Chapter 9 Semantics

Semantics is all about figuring out the intended meaning of words and sentences, the meaning everyone generally agrees on. It's not about what someone might be trying to twist a word to mean in a specific situation

1 Meaning 

This distinction is generally presented in terms of referential meaning as opposed to associative or emotive meaning

Referential meaning covers those basic, essential components of meaning that are conveyed by the literal use of a word. It is the type of meaning that dictionaries are designed to describe

E.g:  needle => “thin, sharp, steel instrument.”

But different people might have different associations or connotations attached to a word like needle.

needle=>  “pain,” or “illness,” or “blood,” or “drugs,” or “thread,” or “knitting,” or “hard to find”

This sentence is syntactically good, but semantically odd

2 Semantic Features

Def

Basic elements such as “human,” included as plus (+human) or minus (−human), used in an analysis of the components of word meaning

From a feature analysis like this, we can say that at least part of the meaning of the word girl in English involves the elements [+human, +female,–adult]

Some verbs may simply require subjects that have the feature [+animate], while others will be more specific and need [+human], as in these two examples.

Words as Containers of Meaning

For many words in a language it may not be as easy to come

up with neat components of meaning. For example, advice, threat and warning. The idea of words as containers for meaning is seen as too limited because there's more to their meaning than just basic components 

3 Semantic Roles

Def: the part played by a noun phrase, such as agent, in the event described by the sentence

Instead of thinking of words as containers of meaning, we can look at the “roles” they fulfill within the situation described by a sentence

E.g:

“The boy kicked the ball”

The verb describes an action (kick), the noun phrases in the sentence describe the roles of entities, such as people and things, involved in the action 

Agent and Theme

The noun phrase The boy as “the entity that performs the action,” is know as the agent. The ball takes another role as “the entity that is involved in or affected by the action,” which is called the theme 

Instrument and Experiencer

• Instrument:

The semantic role of the noun phrase identifying the entity that is used to perform the action of the verb (e.g. The boy cut the rope with a razor) the noun phrase a razor is being used in the semantic role of instrument. the preposition with is often a clue that the following noun phrase has the role of instrument in English

• Experiencer:

The semantic role of the noun phrase identifying the entity that has the feeling, perception or state described by the verb (e.g. The boy feels sad). If we “feel, know, hear or enjoy” something, we are not really performing an action, We are in the role of experiencer

Location, Source and Goal

• Location (in semantics):

The semantic role of the noun phrase identifying where an entity is (e.g. The boy is sitting in the classroom)

• Source:

The semantic role of the noun phrase identifying where an entity moves from (e.g. The boy ran from the house)

• Goal:

The semantic role of the noun phrase identifying where an entity moves to (e.g. The boy walked to the window)

All these semantic roles are illustrated in the following scenario. Note that a single entity (e.g. George) can appear in several different semantic roles.

4 Lexical Relations

Def: the relationships of meaning, such as synonymy, between words

Synonymy

The lexical relation in which two or more words have very closely related meanings (e.g.“conceal” is a synonym of “hide”)

Antonymy

The lexical relation in which words have opposite meanings (“Shallow” is an antonym of “deep”)

Antonyms are usually divided into three main types, “gradable” (opposites along a scale), “non-gradable” (direct opposites) and “reversives” (one is the reverse action of the other)

• gradable antonyms:

words with opposite meanings along a scale (e.g.big–small)

E.g: I’m smaller than you and slower, sadder, colder, shorter and older, but luckily quite a bit richer

• non-gradable antonyms (also called “complementary pairs”):

Words which are direct opposites (e.g. alive–dead, male/female, married/single and true/false)

• reversives:

Antonyms in which the meaning of one is the reverse action of the other (e.g. dress–undress, enter/exit, pack/unpack, lengthen/shorten, raise/lower, tie/untie)

Hyponymy

The lexical relation in which the meaning of one word is included in the meaning of another 

E.g: animal/horse, insect/ant, flower/rose

• superordinate:

The higher level term in hyponymy

E.g: animal/dog, insect/bee  

• co-hyponyms:

Words in hyponymy that share the same superordinate

E.g: dog and horse are co-hyponyms and the superordinate term is animal, while ant and cockroach are co-hyponyms with insect as the superordinate

Prototypes 

Def: the most characteristic instance of a category (e.g. “robin” is the prototype of “bird”)

The concept of a prototype helps explain

the meaning of certain words, like bird, not in terms of component features (e.g. “has feathers,” “has wings”)

Homophones and homonyms

• homophones:

Two or more words with different forms and the same pronunciation (e.g. to–too–two)

• homonyms:

two words with the same form that are unrelated in meaning (e.g. mole (on skin) – mole (small animal))

Polysemy 

Def: a word having two or more related meanings (e.g. foot, of person, of bed, of mountain)

If the word has multiple meanings (i.e. it is polysemous), there will be a single entry, with a numbered list of the different meanings

Word Play 

These last three lexical relations are the basis of a lot of word play, usually for humorous effect.

“Mary had a little lamb”, we think of a small animal, but “Mary had a little lamb, some rice and vegetables”, we think of a small amount of meat 

Metonymy

a word used in place of another with which it is closely connected in everyday experience

(e.g. He drank the whole bottle (= the liquid))

It is our familiarity with metonymy that makes it possible for us to understand He drank the whole bottle, although it sounds absurd literally (i.e. he drank the liquid, not the glass object)

We use metonymy when we talk about filling up the car, answering the door, boiling a kettle, giving someone a hand, or

needing some wheels.

5 Collocation

Def: a relationship between words that frequently occur together (e.g. salt and pepper)

If you ask a thousand people what they think of

when you say hammer, more than half will say nail. If you say table, they’ll mostly say chair, and butter elicits bread, needle elicits thread and salt elicits pepper

In recent years, the study of which words occur together, and their frequency of cooccurrence, has received a lot more attention in corpus linguistics

corpus linguistics:

the study of language in use by analyzing the occurrence and frequency of forms in a large collection of texts typically stored in a computer