Dr.

Nguyen Thi Dan Tam

 Class Assessment
• Attendance: 10%
• Mid-term test: 10%
• Participation (pairs/groups): 20%
• Final test: 60%
• 3 missed classes: No mid-term test
• No-midterm test: No final test => Fail
BASIC CONCEPTS
IN SEMANTICS
 WHAT IS SEMANTICS?

Semantics is the study of meaning

in language.
I saw a man on a hill with a telescope.
1. I saw a man on a hill with a
telescope.
There’s a man on a hill, and I’m
watching him with my telescope.
2. I saw a man on a hill with a
telescope.
=> There’s a man on a hill, whom I’m
seeing, and he has a telescope.
3. I saw a man on a hill with a telescope.
=> There’s a man, and he’s on a hill that
also has a telescope on it.
4. I saw a man on a hill with a telescope.
=>I’m on a hill, and I saw a man using a
telescope.
5. I saw a man on a hill with a telescope.
=> There’s a man on a hill, and I’m sawing
him with a telescope.
 I went to the bank.

The bank could be a place where

money is kept.

 It could be the edge of a river.

Can you think of any other
sentences?
 Utterance/Sentence/Proposition

Utterance
To utter= to say

=> An utterance is an act of saying.

 Examples
• “How are you doing?”
• “Hi”
• “I’m going to see her”.
• “In the classroom”
• “Uhm…uhm…”
• “Really? Go go”.
An utterance….
• Is spoken! (In “ ” (double quotation marks))
• Can be a word, a phrase, a sentence or a
sequence of sentences.
• Can be grammatical or not
• Meaningful or meaningless 
• Has time, place, speaker, language, but no
special form or content
A sentence…
• Is conceived abstractly, a string of words put
together by the grammatical rules of a language
• Is abstract ideal
• Any change in the words, or in their order,
makes a different sentence
 Questions
1. Does it make sense to talk of the time and place of a
sentence?
2. Does it make sense to talk of the time and place of an
utterance?
3. Can one talk of a loud sentence?
4. Can one talk of a loud utterance?
5. Does it make sense to ask what language a sentence belongs
to?
6. Does it make sense to ask what language an utterance
belongs to?
A proposition…(mệnh đề giả định)
• Is a statement that can be either TRUE or
FALSE
• Has the form of an idea

Ex: - We have bread for breakfast.

- Three plus three makes ten.
 Review
• What is an utterance?
• What is a sentence?
• What is a proposition?
 Semantics Features/Properties
=> The smallest units of meaning in a word.
Ex:
- father: human + adult+ male + married + having
children
-teacher: human + adult + earn living by teaching
-Miss Vietnam:
Give 3 examples
 Practice
• Bachelor • Table
• Dog • Gift
• Bride • Bee
• Grandma • Lettuce
• Boyfriend • Mug
• Lecturer
• Mobile phone
•
• Bread
Manager
 Semantics characteristics
• Basic primitive concepts in linguistics (human,
animal, color…)
• The same semantic feature may be found in the
meaning of different words (father, mother, son,
daughter, teacher, baby => human)
• The same semantic feature may be found in
words of different parts of speech (mother,
daughter, pregnant, breastfeed => female)
 Practice
• Find some different words that have the
same semantic feature?
• Find some different words with different
parts of speech that have the same
semantic feature?
 Lexical/ Semantic field
• is the organization of related words and
expressions into a system which show their
relationship to one another
• is a group of words sharing the same semantic
property.
 Examples
• apples, oranges, grapes, bananas
=> Fruits
• stew, boil, fry, steam, roast
=> Ways of cooking
• cleaning the room, doing washing, ironing
clothes, preparing the meal…
=> Doing housework
Other examples of semantic field?
 Exercise 1
• What are the shared and different semantic
properties of these groups?
Ex: i/ widow, mother, sister, aunt, seamstress
ii/ widower, father, brother, uncle, tailor
=> the shared semantic property is human.
=> the different properties are:
(i): female; (ii): male.
1. i. bachelor, man, son, paperboy, pope, uncle.
ii. bull, rooster, drake, ram, boar.
2. i. bitch, hen, doe, mare, ewe, vixen.
ii. actress, maiden, widow, woman, girl.
3. i. doctor, dean, professor, bachelor, parent.
ii. teenager, child, boy, baby, infant.
4. i. table, stone, pencil, cup, house, ship, car.
ii. milk, alcohol, rice, soup, mud.
5. i. book, temple, mountain, road, tractor.
ii. idea, love, charity, sincerity, bravery, fear.
6. i. pine, elm, ash, wiping, willow, sycamore.
ii. rose, dandelion, carnation, tulip, daisy.
7. i. book, letter, encyclopedia, novel, notebook, dictionary.
ii. typewriter, pencil, ballpoint, crayon, quill, charcoal, chalk.
8. i. walk, run, skip, jump, hope, swim.
ii. fly, skate, ski, ride, cycle, canoe, hang-glide.
 Exercise 2
Put the following words into different lexical fields.
Give each group a hypernym.
Cup – hammer – glass – nails – red – jug –
wineglass – blue – purple – boxing – scissors –
football – knife – plastic cup – yellow – badminton
– pink – file – weightlifting – green – run – motor-
racing – crawl – walk – black – swim – vermilion –
karate.
 Hyponym/ hypernym/ hyponymy
(Từ hạ vị, từ thượng vị)
• Hyponym is a word whose referent is totally included in
the referent of another term. (hypo- means below)
• Hypernym is a word whose referent covers all the
referents of its hyponyms. (hyper- means above).
• Hyponymy is a one-way relation from hyponyms and
hypernym so that A (hyponym) is a kind of B
(hypernym)
Hypernym (B)
X Y Z
Hyponymy
A is a kind of B

Hyponym (A)
 Fruit (B)

Banana apple peach (A)

Banana is a kind of fruit. Fruit is a kind of banana.
Apple is a kind of fruit.
Peach is a kind of fruit.
….

 Exercise 3
Give a hypernym to each of the following strings of words. Cross out the item(s)
that does / do not belong to the same lexical field as the others.

•acquire, buy, collect, win, sell, steal, rob.

•whisper, talk, narrate, report, tell, instruct, brief.
•road, path, way, street, method, freeway, avenue.
•easy-going, sociable, well-mannered, friendly, sad, elegant, courteous, strong.
•smell, aroma, bouquet, perfume, fragrance, scent, odor, reek.
•toast, boil, fry, fresh, grill, medium, bake, roast, steam.
•cow, dog, cat, tiger, lion, ape, human, bird, whale, chicken.
•sing, talk, dance, speak, shout, whisper, mutter, babble.
•at, of, in, on, under, below, near.
•square, circular, triangular, rectangular, spherical, hexagonal, polygonal.
 Thank You

Kingsoft Office
Make Presentation much more fun
@Kingsoft_Office

kingsoftstore