
The basic task in semantics is to show how people
communicate meanings with their language.
In a broader sense, semantics deals with everything that
the listener has to know in order to understand what the
speaker said. Additionally, it is concerned with the
conceptual meaning and not the associative meaning.
The conceptual meaning is what a word in fact denotes,
as for example Friday the 13th is a day between Thursday
the 12th and Saturday the 14th, and that is the
conceptual meaning of the phrase Friday the 13 th.
Yet, for many people the idea of that day brings to mind
thoughts of bad luck and misfortune, which is the
associative meaning.
Since linguistic description is an attempt to reflect a
speakers knowledge, the semanticist is committed to
describing semantic knowledge. This knowledge
allows English speakers to know, for example: that
both the following sentences describe the same
situation:
1.1 In the spine, the thoracic vertebrae are above
the lumbar vertebrae.
1.2 In the spine, the lumbar vertebrae are below
the thoracic vertebrae.

that 1.3 and 1.4 below contradict each other:

1.3 Addis Ababa is the capital of Ethiopia.
1.4Addis Ababa is not the capital of Ethiopia.
that 1.5 below has several possible meanings, i.e. is
ambiguous:
1.5 She gave her the slip.

that 1.6 below entails 1.7:

1.6 Henry murdered his bank manager.
1.7 Henrys bank manager is dead.
Semantic Features
How does semantic approach help us to understand the
nature of language?
It might be helpful as a means of accounting for the
oddness which we experience when we read English
sentences such as the follows:
For example: 1- The hamburger ate the man. 2- My cat
studied linguistics. 3- A table was listening to some music.
Above sentences are syntactically right but semantically
odd.
 According to some basic syntactic rules for forming
English sentences we have well structured sentences.
The hamburger ate the man NP
V NP
This
sentence is syntactically good, but semantically
odd. Since the sentence The man ate the
hamburger is perfectly acceptable.
The kind of noun which can be subjects of the verb
ate must denote entities which are capable of eating.
Thenoun hamburger does not have this property
and man has.
Role of Semantics in
Language:
Words are not just a containers of meanings. They fulfill
different roles within the situation described by a sentence.
For example: If the situation is a simple event such as

The boy kicked the ball

The verb kicked describes an action.

The noun phrases The boy and the ball describe the roles
of entities such as people and things involved in the action.
 Semantics in language determines the relationship
between signifiers and what they signify. Although
images and body language can be included as
signifiers in a wider study of semantics, linguistic
semantics deals strictly with words and their
meanings. Semantics is a subfield of linguistics
specializing in the study of meaning.
Semioti
cs
The process of creating and interpreting symbols,
sometimes called signification, is far wider than
language. Scholars like Ferdinand de Saussure 1974)
have stressed that the study of linguistic meaning is
a part of this general study of the use of sign
systems, which is called semiotics. Semioticians
investigate the types of relationship that may hold
between a sign and the object it represents, or in de
Saussures terminology between a signifier and its
signified. One basic distinction, due to C. S. Peirce,
is between icon, index and symbol
Is this a sign?
Types of signs
Icons
Indexes
Symbols
1. Icon
An icon is where there is a similarity between a
sign and what it represents.
Examples:
A portrait and its real-life subject.
A photograph in the passport representing the
passholder.
A geographical map representing a country.
A diagram of an engine and the real engine
2. Index
An index is where the sign is closely associated
with its signified, often in a causal relationship.
Examples:
Smoke as sign of fire
Fever as sign of flu
3. Symbol
A symbol is where there is only a conventional link
between the sign and its signified. The link
between the sign and its object is purely
conventional. Examples:
Traffic lights
Musical notes
The use of insignia to denote military ranks
and perhaps that mourning is symbolized by the
wearing of black clothes in some cultures and
white clothes in others
Everyone is a semiotician, because everyone is
constantly unconsciously interpreting the meaning
of signs around them from traffic lights to colours
of flags, the shapes of cars, the architecture of
buildings, and the design of cereal packaging.
In other words, we need to understand the context in which a
sign is communicated in order to comprehend its real
meaning, and hence act appropriately. What is going on
around the sign is usually as important for us to know as the
sign itself in order to interpret its meaning.
hree Challenges in doing Semantics
1. The first is the problem of circularity
example: ferret = Domesticated albino variety of the polecat =
The definition for this might be of animals, tame, living with
human beings = tame
2. The second problem we will meet is how to make sure that our
definitions of a words meaning are exact or the question of
whether linguistic knowledge is different from general
knowledge;
For example, if I believe that a whale is a fish and you believe
that it is a mammal, do our words have different meanings
when we both use the noun whale? Presumably you still
understand me when I say I dreamt that I was swallowed by a
whale.
3. The third type of challenge facing us comes
from looking at what particular utterances
mean in context.
For example: if someone says to you
Marvellous weather you have here in
Ireland, you might interpret it differently on
a cloudless sunny day than when the rain is
pouring down. Similarly Hes dying might
mean one thing when said of a terminally ill
patient, and another as a comment watching
a stand-up comedian failing to get laughs. Or
again: Its getting late if said to a friend at a
party might be used to mean . Lets leave.
Meeting the Challenges
To cope with the problem of circularity and the problem of
relating semantic and encyclopaedic knowledge, one solution
is to design a semantic metalanguage with which to
describe the semantic units and rules of all languages. In
tackling the third problem, of context, one traditional
solution has been to assume a split in an expressions
meaning between the local contextual effects and a context-
free element of meaning, which we might call conventional
or literal meaning. We could perhaps try to limit our
definitions to the literal part of meaning and deal with
contextual features separately.
rd Meaning and Sentence Meaning
A word is a string of characters that can have different
meanings (jaguar: car or animal?; driver: one who drives a
vehicle or the part of a computer?; rows, the plural noun or
the third singular person of the verb to row?).
A sentence is a group of words that express a specific
thought: to capture it, we need to understand how words
relate to other words (Paul, Jacks brother, is married to
Linda. Linda is married to Paul, not Jack.).
Semanticists often describe that sentence meaning is
compositional. This term means that the meaning of
an expression is determined by the meaning of its component
parts and the way in which they are combined