LING2003   Semantics: Meaning and Grammar (2nd semester 2001-02)
Lecture: Dr. Stephen Matthews

Week 1   The Meanings of Meaning

1. Everyday use and ambiguity of the word mean(ing)

(1) Dadday, what does 'unique' mean?
(2) When Mary talks about "her ex-boyfriend" she means me.
(3) Purchase has the same meaning as buy.
(4) I didn't mean to hurt you.
(5) When he shouts it means he's angry.
(6) Gwailou means "foreign devil".

1.1 Sense and Reference

sense: concept determining possible meanings of an expression, or its place in the system of a language
reference: relation between expressions and objects in the world

all expressions have sense, not all have reference (e.g. the Communist government of Britain)
many expressions may have different senses but the same reference (e.g. the Queen of England, Elizabeth R., Queenie)

1.2 Ogden & Richards' Triangle (The Meaning of Meaning, 1946):

                                         THOUGHT
                                        / (concepts) \
                        (Sense)   /                     \
                                     /                        \
    (language) WORDS_______________WORLD (things, situations)
                                          (Reference)

Note:

(i) Reference as an indirect relation
(ii) Sense as a psychological notion


http://www.sfu.ca/~muntigl/richards.html
INTRODUCTION TO RICHARDS
Richards was born in England in 1893. His interest in language and meaning was awakened by C. K. Ogden. Together, they wrote the book "The Meaning of Meaning." Richards was largely influenced by Francis Bacon's ideals of the market place. Bacon's belief that language functions as a potential barrier to understanding led Richards to view rhetoric as a study of misunderstanding and its remedies. Therefore, understanding and how words come to mean became one of Richard's chief concerns.

MISUNDERSTANDINGS
At the heart of Richard's theory of meaning is a device called the "semantic triangle." Each corner of the triangle corresponds to a component that is integrally involved in the process of meaning.

REFERENCE-- indicates the realm of memory where recollections of past experiences and contexts occur.

REFERENT-- are the objects that are perceived and that create the impression stored in the thought area.

SYMBOL-- is the word that calls up the referent through the mental processes of the reference.

(Ogden & Richards, pp. 9-12)

Ogden and Richards argued that a major problem in human communication is a speaker's tendency to treat words as if they were things in reality. In other words, we tend to confuse "symbol" or "word" with the thing or object in reality. This led Richards, in his explanation of the "proper meaning superstition", to refute the notion that words possess a single meaning. Rather, the meaning of words are determined by the past (and current) experiences of speakers who encounter these words in specific literary contexts. Since speakers interpret words with a background of unique experiences, each and every speaker is bound to interpret the same word in a unique and different way. Misunderstandings, therefore, result from speakers having different references for the same symbol. Take, for instance, the symbol "abortion." This symbol will have different references, and therefore different meanings for pro-life and pro-choice advocates.

Ogden, C. K. & Richards, I. A. 1923. "The Meaning of Meaning." 8th Ed. New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.


http://www.usm.maine.edu/~com/griffin.pdf


(Based on Em Griffin (1997). A First Look at Communication Theory. McGraw-Hill, p. 61)

1.3 Cognitive model of meaning (based on Ogden & Richards' triangle)
 

                                        COGNITION
                                        /                   \
                        Categorization       Perception
                                     /                         \
                    LANGUAGE__________WORLD
 

e.g. colour terms: universal perception vs. language-specific categorization
 

Language                    <=========Colour spectrum========>
English                    blue                                                           green
Russian                sinij        goluboj
Welsh                                                       glas
 

1.4 Interdisciplinary nature of semantics

    philosophy: definitions, truth, logic
    psychology: concepts, categorization, learning
    linguistics: lexical, grammatical meaning; structural ambiguity
    translation: translatability, paraphrase
    law: interpretation, entailment
    anthropology: cultural meaning, relativity
    literary criticism: interpretation, ambiguity, metaphor
    computer science: processing and representation of information
    musicology: musical meaning
    religion: e.g. what did Jesus mean?
 

2. Levels of Meaning

2.1 Lexical meaning: definitions, sense relations, semantic fields, polysemy

2.2 Grammatical meaning
grammatical categories, e.g. progressive aspect (tai2-gan2 syu1)
grammatical relations, e.g. dative (We took Timmy a present)

2.3 Sentence meaning
sentence: a sequence of words which is possible in a given language, and complete in some sense, independent of any context in which it might be used
compositionality: phrases (water the flowers) vs. idioms (spill the beans)
ambiguity, e.g. scope of negation (we could not have any exam)
entailment: sentence A => (entails) sentence B

2.4 Utterance meaning
utterance: a piece of language used by an individual speaker on a particular occasion: "Utterances are unique physical events" (Lyons 1977:28)
entailment vs. implicature (see Levinson)

e.g. the meaning(s) of the present perfect:

I have read the book => I read the book
                             (entails)

I have read the book -> I know what it is about
                             (implies)

I have read the book, but I still don't know what it's about
                    (cancels implicature)
 

2.5 Semantics vs. pragmatics
semantics concerns sentence meaning, pragmatics utterance meaning
entailments are semantic, implicatures pragmatic

Semantic phenomena: synonymy, modality, thematic roles, quantification
Pragmatic phenomena: implicature, speech acts, politeness, verbal humour
Semantic and/or pragmatic phenomena: metaphor; sentence/utterance particles