Appunti di linguistica inglese - Semantica

Linguistica inglese – Modulo B – Prof. Berti

Semantics

Is related to the meaning. The word comes from ancient Greek “semantikos”, that means “significant”. It is a branch of linguistics, which is concerned with the study of meaning. A branch of linguistics that studies meaning. We think words and their meaning.

Ex. UNPLEASANT - un -> morpheme that changes the meaning - pleasant -> adjective

Ex. TO PLAY (v) + -ER (has a meaning itself) = PLAYER (n)

If you put together logical words, you have a sentence which has a meaning.

Investigation the relations between words

Ex. Desk and Table are synonyms. Semantics deals with the relationship between words.

3 stages of interpretation

As soon as you listen or read something, your interpretation goes through 3 stages:

• Literal meaning (semantics) It is based on our knowledge of the language. It is independent of the context; it is not important where or when I produce the sentence, the phrase has always the same meaning.
• Explicature (pragmatics) It has to do with pragmatics. It goes beyond the literary meaning. It is an interpretation based on the knowledge you have of the words. It is related to the context.
• Implicature (pragmatics) It has to do with pragmatics. It has to do with the information that the speaker wants to convey implicitly. What is hinted at by an utterance in its particular context.

Es. THE CAT IS ON THE TABLE

• Literal meaning:
• THE -> is a determiner. It is a functional meaning and it indicates an object. It is already known to the speaker.
• CAT -> noun / refers to an animal, mammal, feline / 4 paws, tail, whiskers / we may also add another type of meaning which can be shared or individual: for example, cute, independent / we have features related to which cats do: eat meat, can see in the dark etc. These are things that we have in our mind. In our brain, we have all these characteristics related to the word cat.
• IS -> copula, indicates special location
• ON -> preposition. It has a functional meaning and indicates position, something which is on top of something else.
• TABLE -> object. Piece of furniture etc. We know what we do with a table (we eat): the function contributes to the general meaning.
• Explicature Which cat? Which table? We have to contextualise to discover the real utterance (I am referring to this cat and you know that it is this cat).
• Implicature
  • “It shouldn’t be on the table”
  • “Look how cute it is”

Es. A: WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU? B: NOTHING

• Literal meaning: Nothing.
• Implicature: I will cut your head.

Es. WE’RE NOT THERE YET BUT WE’VE PASSED BOLOGNA

• Literal meaning:
• WE -> subject, plural / the speaker and somebody else
• ARE -> verb, present
• NOT -> negation
• THERE -> adverb. It indicates position, location.
• YET -> adverb. It indicates time.
• BUT -> adversative conjunction (almost the opposite of what we said).
• WE -> subject, plural
• HAVE PASSED -> verb / location to former position.
• BOLOGNA -> proper noun. It indicates a city.
• Explicature
  • “There” where? Which place indicates “there”? (it changes upon the context)
  • “We” – who is we? (if we use “we” in another context, we refer to other people)
  • We know that on a map Bologna is between Milan and Rome and closer to Milan.
• Implicature
  • “We are getting closer to our destination”
  • “We are still far from our destination”
  • We have also to know where Milan and Rome are. (Se lo speaker usa Bologna come punto di riferimento, vuol dire che siamo vicino a Bologna e non per esempio a Firenze).

Communication

Human beings are not the only ones who can communicate.

• Stimulous-dependent It has always a purpose (when a dog barks, it is not barking randomly, but he wants to communicate something, maybe because something changed). We communicate because we want to make people know how we feel or what we think.
• Communication It is extremely codified and redundant. Human beings are very creative. Animal’s communication is related to the present time. Humans can talk about future and past. In English, we don’t use one single past or one single present; it depends on what we want to communicate, on the basis of what we feel.
• Animal communication It is based on single-units that may be repeated. Humans have lots of different single units and they can combine them. From very simple units (phoneme), we can combine phonemes to have a morpheme and words. We can combine words to have a phrase; we combine phrases to have a clause, and we combine clauses to have a sentence.

Freedom vs Rules

Freedom is related to having a finite number of rules (e.g. SVO, adj.+noun, inflections, collocations, etc.). We have a limited set of rules that allow us to form sentences in order to communicate. The fact of having rules and restrictions makes us free to say what we want and like. We can create an infinite number of utterances.

Rules

• Are concerning the order (subject – object – verb).
• An adjective precedes a noun (ex. a beautiful day NOT a day beautiful).
• Are concerning the flexion (ex. we have to add an –S at the end of a word to have the plural form).
• A morpheme is allowed to create new words and you can add the same prefix to different words.
• Are concerning the lexis (ex. collocation).

The fact that we can produce an infinite number of sentences doesn’t mean that we constantly produce new and never-heard-before messages.

Corpus Linguistic

It is a methodology. We study the language in a more objective way. We tend to follow institutionalised patterns:

Ex. “Spick and span” NOT “span and speak”. It is a conventional way of expressing something.

Ex. Semantic prosody -> “Cause” is also associated with a negative term. It occurs in a negative context. For example, “to cause an accident”.

The knowledge we have is a knowledge of meaning and of combination. Speakers have a general implicit knowledge of meaning in their own language. Knowing a language means knowing when something is meaningful.

1. Henry laughed -> meaningful
2. Picture a Henry drew -> meaningless ANOMALOUS SENTENCE
3. The Picture laughed -> meaningless. The problem is semantic.

With semantics, you can think of a context where it can be possible. For example, in a novel, a picture can laugh. We look at that in a metaphorical way.

Paraphrases – Two sentences have the same meaning

Rebecca got home before Robert. Robert arrived home after Rebecca.

Synonyms – Two words have the same meaning

Purchase = buy -> Where did you purchase/buy these tools?

Enormous = huge -> At the end of the street, we saw two enormous/huge statues

Contradiction – The meaning of a sentence contradicts another

Jim is married Jim is a bachelor (scapolo)

Antonyms – Two words have different meanings

Thick ≠ Thin -> Mary cut a thick ≠ thin slice of cake

Departs ≠ Leaves -> The train departs ≠ arrives at 12.00

Some words have common semantic features

• Ex. street, lane, road, path, house, avenue. House non centra con gli altri.
• Acquire, buy, inherit, steal, take, use. Use non centra con gli altri.

Some sentences have double meaning

1. Maggie doesn’t care for her parakeet.
2. Maggie took the sick parakeet to a small animal hospital.

1) to care for somebody -> she doesn’t care about her parakeet or she doesn’t take care of her parakeet. 2) small hospital for animals or hospital for small animals.

Ambiguity of phrase

06.10.2016

Adjacency pairs – Two utterances are compatible with each other

1. When did you last see my brother? Ten minutes ago/Last Tuesday/Around noon/It must have been on 5th June tutti tranne “very nice”
2. There’s a great new comedy at the Newtown multiplex. So I’ve heard/What’s it called?/Who’s in it? Tutti tranne the last one “So do I..”

We recognise adjacency pairs because we are speakers of English.

Entailment – Two statements are related so that if one is true the other must be too

A: The president was assassinated -> entails -> B: The president is dead. Entailment has a direction.

Presupposition – The message contained in one sentence presupposes other pieces of knowledge (relationship between sentences)

1. Jane no longer writes fictions -> it presupposes that once she was used to writing fiction.
2. Have you stopped eating meat? -> it presupposes that once he was used to eating meat.

Entailment is connected to the consequence of something. It is a relation between sentence meanings. It is a strong kind of implicature. You can’t say: “Mary broke the window, but the window never broke”, because entailment does not hold under negation. Presupposition is related to some knowledge which is taken for granted. It is an implication. It is assumed to be known to the addressee. Presupposition remains constant under:

• Negation
• Questioning
• Embedding under modals (ex. might)
• Embedding as the antecedent of a conditional (ex. in if-clauses)

If we say “the king of France is bald” there is the presupposition that there is a king of France. But we can’t say that the king of France is bald but there isn’t a king of France. The presupposition can’t be cancelled because if I cancel it my statement has no meaning. Presupposition is the condition that what I am going to say is correct.

Exercise

1. John’s wife is posh – John has a wife -> Presupposition – because even if we say that John’s wife isn’t posh, he has in any case a wife. He presupposes that he has a wife.
2. Tony’s car is new – Tony has a car -> Presupposition
3. The president is a bachelor – The president is unmarried -> Entailment – because we can’t say that the president is a bachelor but he is married, because there is a contradiction and it changes the meaning.
4. Mary stopped running – Mary used to run -> Presupposition

Approaches to meaning (what the linguistic is take on meaning?)

1. Denotational meaning -> description of relationship between languages (words, sentences) and the world – that is, between words or other expressions and the things or situations that they refer to.
2. Representational / Mentalistic -> meaning is generated in the human mind by representing mental images.

Ex. Word meaning: “dog” -> in our mind appears the image of a dog Sentence meaning: “my dog ate the pillow”

Ex. DOOR -> in Italy, most doors are brown so for Italian people the prototype of a door is the brown one and when we think of a door in our mind appears immediately the image of a brown door. In Ireland, doors are colourful. But how can we communicate if in our mind we have different images? -> this is a LIMITATION OF THE MENTALISTIC APPROACH

Ex. LOVE -> in our mind, it can appear the image of a heart or the image of a person we love. We can’t find an image for a specific word, like abstract words.

Denotational approach

Emphasizes the relation word-world. It is a connection from the phonological dimension that identifies objects in the real world. It is stable because it doesn’t go through a mental image, but it goes directly out to the world. We can use words in a successful way. Language is a connection between us and the world. Denotation is only a part of the meaning of a word or a sentence; it is a fragment.

• Denotation is a stable relation between words/expressions and the world
• Denotation is the knowledge speakers have that makes the use of words and expressions successful.

Connotation

It allows us to use language in a deeper way: we can express feelings, thoughts, opinions etc.

Ex. CAT -> we associate different meanings to the word cat according to:

• Our experiences (or for example the word “plane” -> A: I love travel – B: I have taken a plane)
• According to our society, culture (or for example the word “cow” -> Italians and Indians have the same image in their minds, but according to their culture they have different relationships with the animal).

ASK – QUESTION – INTERROGATE

According to the denotational level they are similar, but we use them in different contexts. I can use “interrogate” only in a police station: it means question after question. In this context, the word “ask” would be more relaxing. We can apply these three synonyms in different contexts and they are not interchangeable.

Exercise

My new neighbour is:

• Strange -> negative (bizzarro) – neutral (foreign)
• Peculiar -> neutral (it could be both positive and negative, it depends on context)
• Odd -> negative
• Quirky -> positive (it means unconventional in a good way)
• Eccentric -> between neutral and slightly positive
• Weird -> negative (it means unconventional)