Chapter (3)

Semantics
Main Points:
3.1 What is Semantics?
3.2 An Overview of Semantics
3.1 What is Semantics?
3.1 What is Semantics?
Semantics is a subfield of linguistics that studies
linguistic meaning and how expressions convey
meanings.
It deals with the nature of meaning itself—what exactly
are linguistic meanings, and what is their relationship to
the language user on the one hand and the external
world on the other?
Semanticists study not only word meanings, but also how
word meanings combine to produce the meanings of
larger phrasal expressions. Finally, an important part of
the study of natural language meaning involves meaning
4
relations between expressions.
3.2 An Overview of Semantics
3.2.1 Lexical and Compositional
Semantics
This point introduces:
 Lexical semantics
and
 Compositional semantics
(the two main areas of
semantics.) 6
Semantics is the subfield of linguistics that studies
meaning in language.
We can further subdivide the field into lexical and
compositional semantics.
Lexical semantics deals with the meanings of words
and other lexical expressions, including the meaning
relationships among them. In addition to lexical
expressions, phrasal expressions carry meaning.
Compositional semantics is concerned with phrasal
meanings and how phrasal meanings are put together.
Every language contains only a limited
number of words, with their meanings and
other linguistic properties stored in the
mental lexicon.
However, every language contains an
unlimited number of sentences and other
phrasal expressions, and native speakers
of a language can understand the
meanings of any of those sentences.
Since speakers cannot memorize an
unlimited number of different
sentence meanings, they need to
understand the meaning of a
sentence based on the meanings of
the lexical expressions in it and the
way in which these expressions are
combined with one another.
Compositional semanticists are
interested in how lexical meanings
combine to give rise to phrasal
meanings, while lexical semanticists
focus on meanings of words. In this
chapter, we discuss both lexical and
compositional semantics, but before we
address either, we must first clarify
exactly what we mean by meaning.
3.2.2 Two Aspects of Linguistic
Meaning
This point describes the
components of linguistic
meaning; namely:
sense
and
reference
Reference
By virtue of knowing the sense of some expression, you
also know its relationship to the world, or its reference.
If you have a mental representation of what cats are
(four-legged, usually furry, potentially allergy-causing
felines (of or like a cat), etc.) that is associated with the
expression cat, you will also be able to pick out those
things in the world that are indeed cats.
We could show you pictures of different kinds of
animals and ask you, “Which of the following animals
are cats?” and you would be able to determine that, say,
Garfield, Felix, and Fluffy are all cats, but that Fido, Rex,
and Fishy the Goldfish are not.
To be able to correctly pick out the cats in the
pictures is to know the reference of the
expression cat—in other words, to know what
things in the world the expression cat refers to.
The particular entities in the world to which
some expression refers are called its referents.
So, Garfield, Felix, and Fluffy are among the
referents of the expression cat.
The collection of all the referents of an
expression is its reference.
End of lecture
Thank you