SEMÁNTICA Y PRAGMÁTICA

UNIT 1: What is Semantics?

Dra. Isabel Íñigo Mora

[email protected]
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What is Semantics?

• Both Semantics and Pragmatics study meaning.

• “Semantics” comes from ancient Greek “semantikos”, an
adjective meaning “relating to signs”.
• Although the study of meaning is extremely ancient, the
name “semantics” was only coined in the late 19th century
by the French linguist Michel Bréal.
• Semantics is a vast subject and “meaning” is a very vague
term.
• Meaning = idea or intention lying behind a piece of language.
• Only when sounds or letters have a meaning do they qualify
as language.
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• However, probably most authors would agree

with Kreidler’s definition (to choose just one
of them):
Linguistic semantics is the study of how
languages organize and express meanings
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• We can talk about anything we can think of (or

perhaps almost). And even if we were to
arrive at a rough idea of what meaning is, we
would nevertheless have another list of
questions waiting in line. For example:
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1. How can the meaning of a given word or expression be

defined?
2. How can the meaning of a Word or expression be
represented?
3. What is the relationship between language and thought? Do
we think in language or a similar format? What is the
relationship between word meanings and conceptual
structures?
4. Can language express all meanings or are there meanings
that cannot be expressed linguistically? If you cannot
express something in your language, can you think about it?
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5. How do children learn the meaning of words?

Do they first develop the necessary cognitive
structures and then learn the corresponding
linguistic labels or do some cognitive relations
depend on language? That is, does cognitive
development drive language, is it the other
way round, or do they evolve in tándem?
6. How are the meanings of the different words
related to each other?
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• There are many meaningful ways of behaving which do not
involve language:
– Conventional, accepted symbols (left-right indicator lights on cars; the
use of flags at sea; etc.)
– Many types of symbol involving body parts (bowing; waving; nodding;
shaking the head; etc.)
• Many types of intentional human behaviour can be seen as having
a significance, or a meaning, in the (broad) sense of the word,
since they both express, and allow observers to draw conclusions
about, the nature and intentions of the participants.
• The use of language is only one of a number of ways in which the
intention can be fulfilled (someone suddendly choking on some
food at the dinner table).
• Significance comes not only from language.
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• Different languages impose different starting
distinctions on what we, in English, call
“meaning”:
• “Meaning” in English: English uses the verb “to
mean” to refer to a relationship involving at least
one of three different types of thing:
– Language
– The world (including people, objects, and everything
outside of ourselves)
– Our own minds or intentions.
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• In English there are 3 ways of talking about
language:
– Meaning (places the emphasis on the speaker’s
intentions)
– Truth (the relation between language and reality: does
the language used correspond to the actual state of
affairs?)
– Use (makes no explicit reference to the facts, but limits
itself to a consideration of equivalences between the
piece of language in question and an assumed norm:
saying “cutlery” instead of “crockery”).
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• “Meaning” in Warlpiri (a language spoken in
central Australia): It makes less of a distinction
than English between what a word means,
and what its referent actually is.
• “Meaning” in French: an important distinction
between the noun “meaning” and the verb
“to mean”. The first refers only to the “sense”
and the second to a volition “vouloir dire” (“to
want to say”)
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• “Meaning” in Chinese: There is no single word
with the same range of meanings as English
“mean” or “meaning”. The verb “zhi”, whose
core meaning is “point”, can express all of the
relations between mind, language and world,
except for the world-world relation. So, if you
want to say something like “Clouds mean rain”
or “Money means power” they do not use
“zhi” here.
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• The semiotic triangle (3 aspects of the
meaning phenomenon):
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• “Thought”: unfortunate label: (1) not only
conscious but also unconscious (exclamations
of pain and surprise); (2) thought = thinking
but also feelings (“marvellous”, “fantastic”,
etc.). He proposes the term “Psychology”.
• The relation word-referent is a conventional
one (even onomatopoeic, different languages
represent these sounds differently)
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• The semiotic triangle, re-labelled:
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• Another interesting issue is: What resources

does language have to convey or express
meaning? As Wierzbicka (1988: 1) points out:

“Everything in language conspires to convey

meaning”

Think about: Phonology, Morphology, Lexicon and

Syntax.
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PHONOLOGY
• Can we express meaning by uttering isolated sounds?
Do linguistic sounds have meaning by themselves? At
first sight, the answer is no. However, this immediate
answer can be reconsidered and modified slightly if we
take a look at what has been called sound symbolism,
also known as phono-semantics. Sound symbolism
states that there is a certain association between the
sound of an utterance and its meaning. There are a
number of linguistic áreas and phenomena that are
sound symbolic:
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• DIMINUTIVES:
There seems to be an association of the sound /i/ with small
things. Many languages form the diminutive with this sound:
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The reason for this, it seems, lies in the way in which this sound
is produced. To utter the phoneme /i/, we have to raise the
tongue and leave a very small space in our mouth; the contrast
between this sound and /o/ is evident. That is why /i/ sounds
have a certain tendency to be associated with small things,
and /o/ sounds with big things:
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• MALUMA vs TAKETE:
Gestalt psychologists (Köhler, 1947) thought of a very interesting experiment.
They gave people two different forms; one of them was spiky and angular,
and the other round and soft. They told subjects that one of them was called
“takete” and the other “maluma”:
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• Interestingly, a vast majority of people tended

to associate the name “maluma” with the
round, soft figure and the name “takete” with
the spiky one.
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• According to the neuroscientist Ramachandran,
these could be considered examples of
synaesthesia, in which we mix information from
different modalities. Examples of synaesthesia are
found in many common phrases of English, like
loud color, that mixes sound and vision, or soft
voice, which mixes sound and touch. In this case,
the shape of the mouth imitates the shape of the
thing being described (to a certain extent) and the
brain areas controlling the mouth muscles are
adjacent to the visual centres.
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• MEOW, PLUNGE AND GLINT:
Another example of a certain relationship
between sound and meaning is to be found in
phenomena such as
1. Onomatopoeia: the linguistic mimicking of
non-linguistic sounds, such as bow-wow for
the marking of a dog.
2. Phonesthesia: when the sound of the Word
reminds us of the action or object they
describe as in plunge, whisper, crack or frizzle.
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3. Phonesthemes: which corresponds to an
association of certain sound combinations
with a given meaning, in a rather random
way. For example, the consonant cluster st- is
associated with verbs indicating movement
(stomp, stampede, step, stride, stroll) or the
combination gl- associated with verbs related
to light or vision (glimmer, glisten, gleam,
glitter, glow, glint).
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MORPHOLOGY
• Inflectional meanings in English (nouns):
plurality, possession, gender and size (book-
booklet; dog-doggie).
• Inflectional meanings in English (verbs):
tense, person & number and aspect (-ing =
action going on).
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• Derivational meanings in English: The number of derivational morphemes
in English is much higher tan that of inflectional morphemes. Additionally,
the range of meanings associated with derivational morphemes is much
broader:
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LEXICON
• Open-class words: nouns, verbs, adjectives,
adverbs.
• Closed-class words: prepositions, determiners,
conjunctions.
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SYNTAX
• The different ways in which we can combine words
to build a sentence are not very clear. Language is
clearly compositional, but its compositionality is far
from straightforward. Knowing exactly which parts
of meaning are contributed by each word, or how
the meaning of the combination is arrived at can be
very tricky, even in two-word combinations. For
example, if olive oil is oil made from olives, where
does baby oil come from?
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In the case of full sentences, their meanings, thus, stems from the
fusion of the meaning of the individual verb plus the meaning of
the construction in which the verb is stored:
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• Two important characteristics of meaning are:

– Meaning is compositional: the meanings of
sentences are made up or composed of the
meanings of their constituent lexemes.
– Productivity: all human languages have the
property of productivity. This is simply the fact that
the vocabulary of any given language can be used
to construct a theoretically infinite number of
sentences.
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• Problem: Are the meanings of the
collocations just the results of the
combinations of the meanings of their parts,
or are the whole collocations themselves the
meaning bearing units? Two possibilities:
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• First possibility: Compositionality: lists the
meanings of “cut, foot, grass, cake, etc” and
sees the specific meanings of the collocations
“cut one’s foot, cut the grass, etc” as derived
compositionally from the meanings of the
parts. This might work in one of two ways:
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1. The general meaning hypothesis: “cut” might
have the same vague or general meaning in all
its different collocations.
PROBLEM: Describing this common core of general
meaning supposedly present in all cases of “cut” is not
necessarily an easy matter (Cut the grass//Cut butter)
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2. The multiple meaning hypothesis: “cut” might
have a different meaning in each collocation.
PROBLEM: (a) the sheer number of the different senses
attributed to “cut”, since the question of cutting in each of
the examples in question is slightly different; (b) given this
variety of different possible meanings of “cut”, how does
a hearer know the appropiate interpretation ?
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• Second possibility: Non-compositionality: lists all
the different collocations in which “cut” appears
and specifies a different meaning for each
collocation.
PROBLEM: It ignores our intuition of the compositionality
of the meanings of the collocations: the reason that “cut
the grass” has the interpretation it does is, surely
something about the combination of the meanings of
“cut” and the meaning of “grass”. It is not an arbitrary fact
that “cut the grass” means what it does.
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* Not all combinations of words are necessarily

compositional.
• Idioms: One especially important category of
non-compositional phrase. (“He’s just kicked
the bucket”).
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• Sentence meaning: the compositional meaning of
the sentence as constructed out of the meanings of
its individual component lexemes.
• Utterance meaning: the meaning which the words
have on a particular occasion of use in the particular
context in which they occur (it may also be called
speaker’s meaning)
* The distinction between sentence meaning and
utterance meaning is also linked to the difference
between semantics and pragmatics.