The Meaning of

Language
PRESENTER:

ANGEL F. ESTEBAN
 Objectives:

To identify the elements that deals with phrasal and sentence

meaning.
 For thousands of years philosophers have pondered the meaning of
meaning, yet speakers of a language can easily understand what is said
to them and can produce strings of words that are meaningful to other
speakers. We use language to convey information to others (My new car
is pink.), ask questions (Who left the party early?), give commands (Stop
lying!), and express wishes (May there be peace on Earth.).
 What do you know about meaning when you know a
language?

To begin with, you know when a “word” is meaningful (flick) or

meaningless (blick), and you know when a “sentence” is meaningful
(Jack swims.) or meaningless (swims metaphorical always). You know
when a word has two meanings (bear). You know when two words have
the same meaning (sofa and couch), and when two sentences have the
same meaning (Jack put off the meeting.; Jack put the meeting off.)
…and you know when words or sentences have opposite meanings
(alive/dead; Jack swims.; Jack doesn’t swim.).
 All of this knowledge about meaning extends to an unlimited set of
sentences, just like our syntactic knowledge, and is part of the grammar
of the language. Part of the job of the linguist is to reveal and make
explicit this knowledge about meaning that every speaker has.
The study of the linguistic meaning of morphemes, words, phrases,
and sentences is called semantics. Subfields of semantics are lexical
semantics, which is concerned with the meanings of words and the
meaning relationships among words, and compositional semantics,
which is concerned with the meaning of syntactic units larger than the
word.
 The Architecture of Meaning

Lexical Morpheme Meaning

Semantics Word Meaning

Compositional Phrasal Meaning

Semantics Sentence Meaning

Pragmatics Utterance Meaning

 Compositional Semantics

 Deals with phrasal and sentence meaning.

 Entailment and Related Notions

 Whenever A is true, B is necessarily true.

Regine ate apples and grapes.

entails Regine ate apples.

A cat chased a rat.

entails A rat was chased.
 A entails B and vice versa, then whenever A is true B is
true and vice versa.

Jack put off the meeting.

synonymous/
entails Jack postponed the meeting . paraphrase
  Two sentences are contradictory if one entails the
negation of the other.

Jack is alive.
contradictory
entails Jack is dead.

Note: The notions of contradiction cannot be true under any circumstances.

 Presupposition

 A presupposes B when, to determine whether A is true or false,

one must assume B is true.

Peter has quit smoking.

presupposes Peter smoked before.

Emily never went to Philadelphia again.

presupposes Emily has been to Philadelphia before.
 Thematic Roles

 Phrases play various roles (called ‘thematic roles’) in sentences.

 Some thematic roles are given below:
o Agent – initiator of action
o Theme – undergoes action
o Recipient – endpoint of change in possession
o Goal – endpoint of change in location
o Source – point of origination
o Instrument – means to accomplish action
o Experiencer – receiver of sensory input
 John gave the book to Sarah.
agent theme recipient

Jeff saw the moon with a telescope.

experiencer theme instrument

I walked from Newark to Wilmington.

agent source goal
 Note:

 Do not confuse thematic role with grammatical relations

(subject, object, indirect object, and oblique/object of
preposition) because these are syntactic, not semantic.
 Ambiguity

 Our semantic knowledge tells us when words or phrases (including

sentences have more than one meaning, that is, when they are
ambiguous.)
The boy saw the man with a telescope.

 The sentence is structurally ambiguous because it is associated

with two different phrase structures, each corresponding to a
different meaning.
 Anomaly

 The semantic properties of words determine what other words they

can be combined with.
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

 The sentence obeys all the syntactic rules of English but there is
obviously something semantically wrong with the sentence. A
semantic violation occur in the sentence is semantically
anomalous.
 Metaphor

 When what appears to be an anomaly is nevertheless understood

in terms of a meaningful concept, the expression becomes a
metaphor. Time is money.

 To understand the metaphor it is necessary to know that in our

society we are often paid according to the number of hours or days
worked. In effect, the metaphors take the abstract concept of time
and treat it as a concrete object of value.
 “I am a man whom Fortune hath cruelly scratched” – Shakespeare
 There’s a bug in my program
 the fall of the dollar
 bat an eyelash
 Idioms

These are similar in structure to ordinary phrases except that they

tend to be frozen in form and do not readily undergo rules that
change word order or substitution of their parts.
 sell down the river
 rake over the coals
 drop the ball
 let their hair down
 put his foot in his mouth
 throw her weight around
Snap out of it
 bite your tongue
 give a piece of your mind
 References:

Fromkin, V. et.al. (2010). Introduction to linguistics. Pasig City,

Philippines: Cengage Learning Asia Pte. Ltd.

Semantics. (n.d.). Retrieved from udel.edu.com

Thank you for
learning.