Jump to content

User:Phlsph7/Semantics - Basic concepts

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
< User:Phlsph7
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Phlsph7 (talk | contribs) at 13:20, 7 February 2024. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Basic concepts

Meaning, sense, and reference

Semantics studies linguistic meaning, which contrasts with other forms of meaning. For example, religion and spirituality are interested in the meaning of life, which is about the significance of existence or finding a purpose in life. A slightly different sense is the meaning of an action or a policy as the goal it serves. Linguistic meaning, by contrast, refers to how signs are interpreted and the information they contain.[1][2][3][4] It is often expressed in dictionary definitions that give synonymous expressions or paraphrases, for example, when the term ram is defined as an adult male sheep.[5][6]

Linguistic meaning has itself different levels of meaning. Word meaning is studied by lexical semantics and investigates the meaning of individual words. Sentence meanings falls into the field of phrasal semantics and examines the meaning of full sentences while utterance meaning is studied by pragmatics and concerns the meaning of an expression on a particular occasion. The two come apart in cases where expressions are used in a non-literal way, as is often the case with irony. Some theorists further distinguish uttarance meaning as a public phenomenon from speaker meaning, which is a private phenomenon corresponding to what the speaker intended to state.[7][8][9] Word meaning is often related to a concept of a specific kind of entity. For example, the word dog is associated with the concept of a four-legged domestic animal. Sentence meaning by contrast, constitutes a concept of a certain type of situation, as in the sentence "the dog has ruined my blue skirt".[10]


Semantics is primarily interested in public or objective meaning that expressions have rather the private or subjective meaning that specific individuals ascribe associated with expressions. This is usually the meaning found in general dictionary definitions. For example, some people associate the word needle with pain or with drugs but this is not part of the literal meaning studied by semantics.[11]

Meaning is often understood as a concept that encompasses both sense and reference.[12][3][13] Some theorists prefer the terms intension and extension or connotation and denotation.[14]

The reference of an expression is what an expression refers to while sense is the way it refers to that object or how the object is interpreted. For example, the expressions "morning star" and "evening star" refer to the same planet, just like the expressions "2 + 2" and "3 + 1" refer to the same number. The meaning of these expressions differs not on the level of reference but on the level sense.[3]

Identity statements usually express that two expressions with a different sense have the same reference. For example, the sentence "the morning star is the evening star" is informative while the sentence "the morning star is the morning star" is a plain tautology.[15]

Sense is sometimes understood as an intermediate entity that helps people to associate linguistic expressions with the external world. According to this view, the sense of an expression corresponds to the mental phenomena in the form of concepts and ideas associated with this term. Through them, people can identify which objects it refers to. [15][16]

Some semanticists focus only on sense or only on reference in their analysis of meaning.[17][16]

To understand the meaning of an expression, it is usually necessary to understand both to what entities in the world it refers and how it describes them.[18]


Some theorists distinguish reference as the process of pointing to something from denotation as the object to which an expression points.[19]

According to one view, the meaning of an expression is the object it refers to. This view states that the meaning of the word 'bridge' are the physical structures that provide passage over a gap.[17] A different view holds that the meaning of a term are the mental phenomena, like the concepts and ideas associated with this term. [16]

utterance vs sentence vs proposition[20]



Truth

Semiotic triangle

Compositionality

The to know the lexical meaning of individual words, it is usually necessary to memorize them or look them up in a dictionary. Sentence meaning, by contrast, works differently since it is created by combining the meanings of words used in it. This phenomenon is known as the principle of compositionality, which states that the meaning of a complex expression is a product of the meanings of its parts and the rules that govern how the parts may be combined.[21]



Others

One problem in many disciplines that study language is that language is used at the same time to express their findings. To avoid this potential confusion, semanicists frequently differentiate between object language and metalanguage. The object language is the language that is being investigated and whose meanings are studied. The metalanguage is the language employed to describe the object language. For example, dictionaries use definitions to explain the meaning of terms. In this case, the term belongs to the object language while the definition is part of the metalanguage. [22]


Meaning and use[23]


Sources

  • Marti, Genoveva (1998). Sense and Reference. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  • Leach, Stephen; Tartaglia, James (11 May 2018). "Postscript: The Blue Flower". The Meaning of Life and the Great Philosophers. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-315-38592-1.
  • Abaza, Jack (16 November 2023). The Definitive Answer to the Meaning of Life. Wipf and Stock Publishers. ISBN 979-8-3852-0172-3.
  • Cunningham, D. J. (2009). "Meaning, Sense, and Reference". In Allan, Keith (ed.). Concise Encyclopedia of Semantics. Elsevier. ISBN 978-0-08-095969-6.
  • Yule, George (2017). The Study of Language (6 ed.). Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-15299-1.
  • Löbner, Sebastian (2013). Understanding semantics (2 ed.). Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-82673-0.
  1. ^ Leach & Tartaglia 2018, pp. 274–275.
  2. ^ Abaza 2023, p. 32.
  3. ^ a b c Cunningham 2009, p. 526.
  4. ^ Löbner 2013, pp. 1–2.
  5. ^ Cunningham 2009, pp. 530–531.
  6. ^ Yule 2017, pp. 321–322.
  7. ^ Riemer 2010, pp. 21–22.
  8. ^ Griffiths & Cummins 2023, pp. 5–6.
  9. ^ Löbner 2013, pp. 1–6.
  10. ^ Löbner 2013, pp. 18–21.
  11. ^ Yule 2017, p. 321.
  12. ^ Griffiths & Cummins 2023, pp. 7–9.
  13. ^ Saeed 2009, p. 46.
  14. ^ Cunningham 2009, p. 527.
  15. ^ a b Marti 1998, Lead Section.
  16. ^ a b c Riemer 2010, pp. 27–28.
  17. ^ a b Riemer 2010, pp. 25–26.
  18. ^ Cunningham 2009, p. 531.
  19. ^ Griffiths & Cummins 2023, pp. (7–9)?.
  20. ^ Saeed 2009, pp. 12–13.
  21. ^ Löbner 2013, pp. 7–8, 10–12.
  22. ^ Riemer 2010, pp. 22–23.
  23. ^ Riemer 2010, p. 36.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Phlsph7/Semantics_-_Basic_concepts&oldid=1204623273"