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AJ semantics - Simple summary of first 7 chapters of Saeed.

Simple, with examples, clearly
Introduction to Semantics (Masarykova univerzita)

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Úvod do sémantiky
 semantics – What does sentence X mean?
 pragmatics – What is meant by sentence X?

1st unit
Saeed [sa:i:] ch. 1:
 1.1
o semantics = showing how people communicate meanings with pieces of language.
o semanticists have to have at least a nodding acquaintance with other disciplines, like
philosophy and psychology, which also investigate the creation and transmission of meaning.
o Entailment = meaning
 1.2 Semantics and semiotics
o signification = process of creating and interpreting symbols
o semiotics = general study of the use of sign systems, includes study of linguistic meaning
 investigate the types of relationship that may hold between a sign and the object it
represents, or in de Saussure’s terminology between a signifier and its signified
 C. S. Peirce – icon, index and symbol
 Icon – similarity between a sign and what it represents, as for example
between a portrait and its real-life subject
 Index – closely associated with its signified; thus smoke is an index of fire
 Symbol – only a conventional link between the sign and its signified, as the
way that mourning is symbolized by the wearing of black clothes in some
cultures and white clothes in others.
o Onomatopoeia = sound symbolism,
 1.3
o Definitions theory – něco… složitýho
o Circular definitions – explaining words with other words that needs to be explained by other
words. Hard to get out of the circulatory system.
 Idiolect – technical term for an individual’s language.
o the question of whether linguistic knowledge is different from general knowledge;
o the problem of the contribution of context to meaning
 if features of context are part of an utterance’s meaning then how can we include
them in our definitions? “he is dying”
 1.4
o Semantic metalanguage = tool of description.
o Conventional or literal meaning = split meaning between the local contextual effects and a
context-free element of meaning
 1.5
o Cognitive grammar =
o Recursive = allowing repetitive embedding or coordination of syntactic categories
o Chomsky indicates the infinite possibilities of creating sentences – always can be added
another clause
o Compositional = meaning of an expression is determined by the meaning of its component
parts and the way in which they are combined.
 1.6
o The relationship by which language hooks onto the world is usually called reference.
o The semantic links between elements within the vocabulary system is an aspect of their sense
or meaning.

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 Utterance: speaking or writing

 Sentences = abstract grammatical elements obtained from utterances
 Proposition = the words of sentence without intonation, pitch, context. Descriptions
of states of affairs - basic element of sentence meaning
o figurative language – Described by a rhetorical terms including metaphor, irony, metonymy,
synecdoche, hyperbole and litotes.
 Metaphors fade over time and become part of a normal literal language
o Pragmatics = the role of the context in decoding the speaker´s meaning
o sentence meaning x speaker meaning.

Class:
 Lingu description has 3 lvls of description
o Phonology
o Syntax
o Semantics
 E.g. contradiction, ambiguity, entailment
o Pragmatics
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JtJu9HdQVM
 Reference and sence

2nd unit
Saeed ch. 2:
 2.1.

o Reference: a unique and real entity that an expression represents.

o Denotation: the meaning of an expression (especially of a word) less its connotation.
 “sparrow flew into the room”, I am using the two noun phrases a sparrow and the room to refer
to things in the world, while the nouns sparrow and room denote certain classes of items
 Referring is what ppl do, while denotating is a property of words
 Denotation is a stable relationship in a language which is not dependent on
any one use of a word. Reference, on the other hand is a moment-by-moment
relationship
 Theory bout referential/denotational approach and the representational
approach
 In eng same situation can be described either as an activity or as a
state
o Joan is sleeping. - activity
o Joan is asleep. - state

o Sense: a facet of a referent that an expression represents. New lvl btw words and the
world
o Connotation: the settled emotional content of an expression (especially of a word).
o Intension: the truth conditions of an expression
o Extension: all entities that fulfill the the intension of an expression
 2.2.
o Names and noun phrases = Nominals and their referential possibilities

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o Types of references
 Referring and non-referring expressions
 Cant be referred to the words like so, very, maybe, if, not, all…
 Often changeable state of being referring/non-referring
o For example, the indefinite noun phrase a cholecystectomy is a
referring expression in the following sentence: They performed a
cholecystectomy this morning. where the speaker is referring to an
individual operation but not in: A cholecystectomy is a serious
procedure. where the nominal has a generic interpretation.
 Constant versus variable reference
 Constant references – the Pacific ocean, the Eiffel tower
o Always the same reference
 Variable references – “She put it into my office”
o Necessity of context
o Deixis - label for words whose denotational capability so
obviously needs contextual support.
 Referents and extensions
 Referent describes an expression for the thing picked out by uttering
the expression in a particular context
o The referent of a toad in I’ve just stepped on a toad would be
the unfortunate animal on the bottom of my shoe.
 Extension of an expression is the set of things which could possibly be
the referent of that expression.
o The extension of the word toad is the set of all toads.
 Relationship btw an expression and its extension is called denotation
o Names
 Names = simplest case of naminals.
 Context is important in the use of names: names are definite in that they carry
the speaker’s assumption that her audience can identify the referent.
 The description theory
 name as a label or shorthand for knowledge about the referent
o e.g. Christopher Marlowe might be described as The writer of
the play Dr Faustus or The Elizabethan playwright murdered in
a Deptford tavern.
 Understanding a name and identifying the referent are both
dependent on associating the name with the right description.
 The causal theory
 Based on the idea that names are socially inherited or borrowed.
 Names spreading dependently on the original ppl carrying them 
users of the name form a kind of chain back to an original naming or
so-called grounding.
o Nouns and noun phrases (NPs)
 Definite and indefinite articles – rules for the and a/an expresses if the referent
is known to us, if has been identified earlier and so on.
 NPs can refer to groups of individuals
 Distributively – focus on individual members
 Collectively – focus on the aggregate

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o Complex denotation behaviour is characteristic of quantifiers;

e.g. Each, all, every, some, none, no.

 2.3.
o Simplest version of possible semantic classes by Ruth Kempson:
o Not all the words are
claiming any meaning
within this theory
o Meaning of expression
arising from both sence
and reference explained
at earlier.
 2.4.
o Image theory – images associated with words. Not always applicable.
 Better modified ver. of this theory - sense of some words is not visual but a
more abstract element: a concept.
o Lexicalization = concepts corresponding to a single word
 We’re designing a device for cooking food by microwaves --> microwave oven
 microwave
o Kids tend to underextend concepts – dog is used only for their ped, not the breed of
animal generally – and overextending concepts – daddy used for every male adult.
o Concepts are defined by sets of necessary and sufficient conditions.
 x is a woman if and only if L. // L= human, adult, female, etc
o Prototype – not as concrete as concepts, works with categories – furniture, bird
 Organized by exemplars
 Frames = idealized cognitive models
 Divisions of our knowledge of the worls
 Dictionary-type
 Encyclopaedia-type
o Conceptual hierarchy – network showing similarities within classes and concepts
 superordinate level
 basic level
 subordinate level
 2.5
o Linguistic relativity
 The structure of a language influences the way its speakers conceptualize the
world.
 Explanation for a common experience when dealing w/ diff langus
 Diff concept ranges in languages, French pourpre not entirely same as
English purple
o Language of thoughts also called Mentalese
 Separate communication system in the mind, universal
 Meanings are richer than languages
 Opposite to linguistic relativity: human beings have essentially the
same cognitive architecture and mental processes, even though they
speak different languages

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o Mental constructivism
 SUMMARY
o Semantic knowledge seems to include both reference and sense. We have seen that
there are two different approaches to our ability to talk about the world: a
denotational approach which emphasizes the links between language and external
reality; and a representational approach which emphasizes the link between language
and conceptual structure.

Class:
 Reference from semantic point of view
 Odkaz 1
 Odkaz 2

4th unit
Saeed ch. 3:
 3.1
o Study of word meaning = lexical semantics
 Traditional aims of lex. s. have been:
 To represent the meaning of each word in the language
 To show how the meanings of words in a language are interrelated.
 3.2
o different categories of words must be given different semantic descriptions, e.g.:
names, common nouns, pronouns and what we might call logical words
 3.3
o list of all the words in a language, together with idiosyncratic information
o about them = body of information called dictionary or lexicon.
o Grammatical words just variations of 1 lexeme, therefore not so important in
semantics. Eg walk, walks, walking
o Lexical entry – group of lexemes, often similar of grammatical or phonological basis
differing in the semantic one (eg “foot”)
o Idioms and phrasal verbs are both cases where string of words may represent single
semantic unit.
 3.4
o Collocation = tendency for words to occur together repeatedly
 adjs strong and powerful have rather similar meaning and sometimes their
uses is interchangeable (strong argument, powerful argument), and
sometimes, on the basis of collocations, only one of them is preferred
(strong tea rather than powerful tea)
 hot and cold water X cold and hot water
 fossilization process, happening not just collocations, but also idioms
o lexical ambiguity – mole = both “a small burrowing mammal” and “a long
dormant spy“
 in case of so do and do too application whichever sense is selected in the first
clause has to be repeated in the second
o lexical vagueness – publicist is not definite about gender, depends on the context
 3.5
o Lexical field - group of lexemes which belong to a particular activity or area of
specialist knowledge

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o Homonymy = unrelated senses of the same phonological word

 Homographs = senses of the same written word
 Homophones = senses of the same spoken word
o Polysemy = coexistence of many possible meanings for a word or phrase.
o Synonymy = diff phonological words having same or similar meanings
o Antonymy = oppositions = words related in meaning yet incompatible or contrasting
 Simple antonyms = complementary pairs = binary pairs = negative relations
(Pass/fail, dead/alive – alive=not dead, hit/miss)
 Gradable antonyms – positive of one term does not necessarily imply the
negative of the other, bw opposites there are also intermediate terms (hot,
warm, cool, cold) and are relative (thick pencil is likely to be thinner than a
thin girl)
 Reverses – oftn bw terms describing movement (push/pull, come/go, in/out)
 Converses – describes relation bw 2 entities from alternative viewpoint
(own/belong to, employer/employee)
 Taxonomic sisters – taxonomy = classification system, t. sisters are at the
same horizonatal lvl in taxonomy eg. days of week, dog breeds,colours: red,
orange, yellow, green, blue, etc.
 Some taxonomies are closed – cant be add another item (days of the
week), some open – flavours of ice cream for instance
o Hyponymy – relation of inclusion, it includes meaning of more general word (dog and
cat are hyponyms of animal)
 Superordinate = hypernym/hyperonym – works with hierarchical taxonomy
 Special sub-cases of taxonomies are bw ADULT-YOUNG and FEMALE-MALE
relationships.
o Meronymy – describes part-whole relationship bw lexical items – page and cover are
meronyms of book. Reflects hierarchical classification similar to taxonomies.
 relationship identified by using sentence frames like X is part of Y, or Y has X,
as in A page is part of a book, or A book has pages.
o Member-collection – relationship between the word for a unit and the usual word
for a collection of the units. (Ship/fleet, tree/forest, book/library, bird/flock)
o Portion-mass – relationship bw mass noun and the usual unit of measurement or
division. (drop of liquid, grain of salt, sheet of paper)
 3.6
o Lexical relation – two derivational relations as examples of this type of: causative
verbs and agentive nouns.
o Causative verbs
 State – relationship bw adj describing a state – wide in “the road is wide”
 Change of state = inchoative – verb describing such action – widen in “The
road widened”
 Causative – verb describing cause of state – widen in “The City Council
widened the road” (kill as a causative verb “to cause to die”)
 not necessary for word changing the shape (open usable in all the variations
without changing, but words are grammatically distinct – adj, intransitive
verb and transitive verb
 Often there are gaps in this relation: for example we can say The soil is rich
(state) and The gardener enriched the soil (causative) but it sounds odd to
use an inchoative: ?The soil is enriching.

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 Resultative adj – describing the state which is result of a process, usually in

the form of past participle (closed, broken, tired)
o Agentive nouns
 Several types, well-known the one derived from verbs ending with -er or -or
eg walker, sailor, toaster, commentator.
 Not always – prson who cooks is a cook not a cooker
 3.7
o Colors napříč jazykama stuff. Fun fact: Dani has just two basic colour terms: mili for cold,
dark colours and mola for warm, light colours; while English has eleven.
o Core vocabulary – basis of langu of more frequent words, also is generally more
resistant to loss or change than other parts of the vocabulary.
 Comparison of Core v. of diff langus might show cognates = related words descended
from a common ancestor language
 Semantic primes = represent words or phrases that are learned through
practice but cannot be defined concretely by simpler terms

5th unit
Saeed ch. 5: sentence meaning
 5.2
o 3 important dimensions to the task of classifying a situation in order to talk about it
 Situation type
 Static –
o mostly described by adjs, but also by stative verbs (eg be,
have, is, know, love, remain)
 Dynamic –
o mostly described by Dynamic verbs and just verbs
 durative – describes process lasting for a period of
time, or punctual – describes event seemingly
instantaneous that it involves almost no time
 John slept/John coughed
 Telic/bounded – processes having a natural
completion (paint, draw, build), or atelic/unbounded
(talk, sleep, walk)
 “Mary painted my portrait.” And “Mary has
painted my portrait.” Entails “The portrait is
finished.”, but “Mary was painting my portrait”
does not
Events or processes
 Process – inchoative (beginning of the state,
change of state) or resultative (having a final
point of completion)
 Tense = way of marking time, not necessarily in single verb, may be implied in
whole sentence
 Either defined by adverb of time or by the use of auxiliary verbs.
 Aspect = allow speakers to relate situations and time in various ways: as
complete or incomplete, as so short as to involve almost no time, as
something stretched over a perceptible period, or so…
 John was building a fire-escape/John built a fire-escape

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 5.3
o Modality
 Devices allowing speaker to express varying degrees of commitment to a
proposition.
 Auxiliary verbs are used s modal verbs
 Deontic modals – communicates judgements of moral and legal obligation.
 Consist of two types of social information: obligation and permission
 Epistemic modals – reflects various judgements of factuality
 Conditionals as part of the modal system – condition and
consequent
 Realis and irrealis modality eg. reality/unreality distinction
 Moods - ???
 optative mood
 imperative mood (for commands)
 interrogative mood (for questions)
 declarative mood (for statements)
o Evidentiality – allows a speaker to communicate her attitude to the source of her
information.

Class:
Harry painted my portrait. – he might be dead
Harry has painted my portrait. – he is probably still alive. Also, st bout the impact on “now”

Mary wept.
Mary was weeping.

I am loving it – eating introduced as process, dynamic attitude. Enjoyment.

I love it –
 https://www.grammaring.com/present-subjunctive - present subjinctive
 Deontic
o relating to moral obligation, DEONTOLOGICAL
 Epistemic
o Relating to knowledge and knowing, COGNITIVE

6th unit
Saeed ch. 6:
 6.2
o Thematic roles by Andrews and Radford
 Agent/actor – initiator of an action, capable of acting with volition
(volunterary)
 The fox jumped out of the ditch.
 Patient – the entity undergoing the effect of some action, often undergoing
some change in state
 The sun melted the ice.
 Experiencer – the entity which is aware of the action or state described by
the predicate, but which is not in control of the action or state
 Logan heard the door shut/Kevin felt ill.
 Stimulus – the entity causing an effect (usually psychological) to experiencer

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 John didn’t like the cool breeze/ The noise frightened the passengers.
 Beneficiary – the entity for whose benefit the action was performed
 Robert filled in the form for his grandmother/They baked me a cake.
 Theme – the entity which is moved by an action, or whose location is
described
 The book is in the library.
 Instrument/force – the means by which an action is performed (prep with)
 They signed the treaty with the same pen.
 Location – the place in which something is situated or takes place
 The monster was hiding under the bed.
 Goal/recipient – the entity towards which something moves, literally or
metaphorically
 Skye handed her paper to John/Pat told the joke to his friends.
 Source – the entity from which something moves, literally or metaphorically
 The plane came back from Brno/We got the idea from a magazine
o Sometimes blurry what class entity is - Margarita received a gift of flowers.
(goal/beneficiary? Both?)
o Idea that one nominal might fulfil more than one role is elaborated into a theory of
tiers of thematic roles: a thematic tier, which describes spatial relations, and an
action tier which describes actor‒patient type relations.
 Action tier roles: actor, agent, experiencer, patient, beneficiary, instrument.
 Thematic tier roles: theme, goal, source, location
 6.3
o implicational hierarchy – an order in which roles are organized
o “This cottage sleeps five adults.”
 6.4
o thematic role grid/theta-grid – listing of thematic roles
o Arguments of the verb – ???
o Subject-object relationships
 6.5
o 2 general problems with thematic roles
 delimiting particular roles i.e. verb beat would give us two theta-roles, a
beater-role and a beaten-role. Then general statements cant be made.
 But also inability to define theta-roles in general
 6.6
o Dowty’s prototype and entailments approach
 Argument Selection Principle - wt
 Corollary 1 wt
 Corollary 2 wt
 Non-discreteness wt
 Page 166 Saeed. Nechápu, nechce se mi to ani kopírovat. Chce se mi plakat.
o Rsns why theta roles are important, did not rly convinced me nor did I understood it
 6.7
o Passive voice
 Billy groomed the horses.
 The horses were groomed by Billy.
 In the active sentence Billy, the agent, is subject and the horses, the patient,
is object. The passive version, however, has the patient as subject and the

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agent occurring in a prepositional phrase, the structure often associated with

instrument.
 Terms figure and ground and the situation scene
o “This house was lived in by three monarchs”
o Impersonal passive does not allow the agent to be mentioned in the sentence.
o Middle voice - varies from language to language but a central feature is that middle
forms emphasize that the subject of the verb is affected by the action described by
the verb.
 6.8
o Classifiers
 = morphemes or lexical words that code characteristics of the referent of the
noun, allowing the speaker to classify the referent according to a system of
semantic/conceptual categories
 Numeral classifiers, possessive classifiers, verbal classifiers,
o Noun-phrases
 = agreement-based noun systems that seem to be based on semantic
classifications somewhat similar to those we have seen for classifiers

7th unit
Saeed ch. 7:
 7.2
o Elements of language that are so contextually bound are called deictic, from the noun
deixis.
o Deixis
 The deictic devices in a language commit a speaker to set up a frame of
reference around themselves. Spatial deixis.
 For example, adverbs of location can be used deictically: It’s too hot
here in the sun, let’s take our drinks into the shade over there.
 how big an area is meant by here depends on context: a speaker might use
here to refer to a country, a city, a room, a part of a room, etc.
o When semantic distinctions are obligatory we will say that they are grammaticalized.
o often used as a form of orientation within a discourse, in what we could therefore call
discourse or textual deixis
o localism = metaphorical shift from the more concrete domain of physical space to the
more abstract domain of time
o person deixis, social deixis,
 7.3
o Much of reference involves reliance on context, together with some calculation on
the part of the speaker and hearers, eg “short-hands”
 It’s a struggle keeping the barnacles from off the crops.
 barnacles as a short-hand for barnacle geese.
o Short-hands are sometimes grouped with the rhetorical devices metonymy and
synecdoche
 7.4
o Types of contextual knowledge
 Knowledge as context
 Discourse (=?) as context

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 Background knowledge as context

 Mutual knowledge
 7.5
o information structure/thematic structure = ‘package’ of speaker’s utterances to take
account of these estimates of knowledge.
 As a starting point it is simplest to call the already present knowledge given,
and the additional information, new
 St bout definite and indefinite articles a and the
 In a sentence like “The party begins at eleven and it’ll go on for hours” the
reference of it is supported by the preceding nominal the party. This
relationship of indirect reference is called anaphora. The nominal the party is
termed the antecedent and the pronoun it is termed an anaphoric pronoun.
o English intonation system allows the speaker to partition the sentence into two
elements: a prominent part (aka focus) and the rest
o Clefts and pseudo-clefts = serve to place parts of the sentence in focus, marking
information structure in English by syntactic constructions
 7.6
o listeners actively participate in the construction of meaning, in particular by using
inferences to fill out the text towards an interpretation of speaker meaning.
 E.g. anaphora = special subtype of coreference, a referential relation
between expressions where they both refer to the same entity
 Bridging inferences – inferential links routinely made between sentences
 7.7
o Conversational implicature – theory about fact, that there seems to be enough
regularity in the inference-forming behaviour of listeners for speakers to exploit this
by implying something, rather than stating it. Such behaviour can be explained by
cooperative principle: a kind of tacit agreement by speakers and listeners to
cooperate in communication.
 Maxims = not sure what exactly it is, but it has 4 types
 The Maxim of Quality
 The Maxim of Quantity
 The Maxim of Relevance
 The Maxim of Manner
 secret – violating (by lying) and overt – flouting (for lingu effect, i.e.
figurative, metaphorical and hyperbolic langu) breaking of the maxims
 generalization of 4 maxims and 8 submaxims to Q-principle and R-principle
 Q-Principle: Say as much as you can, balancing against the R-principle
 R-principle: Say no more than you must, balancing against the Q-principle
o Relevance theory based on principle of relevance - Every act of ostensive communication
communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance
 ostensive communication = interaction: the communicator wants to signal
something and create a mutual environment of communication and this intention is
recognized by her hearers i.e. the situation of ordinary conversation
 Explicatures – expansions of the original underspecified linguistic input
 Narrowing/broadening

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