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Basic concepts

Meaning

Semantics studies linguistic meaning, which contrasts with other forms of meaning. For example, fields like religion and spirituality are interested in the meaning of life, which is about the significance of existence or finding a purpose in life. Any action or policy can also have meaning in regard to the goal it serves. Linguistic meaning, by contrast, refers to how signs are interpreted and what 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 can be analyzed on different levels. Word meaning is studied by lexical semantics and investigates the meaning of individual words. It is often related to concepts of entities. For example, the word dog is associated with the concept of a four-legged domestic animal. Sentence meaning falls into the field of phrasal semantics and concerns the meaning of full sentences. It usually expresses a concept applying to a type of situation, as in the sentence "the dog has ruined my blue skirt".[7][8][9] The term proposition is often used to refer to the meaning of sentences.[10] For example, the sentences "the tree is green" and "der Baum ist grün" express the same proposition in different languages.[11] Utterance meaning is studied by pragmatics and concerns the meaning of an expression on a particular occasion. Sentence meaning and utterance meaning come apart in cases where expressions are used in a non-literal way, as is often the case with irony. Some theorists further distinguish utterance meaning as a public phenomenon from speaker meaning, which is a private phenomenon corresponding to what the speaker intended to state.[7][8][12][13]

Semantics is primarily interested in public or objective meaning that expressions have, like the meaning found in general dictionary definitions. Speaker meaning, by contrast, is the private or subjective meaning that individuals associated with expressions. For example, some people associate the word "needle" with pain or with drugs. Speaker meaning can diverge from literal meaning and is not the primary focus of semantics.[14][8]

Sense and reference

Meaning is often analyzed in terms of sense and reference,[15][3][16] also referred to as intension and extension or connotation and denotation.[17][15] The referent of an expression is the object to which the expression points. The sense of an expression is the way in which 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][15]

Sense is sometimes understood as an intermediate entity that helps people relate 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.[18][19] Some semanticists focus primarily on sense or primarily on reference in their analysis of meaning.[20][15] But 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.[21]

The distinction between sense and reference can explain identity statements, which can be used to show how two expressions with a different sense have the same referent. For example, the sentence "the morning star is the evening star" is informative and people can learn something from it. The sentence "the morning star is the morning star", by contrast, is an uninformative tautology since the expressions are also identical on the level of sense.[18]

Compositionality

Compositionality is a key aspect of how languages construct meaning. It is the idea that the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meanings of its parts. For example, it is possible to understand the meaning of the sentence "Zuzana owns a dog" by understanding what the words "Zuzana", "owns", "a" and "dog" mean and how they are combined.[22][23][24] In this regard, sentence meaning is different from word meaning since it is normally not possible to deduce what a word means by looking at its letters and one needs to consult a dictionary instead.[25]

Compositionality is often used to explain how people can formulate and understand an almost infinite number of meanings even though the amount of words and cognitive human resources is finite. For example, many sentences that people read are sentences that they have never seen before and they are nonetheless able to understand them.[22][23][24]

When interpreted in a strict sense, the principle of compositionality states that the meaning of complex expressions is fully determined by the meanings of its parts and the ways they are combined. It is controversial whether this claim is correct or whether additional aspects affect their meaning. For example, context may affect meaning and idiomatic expressions, like kick the bucket, carry meanings that are not directly reducible to the meanings of their individual constituents.[22][23][24]

Truth and truth conditions

Truth is a property of statements that accurately present the world and true statements are in accord with reality. Whether a statement is true does usually depends on the relation between the statement and the rest of the world. The truth conditions of a statement are the way that world needs to be like for the statement to be true. For example, it belongs to the truth conditions of the sentence "it is raining outside" that rain drops are falling from the sky. Whether this sentence is true depends on the situation in which it is used.[26][27][28]

Truth conditions play a central role in semantics and some theories rely exclusively on truth conditions to analyze meaning. To understand a statement usually implies that one has an idea about the conditions under which it would be true. It is possible to understand a sentence by being aware of its truth conditions without knowing whether it is true, i.e., whether the conditions are fulfilled. [26][27][28]

Semiotic triangle

Diagram of the semiotic triangle
The semiotic triangle aims to explain how the relation between language ("Symbol") and world ("Referent") is mediated by the language users ("Thought or Reference").

The semiotic triangle, also called the triangle of meaning, is a model used to explain the relation between language, language users, and the world, represented in the model throught as "Symbol", "Thought or Reference", and "Referent". The symbol is the linguistic word or sign, either in its spoken or their written from. The idea underlying the model is that there is no direct relation between linguistic expressions and what they refer to but this relation is mediated through a third component. In this regard, it is a refinement of earlier models diadic models, which analyzed the problem of meaning without this additional component.[29][30][31][32]

The indirect relation is expressed by the dotted line between symbol and referent. For example, the term "apple" stands for a type of fruit but there is no direct connection between this string of letters and the corresponding physical object. Instead, this relation is only established indirectly through the mind of the language user. When they see the symbol, it evokes a mental image or a concept, which establishes the connection to the physical object. This process is only possible if the language user learned the meaning of the symbol before. The meaning of a specific symbol is governed by the conventions of a particular language. The same symbol may refer to one object in one language, to a another object in a different language, and to no object in another language. [29][30][31][32]

Others

Many other concepts are used to describe semantic phenomena. The semantic role of an expression is the function it fulfills in a sentence. For example, in the sentence "the boy kicked the ball", the boy has the role of the agent who performs an action. The ball, by contrast, is the theme or patient of this action as something that does not act itself but is involved in or affected by the action. The same entity can be both agent and patient, like when someone cuts themselves. An entity has the semantic role of an instrument if it was used to perform the action, for example, when cutting something with a knife then the knife is the instrument. For some sentences, no action is described but an experience takes place, like when a girl sees a bird. In this case, the girl has the role of the experiencer. Other common roles are location, source, goal, beneficiary, and stimulus.[33][34]

Lexical relations describe how words stand to one another. Two words are synonyms if they share the same or a very similar meaning, like "car" and "automobile" or "buy" and "purchase". Antonyms have opposite meanings, as the contrast between "alive" and "dead" or "fast" and "slow". One term is hyponym of another term if the meaning of the first term is included in the meaning of the second term. For example, ant is a hyponym of insect. A prototype is a hyponym that has characteristic features of the type it belongs to. A robin is a prototype of a bird but a penguin is not. Two words with the same pronunciation are homophones like "flour" and "flower", while two words with the same spelling are homonyms, like the bank of a river in contrast to a bank as a financial institution.[a] Hyponymy is closely related to meronymy, which describes the relation between part and whole. For example, "wheel" is a meronym of "car". Polysemy is the capacity of a word to carry various related meanings, like the word "head", which can refer to topmost part of the human body or the top-ranking person in an organization.[36][37] An expression is ambiguous if it has more than one possible meaning. In some cases, it is possible to disambiguate them to discern the intended meaning.[38][39]

The meaning of words can often be subdivided into meaning components called semantic features. For example, the word "horse" has the semantic feature "animate" but lacks the semantic feature "human". It may not always be possible to fully reconstruct the meaning of a word by identifying all its semantic features.[40]

A semantic or lexical field is a group of words that are all related to the same activity or subject. For example, the semantic field of cooking includes words like "bake", "boil", "spice", and "pan".[35][41]

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.[42]


Sources

  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 2010, pp. 113–114.
  7. ^ a b Riemer 2010, pp. 21–22.
  8. ^ a b c Griffiths & Cummins 2023, pp. 5–6.
  9. ^ Löbner 2013, pp. 1–6, 18–21.
  10. ^ Tondl 2012, p. 111.
  11. ^ Olkowski & Pirovolakis 2019, pp. 65–66.
  12. ^ Löbner 2013, pp. 1–6.
  13. ^ Saeed 2009, pp. 12–13.
  14. ^ Yule 2010, p. 113.
  15. ^ a b c d Griffiths & Cummins 2023, pp. 7–9.
  16. ^ Saeed 2009, p. 46.
  17. ^ Cunningham 2009, p. 527.
  18. ^ a b Marti 1998, Lead Section.
  19. ^ Riemer 2010, pp. 27–28.
  20. ^ Riemer 2010, pp. 25–28.
  21. ^ Cunningham 2009, p. 531.
  22. ^ a b c Szabó 2020, Lead Section.
  23. ^ a b c Pelletier 1994, p. 11–12.
  24. ^ a b c Krifka 2001, p. 152.
  25. ^ Löbner 2013, pp. 7–8, 10–12.
  26. ^ a b Gregory 2016, pp. 9–10.
  27. ^ a b Blackburn 2008, Truth Conditions.
  28. ^ a b Kearns 2011, pp. 8–10.
  29. ^ a b Palmer 1976, pp. 25–26. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFPalmer1976 (help)
  30. ^ a b Noth 1990, pp. 89–90.
  31. ^ a b Dirven & Verspoor 2004, pp. 28–29.
  32. ^ a b Riemer 2010, pp. 13–16.
  33. ^ Yule 2010, pp. 115–116.
  34. ^ Saeed 2020, pp. 152–155.
  35. ^ a b Saeed 2020, p. 63.
  36. ^ Yule 2010, pp. 116–120.
  37. ^ Saeed 2020, pp. 63–70.
  38. ^ Edmonds 2009, pp. 223–226.
  39. ^ Murphy & Koskela 2010, p. 57.
  40. ^ Yule 2010, pp. 113–115.
  41. ^ Reif & Polzenhagen 2023, pp. 129–130.
  42. ^ Riemer 2010, pp. 22–23.


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