Chapter-1-2-and-5-Summary.

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Semántica y Pragmática del Inglés

4º Grado en Estudios Ingleses

Facultad de Filología
Universidad de Sevilla

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 1. Lexeme
The sense of a lexeme may be defined as the general meaning or the concept underlying the word. As a first
approximation, we can describe this as what we usually think of as contained in a dictionary entry for the
word in question. In providing a semantic description of a language, we do not need to treat all the variant
morphological forms of a single word separately. Instead, we describe the meanings of a language’s lexemes,
or the abstract units which unite all the morphological variants of a single word.

2. Lexicon.
The set of all the words and idioms of any language, an older term for dictionary.

3. Ambiguity
Semantic ambiguity occurs when a word, phrase or sentence, taken out of context, has more than one
interpretation.

4. Homonymy
The situation where two unrelated meanings happen to be expressed by the same phonological form (e.g.
bank, which means both ‘edge of river’ and ‘financial institution’)

5. Homophones and Homographs

Homophones are words that sound the same but have different meanings and may or may not be spelled
differently (by, buy, bye). Homographs are words that are spelled the same but have different meanings or
pronunciations (bow, referring to the noun and verb).

6. Polysemy
The situation where a word has two or more related senses

7. Hyponymy and hyperonymy

Hyponymy (Greek hypo- ‘under’) is the lexical relation described in English by the phrase kind/type/sort of.
A chain of hyponyms defines a hierarchy of elements: sports car is a hyponym of car since a sports car is a
kind of car, and car, in turn, is a hyponym of vehicle since a car is a kind of vehicle. Hyponymy also has a
crucial communicative function. It often happens that we are unable to retrieve the most accurate, precise
term for the referent we have in mind. At other times, mention of the most precise term would be needlessly
informative and thus violate one of the pragmatic constraints which often seem to be operative in
communication. In cases like these, the existence of a term (referred to as a hyperonym) further up the
hyponymic hierarchy allows reference to be accomplished.

8. Meronymy and Holonymy

Meronymy (Greek meros: ‘part’) is the relation of part to whole: hand is a meronym of arm, seed is a
meronym of fruit, blade is a meronym of knife (conversely, arm is the holonym of hand, fruit is the holonym
of seed, etc.).

9. Synonymy
The situation where two expressions have the same meaning

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 10. Semiotic triangle
To describe meaning fully, we seem to have to make reference to three principal terms: language, the world,
and the human mind. Following Ogden and Richards (1949: 10), these three aspects of the meaning
phenomenon are often symbolized as the ‘semiotic triangle’.

The triangle of reference (also known as the triangle of meaning and the semiotic triangle) is a model of how
linguistic symbols relate to the objects they represent.

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11. Connotation
Connotation names those aspects of meaning which do not affect a word’s sense, reference or denotation, but
which have to do with secondary factors such as its emotional force, its level of formality, its character as a
euphemism, etc.

12. Compositionality
Meaning is often compositional, which means that the meanings of sentences are made up, or composed, of
the meanings of their constituent lexemes.

13. Idioms
It is important to note that not all combinations of words are necessarily compositional. One especially
important category of non-compositional phrase is idioms. For example, if I say that so-and-so has thrown in
the towel, most English speakers will recognize that I am not talking about anyone literally ‘throwing’ a
‘towel’, but that I simply mean that the person in question has given up on whatever venture is being spoken
about. The phrase throw in the towel, then, is not compositional, since its overall meaning, ‘to give up’, does
not derive from the meanings of its individual component lexemes.

14. Collocation
The examples of noun-incorporation we have just seen show the meaning of words and other morphemes
varying according to their collocation, the immediate linguistic context in which they occur. This sort of
variation is found throughout language. We can see a similar phenomenon in English, where the meanings of
verbs seem to vary slightly depending on the noun which they govern

15. Contextual modulation of meaning

The way in which the meaning of a lexeme varies slightly depending on the other lexemes with which it
cooccurs.

16. Levels of meaning

The distinction between word meaning and sentence meaning, then, defines a basic contrast between lexical
and phrasal semantics. Another important contrast is the one between sentence meaning as just described and
utterance meaning. We can define sentence meaning as the compositional meaning of the sentence as
constructed out of the meanings of its individual component lexemes. But the meaning of a sentence as built
up out of its component parts is often quite different from the meaning it actually has in a particular context.
In everyday talk we regularly use words and expressions ironically, metaphorically, insincerely, and in other
‘non-literal’ ways.

17. Phrasal Semantics

It is the study of the principles which govern the construction of the meaning of phrases and of sentence
meaning out of compositional combinations of individual lexemes.

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Semántica y Pragmática del I...
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 18. Object language and Metalanguage
The main way in which we normally reveal the meanings of linguistic expressions is, quite simply, by
describing them in language. But since it is language that we’re interested in in the first place, we need to
distinguish between the language whose meanings we want to describe and the language in which we couch
the descriptions. The language whose meanings we are describing is called the object language. The
language in which we describe these meanings is called the metalanguage.

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19. Concepts
The referential/denotational theory of meaning broke the definitional circle by emphasizing the referent side
of the sense/referent pair. Another way out of the circle is to identify meanings with concepts: the
metalanguage definitions of an object language meaning, in this theory, are the names of the concepts
associated with the object language term.

20. Primitive concepts

Concepts are the basic timber of our mental lives. As we will see later, many investigators think it is
necessary to distinguish between primitive concepts and others. On this view, our stock of concepts is built
up from a stock of primitive concepts, which cannot themselves be broken down into any constituent parts.
This level of primitive concepts is the bedrock of the whole conceptual system; all other concepts can be
analysed into combinations of these simpler primitives, just as all molecules can be analysed down into their
basic component atoms.

21. Mental representations

What form do concepts take psychologically? This is an extremely controversial question. An answer
favoured by many linguists, adopted from philosophy and cognitive science, is that concepts have the form
of symbolic mental representations. Mental representations are the fixed mental symbols – the ‘language of
thought’ – which are instantiated in our minds in some stable, finite medium, and which our thought consists
in. On the view of concepts as mental representations, thinking and expressing meaning are both to be
understood as the manipulation of mental symbols, in much the same way that using language is the
manipulation of a fixed series of linguistic symbols in the medium of air, paper or hand-signs.
Communication, then, involves using the conventional names for individual mental representations. Since
these individual mental representations belong to a language-like format in which the contents of mental
events are expressed or recorded in the mind, their ‘translation’ into the words of natural language follows
readily.

22. Brain states

There are four important answers to the question ‘what is meaning?’: the referential/denotational theory of
meaning, the conceptual theory of meaning, the brain states theory and the use theory. We do not have to
categorically choose between these theories. Instead, recognizing that the notion of meaning in linguistics is
a way of talking about the factors which explain language use, we can see referents, concepts, brain states
and uses as all relevant to this task.

23. Levels of description

It would just be illogical to say that everything that happens in language is determined by brain processes,
and in the same breath to exclude meaning. Here we need to invoke the concept of levels of explanation or
levels of description, an important notion in cognitive science discussed by Marr (1982). Attending to the
notion of levels of explanation/description will show us that there is room for both intentional meanings and
non-intentional brain states in our explanations of language.

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 24. Lexicography
Dictionary-writing, or lexicography, is, in the words of Landau, ‘a craft, a way of doing something useful. It
is not a theoretical exercise to increase the sum of human knowledge but practical work to put together a
book that people can understand.’

25. Mental lexicon

According to a common assumption, our brains holds a ‘store of words in long term memory from which the
grammar constructs phrases and sentences’. This stock of words and associated meanings is usually referred
to as the mental lexicon.

The concept of a word’s meaning is closely linked to the concept of definition. Many linguists identify the
task of linguistic semantics with the task of describing the entries stored in the mental lexicon, a stock of
words and meanings stored in long-term memory: the definition of a word is part of its entry in the mental
lexicon, and the process of matching a meaning with a word-form is assumed to be analogous to that
involved in consulting a dictionary. In order to serve the purposes of serious linguistic description, the
definitions in the lexicon must be much more detailed than is usual in ordinary dictionaries.

26. Semasiological approach to meaning and onomasiological approach to meaning

The definitions found in dictionaries are the result of a word-based, or semasiological approach to meaning.
This sort of approach starts with a language’s individual lexemes, and tries to specify the meaning of each
one. This is not the only possibility, however, for the analysis of meaning in linguistics. The other approach,
the onomasiological one, has the opposite logic: start with a particular meaning, and list the various forms
available in the language for its expression. Thus, whereas a semasiological analysis would start with a list of
verbs, say scare, frighten, terrify, startle, spook, and panic, and specify a slightly different meaning for each
(startle, for instance, referring to a considerably weaker form of alarm than panic), an onomasiological
analysis would start with a general concept, frighten, and list all of these verbs as its possible realizations.
The difference between the two approaches corresponds to the difference between a dictionary and a
thesaurus. As a semasiological tool, a dictionary is a list of words, and one accesses meanings through words.
A thesaurus, on the other hand, is a list of concepts: for a particular concept, the thesaurus gives access to the
different words through which the concept could be expressed.

Semasiological and onomasiological analysis are in no way exclusive: the semasiological approach
emphasizes differences between lexemes, the onomasiological one similarities. Furthermore, both are
necessary to a full description of the processes underlying communication. A complete description of
linguistic performance will show how a speaker achieves the mapping between the concept or meaning she
wishes to express and the word forms actually chosen.

27. Ideophony/onomatopoeia
The question of what level of grammatical structure a meaning should be attributed to may often be
problematic, and boundary cases, where meanings seem to straddle several different grammatical units, occur
quite frequently. One such boundary case is sound symbolism, (also known as ideophony or onomatopoeia).
This is the existence of semi-systematic correspondences between certain sounds and certain meanings,
usually within the domain of the individual morpheme, such as English clash, clang, etc.

28. Real definition and Nominal definition

A definition can therefore be considered either as a sort of summation of the essence or inherent nature of a
thing (real definition; Latin res ‘thing’), or as a description of the meaning of the word which denotes this
thing (nominal definition; Latin nomen ‘name, noun’). Since Aristotle is interested in providing a basis for an
understanding of nature, it is the first interpretation which he adopts: a definition of thunder, for example, is
not a description of the meaning of the word thunder, but expresses thunder’s essential nature (for Aristotle,
the noise of fire being extinguished in the sky).

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 29. Extensional definition and Cognitive definition
We need to distinguish two different functions which a nominal definition may fulfil: fixing the meaning of a
word so that there can be no ambiguity about its denotation, and bringing about an understanding of the
meaning of a word in someone who does not already understand it, typically in order to enable the word to
be correctly used. Many actual definitions aspire to fulfil both these functions simultaneously. The two
functions are, however, rather different, and they should be kept apart. In order to differentiate between them,
let us call the first type of definition extensional definition, and the second type cognitive definition. Thus,

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the definition ‘featherless biped’ is an extensional definition of the noun human, since it accurately identifies
all and only the members of the class of humans.

30. Definition by ostension

Defining by ostension is most obvious way to define many words: by pointing out the objects which they
denote. In spite of the apparent obviousness of this method, it is beset by difficulties. Every attempt to make
the definition more precise ostensively would give rise to a new set of questions. Although it is an appealing
idea that meanings can be defined simply by pointing at objects in the world, in practice this definitional
method would seem to give rise to too many ambiguities to be viable.

The only way to overcome the problems of ostensive definition would seem to be to use language itself as
the medium in which definitions can be phrased: only this way, apparently, can we get the level of
definitional precision we need. There are several ways in which this can be done. We will discuss definition
by synonymy, by context and typical exemplar, and by genus and differentia.

31. Definiens and Definiendum

In definition by synonymy (defining words by providing synonyms), there is a problem with this strategy: it
is usually possible to challenge the identity between the definiens (the metalanguage word proposed as the
definition; Latin ‘defining’) and the definiendum (the object language word for which a definition is
required; Latin ‘needing to be defined’). Thus, one could object that neither mad nor furious is really
synonymous with angry, since mad also means ‘insane’, which angry does not, and since furious actually
means something like ‘very angry’

32. Definition by genus and Definition by differentia

The two preceding types of definition are essentially relational, defining a word’s meaning through its
connections with other words. They may often be workable as cognitive definitional strategies, but they are
unlikely to be successful as extensional definitions.

The only way to convey this essential nature, apparently, is the strategy of definition by genus and
differentia, henceforth GD definition, the theory of which was developed by Aristotle in the Posterior
Analytics. According to Aristotle, definition involves specifying the broader class to which the definiendum
belongs (often called the definiendum’s genus), and then showing the distinguishing feature of the
definiendum (the differentia) which distinguishes it from the other members of this broader class. A classic
example of GD definition is the definition of man (in the sense of ‘human being’) as ‘rational animal’. This
definition names the broader class of entities to which man belongs – animals – and specifies the
distinguishing feature which picks man out from the other members of the class of animals – rationality.
Needless to say, many aspects of this definition might well be contested.

33. Definition and substitutability

How can the accuracy of a definition be checked? For most semantic theories, a minimum requirement on a
term’s definition is the following: substitution of the definiens for the definiendum should be truth preserving
in all contexts. Nevertheless, the fact that the sentences remain true is taken to be a sign of the adequacy of
the definition.

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 34. Definitional circularity
Clearly, then, for as long as we remain within the circle of definitions by substituting one word or phrase as
the definition of another, we remain confined within language. The lexical resources of any language are
limited: at some point, the metalanguage definitions will have to include object language terms, and thereby
introduce circularity. Considered as a cognitive definition, the definition of balance as ‘keep in equilibrium’
poses an obvious problem: if someone does not know the meaning of balance, they are unlikely to know the
meaning of equilibrium. And the most obvious way to define equilibrium would seem, in fact, to be by way

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of the term balance: to keep something in equilibrium is, quite simply, to balance it. Defining keep in
equilibrium by balance, and balance by keep in equilibrium is a simple example of definitional circularity.

35. Semantic primitives

In English, for example, cup and mug would each correspond to the separate concepts CUP and MUG, each
of which is unitary and undecomposable. The fact that cup and mug seem to share certain properties – they
both refer to drinking vessels usually reserved for hot liquids – is not reflected on the conceptual level by any
shared conceptual content. The two concepts are, that is, semantic primitives: in spite of appearances, they
cannot be completely broken down into anything conceptually simpler.

36. Reductive paraphrase

A definition in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) theory of Wierzbicka and Goddard is a reductive
paraphrase of the definiendum’s meaning. Reductive, in that it reduces this meaning into a set of primitive
components, and a paraphrase in that it consists of a textual explanation of the meaning, which is not simply
a list of synonyms or a GD definition (although it may contain this structure) but a collection of natural
language sentences in which the meaning is expressed. Among the many definitions proposed in NSM are
those of sun and watch.

37. Lexical relations

Knowing an expression’s meaning does not simply involve knowing its definition or inherent semantic
content. As well as knowing a word’s definitional meaning, a competent speaker knows how it relates to
other words of the language. There are five important types of lexical relation have been identified:
antonymy, meronymy, hyponymy, taxonomy and synonymy.

38. Semantic relations

Semantic relationships are the associations that there exist between the meanings of words (semantic
relationships at word level), between the meanings of phrases, or between the meanings of sentences
(semantic relationships at phrase or sentence level).

39. Uncommitted antonyms

In the pair of gradable antonyms good and bad, for instance, good is the neutral or uncommitted member.
E.g. ‘how good is the film?’ does not imply is was good.

40. Equipollent antonyms

Not all gradable antonyms show these imbalances, however. Some antonyms are equipollent, in other words
symmetrical in their distribution and interpretation, with neither member of the pair having an uncommitted
(‘neutral’) use. E.g. how hot is the saucepan?’ implies it is hot while ‘how cold is the saucepan?’ implies it is
cold.

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 41. Autoantonymy
A certain number of words in English which have more than one meaning can be given descriptions which
make them seem autoantonymous, i.e. their own opposites. Thus, temper means both ‘to harden’ and ‘to
soften’; cleave means both ‘stick together’ and ‘force apart’ and sanction means both ‘to approve’ and ‘to
censure’. Murphy points out (2003: 173) that contextual factors limit the risk of confusion in many of these
cases: if you temper your comments you are softening them, not making them harder, whereas tempering
metal can only refer to hardening it.

42. Metalexical knowledge

As pointed out by Murphy, the amount of certainty we have in acknowledging a pair of words as antonyms
seems to have an important cultural component. Some antonyms, like hot-cold or big-small, seem well
established culturally, whereas others, like sweltering-frigid or gigantic-tiny, which seem to convey equally
‘opposite’ notions, have less of an antonymic ring. This leads Murphy to conclude that a speaker’s
knowledge of the relation of antonymy (as, in fact, of all lexical relations) is metalexical: the fact that two
words are antonyms (synonyms, etc.) is not, in other words, part of our dictionary knowledge of the word’s
meaning, but part of our encyclopaedic knowledge about the word’s meaning.

43. Types of meronymy

Lyons suggested that there are in fact several different types of meronymy in language. Acting on this
suggestion, Iris, Litowitz and Evens isolate four different types of meronymy in English: the relation of the
functional component to its whole, such as the relation between heart and body or engine and car; the
relation of a segment to a preexisting whole (slice-cake); the relation of a member to a collection or an
element to a set (sheep-flock); and the relation they call subset-set (fruit-food; this would normally be
considered an example of hyponymy, which we discuss below). Transitivity holds for the subset and
segmented wholes types of meronymy, but not for the functional part or collection-element types.

For their part, Winston, Chaffin and Herrmann (1987) propose a six-way typology, according to which part
of has six possible different meanings: component-integral object meronymy (pedal-bike), member-
collection (ship- fleet), portion-mass (slice-pie), stuff-object (steel-car), feature-activity (paying-shop- ping)
and place-area (Everglades-Florida). They claim that meronymy is transitive when the same type of
meronymic relation is involved in all parts of the chain, as in (12), which contains the component-object type
of meronymy.

44. Non-taxonomic hyponymies

How are taxonomies distinguished from non-taxonomic hyponymies? In non-taxonomic hyponymies, a
hyponym (e.g. mare) can be replaced by a complex label consisting of a superordinate term and a modifier
(e.g.female horse; see Cruse 1986: 137–145). Similarly, gelding, another non-taxonomic hyponym of horse,
can be replaced, without any loss of meaning, by neutered horse. This possibility does not exist throughout a
taxonomy. There are no modifiers that can be added to the superordinate bird in order to distinguish the
subordinates robin, eagle or hawk. Similarly, the non-taxonomic nature of the category weed is revealed by
its paraphrase as unwanted plant, and that of vegetable by edible plant.

45. Primary lexemes and Secondary lexemes/binomial labels

The unique beginner, life form and generic level lexemes are usually labelled by what Brown calls primary
lexemes, i.e. ‘simple unitary words such as plant, tree, oak, bird and robin’. On lower levels of the taxonomy,
one typically finds secondary lexemes, which consist of the term for the immediately superordinate class,
accompanied by a modifier (e.g. white oak, a kind of oak and swamp white oak. Secondary lexemes are also
known as binomial labels.

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 46. Lexical synonymy and Phrasal synonymy
An initial distinction needs to be drawn between lexical synonymy (synonymy between individual lexemes)
and phrasal synonymy (synonymy between expressions consisting of more than one lexeme). We will only
be concerned here with lexical synonymy, assuming that phrasal synonymy can mostly be derived from the
synonymy of the phrases’ component lexemes (considered in their associated grammatical structures).

Phrasal synonym: Synonymy between expressions consisting of more than one lexeme

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Lexical synonymy: Synonymy between individual lexemes

47. Sense-synonymy
Sense-synonymy is the synonymy of some, but not all, the senses of a word. Thus, pupil is arguably
synonymous with student with respect to one of its senses (‘person being instructed by a teacher’); but with
respect to the sense ‘centre of the eye’ the two words are, of course, non-synonymous. Pupil and student are
thus not lexical synonyms, but they are synonymous with respect to one of their senses. Similarly, Murphy
demonstrates that the pair baggage/luggage are synonymous with respect to the sense ‘bags’ but not with
respect to the metaphorical sense ‘emotional encumbrances’.

48. Absolute lexical synonyms

The usual test for synonymy is substitution: if one expression can be replaced by another in a sentence
without change to the meaning of the sentence, then the two expressions are said to be synonyms. Absolute
synonyms are substitutable in all possible contexts in all possible (semantic, grammatical, sociolinguistic)
ways.

49. Componential analysis

The fact that semantic relations reveal aspects of meaning is one of the motivations for a componential
approach to semantic analysis. Componential analysis analyses meaning in terms of binary features (i.e.
features with only two possible values, + or –), and represents a translation into semantics of the principles of
structuralist phonological analysis. As a type of definitional analysis, componential analysis inherits the
failings of traditional definitions, and words for which it proves hard to couch definitions are also hard to
analyse componentially.

50. Polysemy, monosemy and homonymy

Theoretical and ordinary description of meaning would both be impossible without the recognition of
separate senses within the same word. Words with several related senses are described as polysemous.
Polysemy contrasts simultaneously with monosemy, the case where
a word has a single meaning, and homonymy, the case where two unrelated words happen to share the same
phonological form. In spite of the intuitive obviousness of these distinctions, there are many instances where
it is not clear whether a word should be analysed as polysemous or monosemous, and no absolute criteria
have ever been proposed which will successfully discriminate them.

51. Polysemy Tests

Linguists have devised a number of polysemy tests, of which we will discuss the most important.
The oldest type of polysemy test, the definitional test, due originally to Aristotle, identifies the number of
senses of a word with the number of separate definitions needed to convey its meaning accurately. A word
has more than one meaning if there is no single definition which can be applied to all of its uses, and it has
no more meanings than the number of maximally general definitions necessary to define its complete
denotation.

Definitional tests for polysemy are widely rejected. The most significant problem with them is that, contrary
to the beliefs of their proponents, they in fact presuppose that the number of meanings to be defined is
already known. Ironically, therefore, far from being a test of polysemy, they actually require that the question
of the number of senses held by a lexical item is already resolved.

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