SemPrag 1: Intro, Lexical Meaning, Theta-Roles Flashcards
What does semantics study?
Meaning: mental representations, as opposed to form.
Difference between sentence & utterance?
A sentence is an abstract linguistic form with certain invariant properties: constituent structure & compositionality. On the other hand, an utterance is a situated (real) instance of language use, which may or may not take the form of a sentence.
Difference between sentence meaning and utterance meaning?
Sentence meaning is meaning derived from the linguistic forms without any context. Utterance meaning studies Speaker Meaning: what the speaker is actually conveying in context by using the sentence/phrase.
What are context-dependent expressions?
Expressions have invariable meaning but also refer to the speech situation: ‘I’ (who?), ‘now’ (when?), ‘local’ (to where?), ‘tall’ (compared to what?), ‘arrive’ (where?). For words like ‘after’ & ‘local’, the relation is specified but the extent (how long after / how close) is not.
Based on the existence of context-dependent expressions, what middle ground has been proposed between sentence meaning and speaker meaning?
‘What is said’: the linguistic meaning incorporating the context for context dependent expressions, however not including speaker intention. Grice 1978: lexical meaning and sentence structure AFTER disambiguation and reference assignment.
How to test semantic theories?
Using native speakers’ judgements about truth & falsity.
How do semanticists define sentence meaning?
As the ‘truth conditions’ of the linguistic expression. These are the conditions which would have to hold for the expression to be true. This is very different to the sentence’s truth VALUE (whether or not it is actually true).
What is a proposition?
The aspects of a sentence that are relevant when we evaluate their truth-conditions (at ‘what is said’ level). (essentially truth conditional meaning).
A function mapping possible worlds to truth values.
What is entailment?
A special kind of implication which is not context-dependent, defined as: A semantic relation by which the truth of S1 guarantees the truth of S2.
What is contradiction?
The truth of one sentence guarantees the falsity of the other.
What is the difference between pragmatic inferences and entailment?
Entailment is context-independent, whereas pragmatic inferences are context-dependent.
Grice: Natural vs Non-natural meaning?
In the 1948 article “Meaning”, Grice describes “natural meaning” using the example of “Those spots mean (meant) measles.”
And describes “non-natural meaning” using the example of “John means that he’ll be late” or “‘Schnee’ means ‘snow’”.
Grice does not define these two senses of the verb ‘to mean’, and does not offer an explicit theory that separates the ideas they’re used to express. Instead, he relies on five differences in ordinary language usage to show that we use the word in (at least) two different ways.
Why are some utterances which seem not to be complete sentences considered to be anyway?
Ellipsis: ‘what notebook did she choose?’ ‘the one with the yellow cover’. Is ellipsis of ‘she chose’ rather than a phrasal utterance such as ‘ouch’.
How to check for contradiction?
Look for superordinate and subordinate nouns, antonyms & negatives.
What is ambiguity vs anomaly? (Larson, R. & G. Segal 1995)
Ambiguity is where a sentence has multiple meanings. (Lexical & syntactic ambiguity). Whereas anomaly is where a sentence has an aberrant (departing from accepted standard), e.g ‘colourless green ideas sleep furiously’.
Words vs Lexemes? (Lyons, J. 1995).
Words: composite units with both form & meaning.
Lexemes: a unit of the lexicon.
Not all words are lexemes and not all lexemes are words.
Lexemes can be transformed by rules into lexically composite expressions (e.g polite > politeness).
A phrasal lexeme is not transformed by rules but is rather simply two lexemes combining to form a lexically distinct lexical unit (lexeme) e.g pass muster or red herring.
Lexical meaning is distinct from grammatical meaning so girl vs girls is one lexeme distinguished by grammatical number. (language dependent).
Difference between homonymy and polysemy? (Lyons, J. 1995).
Homonymy is where two lexemes with different meanings have the same form.
Polysemy is where one lexeme has multiple etymologically related senses (sometimes due to metaphorical extension). However should senses have distinct lexical entries? And what constitutes a distinct sense (e.g the various meanings of fast).
(1) sense enumeration lexicon: create a distinct entry for each kind of ‘fast’, ‘red’, ‘kiss’, ‘window’, ‘Dickens’ etc.
(2) generative lexicon: specify some rules for deriving the distinct senses from a ‘basic’ sense + contextual information (Pustejovsky, 1995)
C.S. Peirce Types vs Tokens?
Types are distinct words, whereas tokens are instances of word use (whether distinct or not).
Synonymy? (Lyons, J. 1995)
Refers to lexemes & lexically complex expressions.
For ABSOLUTE synonymy:
i) all meanings are identical
ii) synonymous in all contexts
iii) semantically equivalent on descriptive and non-descriptive dimensions of meaning. (non-descriptive is expressive meaning e.g the difference between stingy and economical).
What is the goal of semantic theory?
to explain the external and internal significance of language compositionality.
External: information bearing potential in the real world.
Internal: inference from necessity (entailment) or abduction (likelihood).
Compositionality: meaning of a complex expression is derived from the meaning of its parts and the way they are put together. (we believe in compositionality due to productivity, systematicity and finiteness of means).
What are the approaches to semantic theory?
Referential Meaning or Mentalistic Approaches (classical theory, prototype theory, theory-theory, causal theory).
Gottlob Frege: The Referential Theory?
The meaning of a word is what it denotes (its extension) (direct relation with the world).
Terms are proper names to denote individuals.
One-place predicates denote sets of individuals who have the relevant property (table, linguist).
According to this theory there is no intermediate level between an expression and its meaning
Problems with Referential Theory?
There should be a sensitivity to the difference between proper names and noun phrases.
Doesn’t account for changing meaning e.g ‘the U.S president’.
Also doesn’t account for words with no real world reference e.g ‘Santa Claus’.
Sense & Reference
Sense vs Reference
If sense is considered meaning (the mental representation which corresponds to the linguistic form) and reference is considered the real world object to which the linguistic form refers.
The Morning Star vs The Evening Star
Speakers had no knowledge that they were the same star: sense was different.
However Referent was the same!
Laurence & Margolis 1999 note that senses are the indirect referents of expressions in intensional contexts so take on bizarre properties.
Can freely substitute ‘the morning / evening star is bright’ without affecting the truth value, however the same substitutions are not possible for ‘Sue believes the evening star is bright’.
Within the 4 theories of concepts, how can they be grouped?
Classical, prototype and theory theory all believe in an inferential role (for classical theory, only certain inferences are informative), whereas causal theory believes in some causal/historical relation between expression and extension.
Necessary and Sufficient Conditions?
A is a necessary condition for B when it cannot be the case that B is true and A is false.
A is a sufficient condition for B when it cannot be the case that A is true and B is false.