Outline of Semantics
Forms of thought
Mapping meaning onto language
Word meaning
Semantic features
Prototypes and Stereotypes
Relational meanings
(Word meaning and) longer expressions
Reference and Sense
Sentence meaning
propositions
sentence v.s. utterance
Discourse meaning: cohesion, coherence,
background knowledge, the cooperative principle
Markedness
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Forms of thought
• A thought may be compared to a cloud
shedding a shower of words.
• Mental representation:
Have you ever had the experience of
wanting to express a thought, but you
couldn't find the words for it?
• Language is NOT the basic form of
thought. (Then, what is?)
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Mental Representation
• Mental imageries:
A. sound images
B. visual images
C. math
D. movement—action patterns
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Sound Images
• You can “play” music in your head, no?
• Reading music
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Visual Images
• “Pictures in your mind”
• How do you find your way home?
– “see” the whole bus/car route home to school
• Remembering scenery: the apt. I stayed in
NYC, in Hsintien, and the one I stay now.
• Recognizing people: matching pictures
already in memory with what you see now.
• Painters: Michelangelo
• Matching colors; dressing.
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Math
• Doing math problems in your head.
(“Hsin Swan” 心算)
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Movement (Action Patterns)
• How to tie knots, use tools, dance, write
Chinese calligraphy, tie your shoes, braid
hair, use chopsticks, etc.
• Books explained with pictures and words:
often easier just to follow pictures
– E.g., origami
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Transfer among Different Forms of Thought
• Yes, we do it all the time:
e.g. We describe pictures in mind in words;
form pictures from words heard; put some
sort of process into math—then explain in
words; for dance draw pictures of steps, etc.
• Therefore, language is not the basic form of
thought. (And we don’t really know what it;
maybe these forms are all basic, & we have
some sort of code that allows us to convert
one to another).
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Semantics
• However, we’re interested here in semantics,
the study of meaning in language, so
basically we’re most concerned with how
meaning is represented in language, but
since we can convert one form of mental
representation to another, semantics is
related to all forms.
• Importance of meaning: the basic function of
language is communication
• Difficulty to define “semantics” completely
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Mapping Meaning onto language (1)
• Examples
English, Chinese, & Spanish: He gave me a pen.
Turkish: Babam bana topu verdi.
(father to-me ball gave)
(Nash 92)
actor recipient object action
(possessed by speaker)
(definite) (past, 3rd person, singular)
(witnessed by speaker)
Hebrew: Aba natan li
(daddy gave me
et
ha kadur.
the ball)
actor action recipient object definite object
particle
(past, 3rd person, singular, masculine)
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Mapping Meaning onto Language (2)
• None of these languages marks all the
•
•
possible elements of meaning or everything
we know (e.g., sex of the receiver, how
recently when the event occurred, how the
giving was done).
All these could be marked in language and
each language chooses different aspects to
mark.
So, semantic elements are lang. specific.
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Mapping Meaning onto Language (3)
• Examples of “possession”:
A. my shoes
• can be thrown away when worn out, but other
people not likely to wear them
B. my chair
• but other people can sit in it
C. my nose
• has nothing to do with others, nor will I “throw it
away”
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Mapping Meaning onto Language (4)
• Note the differences:
A. He has a big nose.
(“Have”: I “possess” something; more general
than “own”)
B. *He owns a big nose.
(You cannot own parts of your body; only
materials or object which you can give away
or buy/sell it, can be owned.)
C. He is the possessor of his big nose.
(“Possess”—closer to “own” than to “have”)
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Mapping Meaning onto Language (5)
• How does a child learn semantics?
• Slobin Model (Nash 91)
KNOWLEDGE of the world
Parts of KNOWLEDGE marked in HUMAN LANGUAGE
Parts of KNOWLEDGE marked in language X
(language the child is learning)
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Mapping Meaning onto Language (6)
• Semantics is concerned with the bottom two
parts of the diagram: universal semantics (2nd part)
and the semantics of particular languages (3rd part
• The child first learns about the world, then
aspects that have to be marked in language in
general, and aspects that have to be marked in
specific language.
• The child has to learn which aspects of situations
the grammar requires us to mark:
– Time, physical characteristics of objects,
psychological, physical, & social aspects of the people
involved & many other things . . . .
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Mapping Meaning onto Language (7)
• The child’s problems of mapping meaning
onto language:
A. Which aspects of knowledge of world would
likely to be marked?
B. Which aspects must be marked in a
particular language?
C. How are they marked? (words; word order,
affixes, function words, …)
• So, we’ll look at various attempts to explain
how some aspects of our knowledge of
meaning are expressed in language.
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Word Meaning
• Word meaning including:
A. features
B. prototypes
C. stereotypes
D. relational meanings (degree, direction)
E. reference and sense (take us into semantics
of longer expressions)
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Features
• Definition: more basic concepts/ideas that
cannot be “defined” any further; primitive
semantic elements.
• Combinations of features: [+ -] (e.g., see Nash 94-95)
A. Advantages
1. a universal element found in all langs.
(Nash 95)
2. similar to phonological features
B. Disadvantage: very limited application
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Advantage 1: Universal
• While we may speak different languages,
we’re all humans with the same human
brain, & perceive the world with the same
human senses.
e.g. [+HUMAN], [+ANIMATE], [+ROUND],
[+MALE], [+FEMALE], [+LIQUID],
[- MOVEABLE], etc.
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Advantage 2: Similar to Phonological Features
• Psychologically similar to phonological
features
• Same kind of mental operation; from
phonology  semantics, the use of [+ -]
• Phonemes: defined by its features
e.g. /p/=+consonantal, -voiced, +stop,
+bilabial
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Disadvantage
• Very limited application—do not work for
many words
e.g. A. chair/stool/bench/bean bag
B. ugly/beautiful
C. red/green
D. table/desk
E. book/pamphlet
• Lead to idea of prototypes
• [activity: have some students draw a “tree”]
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Prototype (1)
• Definition: a typical/ideal example (serving to
represent the whole class); an examplar
• Concept of prototype: helps to explain meaning
of certain words in terms of resemblance to the
clearest examplar.
• Eleanor Rosch’s experiments:
– A psychologist at the Univ. of California at Berkeley
– Carried out experiments in order to test the idea that people
regarded some types of birds as “birdier” than other birds, or
some vegetables more vege-like, or some tools more tooly
– Questionnaires passed to more than 200 psychology students
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Prototype (2)
• A category name (e.g., fruit, vegetable, bird, clothing, etc.)
• About 50 examples for each category
• Rate how good an example of the category is, on a 7-point
scale
• Results: surprisingly consistent
A. bird:
– Robin, sparrow, canary, dove, lark, parrot, owl, . . . peacock,
duck, . . . penguin, ostrich, . . . bat
B. clothing:
– shirts, dresses, skirts, pajamas, bathing suit, shoes,
stockings, tie, hat, gloves
C. vegetable:
– pea, carrot, cauliflower, . . . onion, potato, mushroom
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Prototype (3)
• Judgment not based on frequency of usage of
the word (though likely to have some effect)
nor on the basis of appearance or use
• People seem to have some idea of the
characteristics of an ideal examplar (in Rosch’s
words, a “prototype”). Then they match other
terms against the features of the prototype to
determine if it’s a member of the same
category (i.e., sufficiently similar to the
prototype, but not have to share all its
characteristics).
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Stereotype
• Definition:
• a list of typical characteristics which describes
the prototype
• more abstract representation of possible
qualities
• e.g. bird
• feathers, wings, beak, fly, lay eggs . . . .
• e.g., elephant
• gray, very thick-skinned, hairless, with a trunk and
two tusks, heavy (adult: weighing several tons)
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Relational Meanings
• Words may differ +- a feature (e.g., man/boy,
•
•
•
man/woman). But, many sets of words differ, or may
be grouped, in other ways, including “degree” and
“direction.”
Degree: amount—contrast to +- of features
e.g., hot/cold, long/short, tall/short, hard/soft,
good/bad, wet/dry, beautiful/ugly
Direction: buy/sell, come/go, give/receive,
borrow/lend, read/write.
Note: A. “father”—also relational (in a different way)
B. “kill” and “hurt”—cause and effect relations
(Nash 95, 96)
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Longer Expressions
• Our examples of features for words like
“father,” “kill,” “hurt,” etc. seem to remain at
the word level.  word meanings interact
with syntax
• However, we have to use phrases and even
clauses (e.g., “x causes y pain”) to get at
word meaning.
• So, word semantics cannot be separated from
the semantics of longer units of language, to
which we now move  reference & sense.
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Reference & Sense (1)
• Reference and sense: applying to semantics of both
•
words and longer expressions
Reference: dealing with the relationships between
language and the world (Nash 98); part of language that
refers to WHAT/Sth. (a real thing or person) in the world.
e.g. “My son is in the beech tree.”
(identify person) (identify thing)
the largest city in Taiwan
the students in the linguistics class
my husband, dragon, ghost, all your children will
be handsome
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Reference and Sense (2)
Sense: dealing with relationships inside the
language. Something in the head; “extra
meaning” or an abstract idea—concerned with
relations within language itself; relations with
other words.
e.g. The moon was bright last night.
(reference, refers to a certain object)
My love is like the moon. (sense,
something more is involved in the phrase
“the moon” than just the object)
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Reference and Sense (3)
• Sense but not reference: function words, such as and,
•
•
or, never, perhaps, otherwise, but. These make
connections between meanings of different units of
language.
Every expression that has meaning has sense, but
not every expression has reference.
Same reference but different sense:
e.g. The evening star
west. (sunset)
The morning star Venus east. (sunrise)
Same object (same reference) but different sense
(different aspect); different ways of referring to the
same thing (i.e., the planet you see at different time)
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Reference and Sense (4)
• The same word can have more than one
sense (i.e., meaning). For example,“bank”
a. I have an account at the Bank of Scotland.
b. We steered the raft to the other bank of the
river.
c. The DC-10 banked sharply to avoid a crash.
d. The banks of dark cloud promised rain.
e. Who do you bank with?
f. Hospital blood banks have saved many lives.
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Reference and Sense (5)
• Other examples:
my father/ the man who married my mother
(same reference? Could be different?
Different senses/meaning?)
• Could have different reference
e.g. stepfather or illegitimate child
我先生/孩子的爸
different senses, although refer to the same
person (=same reference)
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Reference and Sense (6)
• Examples of reference/sense (Nash 99-100)
• When I said “Turn in your homework,” I meant
the homework due today.
• When my niece said in Taiwanese that she
wanted a cup of “te”, she meant drinking water,
not tea.
• “That’s the man!” “Which man do you mean?
There are several men there.”
• What does semantics mean?
• It’s hard to say exactly what love means.
• Partial means “not complete.”
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Reference and Sense (7)
• In the above examples the first three 
reference (use “refer to”); the 2nd three
examples  sense (cannot use “refer to”)
• In every day conversation, the words
“meaning,” “mean,” etc. are used to
indicate “reference” sometimes, and
“sense” other times.
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Sentence Meaning (1)
• Proposition= the basic idea/thought of the sentence;
•
events or states; say something about events/states.
Proposition: predicate +argument(s) (Nash 19-20. 84+)
Aspect of entity,
quality, state,
activity, relation with
other entity/ things.
entity (some
sort of thing)
• A sentence can have more than one propositions.
• Proposition:
– only linguistic element, without interpersonal meaning
– corresponds roughly to a complete independent thought
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Sentence Meaning (2)
• sentence:
– sentence or propositional meaning only
• utterance:
– what speakers say or write; you can give the time,
date, place of an utterance
– includes: intonation, stress, patterns, gestures
– has propositional and contextual (or interpersonal)
meaning
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Sentence
• Definition: a unit of language (an abstract
thing, a part of language itself); a string of
words put together by the grammatical rules
of a language.
• Meanings of a sentence come from only
within the language, independent of context.
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Utterance
• What speakers say or write: you can give the time, date,
•
•
•
place of an utterance (including intonation, stress, patterns
and gestures)
An event in the world which can be thought as an example of
a sentence, or of part of a sentence (e.g., a phrase or a word)
Definition: the meaning of an utterance comes from both the
language & the context & from features of language (e.g.
intonation, stress, gestures)
Different functions in context:
statement of fact
explanation
suggestion
denial
thanks
apology
tease
promise
insult
request, compliment
e.g. Mr. Nash likes tea. (Nash 20)
argument
argument
predicate (shows relationship)
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Sentence Meaning (3)
• Propositional meaning (sentence) vs.
interpersonal meaning (utterance)
• Proposition (Nash 84-85) vs. utterance (Nash
100-101) analysis:
• e.g. “The book is open.”—accusation
“Tom opened the book”— defense against
accusation; put
blame on
someone else
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Sentence Meaning (4)
• Examples of utterance:
“Can you open the window?”—mother to
child (order)
“Is your homework ready?”
–student
student (=can I copy it?)
–teacher
students (=now, turn it in)
• Meaning of utterances based on the context
(depending on the interactions of the
speakers and their relationship).
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Sentence Meaning (5)
• Sentence vs. utterance
e.g. He loves her.—sentence
“He loves her.”—utterance
(in a movie/novel; with context)
(understand, but
who are they?)
(with knowledge
of reference of
pronouns)
• Expressions without propositional meaning, only
interpersonal meaning: e.g. Hello, Goodbye, pardon,
Hey, Hooray ( something like verbal gestures); (Nash
101)
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Sentence Meaning (6)
• Utterance meaning has to be
determined from the context (intentions
of speaker/hearer, their relationship; the
time, place, roles)
• Sentence meaning (propositions) is
independent of context.
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Sentence Meaning (7)
• Practice:
Utterances
Sentences
Propositions
Can be loud or quiet
Can be grammatical
or not
Can be true or false
In a particular
regional accent
In a particular
language
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Sentence Meaning (8)
• Practice:
Utterances Sentences propositions
Can be loud or quiet
+
-
-
Can be grammatical
or not
Can be true or false
+
+
-
+
+
+
In a particular
regional accent
In a particular
language
+
-
-
+
+
-
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Sentence Meaning (9)
• Utterance
– A concrete thing; an event
– Can be spoken or written, context involved
• Sentence
– An abstract linguistic unit or structural form
– An abstract unit (including linguistic content)
– Flesh + frame
• Proposition
– Ideas, concepts; very loosely structured thinking
– Flesh only
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Proposition, Sentence, & Utterance (1)
• Family tree relationship:
proposition
sentence
sentence
sentence
utterance utterance utterance utterance utterance utterance
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Proposition, Sentence, & Utterance (2)
• A single proposition could be expressed by
using several different sentences (e.g., “He
killed Jane,” or “Jane was killed by him”) and
each of these sentences could be uttered an
infinite number of times.
• “I do.” = a sentence, but can be uttered
several times  different utterances
– Elizabeth Tayor married several times. Every time
when she said, “I do.”  a different utterance.
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Proposition, Sentence, & Utterance (3)
physical actions
[gestures]
mental processes
[thoughts]
abstract semantic entities
[propositions]
linguistic entities
[e.g. sentences]
actions [e.g. utterances]
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Discourse (1)
• Language longer than a sentence; naturally
spoken or written language in context
– Paragraphs, conversations, interviews, etc.
• Important at many levels: syntax +
morphology; meaning; discourse structures—
the structures of units longer than a sentence.
• Textbook e.g.: (Nash 101)
The monster danced with Yang Li-Hua. He
enjoyed it. She didn’t.
– It shows meaning & syntax have to be analyzed
in units longer than a sentence.
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Discourse (2)
• Examples of different discourse structures
A. writing
a. paragraph
b. composition (longer organization)
c. book (chapter…)
d. story—typical structure: chronological
order
e. sonnet, 五言絕句，七言絕句，七言律詩
B. apartment descriptions:
American vs. Chinese
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Discourse (3)
• In conversation, discourse grows between
speakers—many “discourse pairs”
– Greeting/greeting; Q/A; compliment/reply (accept
or reject); complaint/apology, etc. (interpersonal
meaning obviously involved here)
• Conversation: casual/classroom/ ordered
discussion/debate/interview/ritual (e.g.
church ritual, graduation, wedding ritual,
classroom ritual—起立.敬禮.坐下.報告)
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Discourse (4)
• Some important elements in discourse:
cohesion, coherence, background knowledge,
the co-operative principle
• Cohesion:
– “the ties and connections which exist within
texts.”
– Something which exists in the language
– Two kinds of links:
• Grammatical
Text: a piece of spoken or
• Lexical
written language.
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Cohesion (1)
• Examples of cohesion: (Yule 140)
pronouns, (e.g. he, my, I , it); lexical
connections (e.g. Lincoln convertible—the
car—the convertible); general connections
with shared meaning elements (e.g.
“money”—bought—saving—penny—worth a
fortune—sold—pay); relationship marker (e.g.
“however”); tense—first 4 sentences: past
tense, last one: present—a different time.
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Cohesion (2)
• Cohesion: the grammatical and/or lexical
relationships between the different
elements of a text. This may be the
relationship between different sentences
or between different parts of a sentence.
Example:
A: Is Jane coming to the party?
B. Yes, she is.
There is a link between Jane and she, also
between is… coming and is.
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Coherence (1)
• The relationships which link the meanings of
•
utterances in a discourse or of the the sentences in
a text.
These links may be based on the speakers’ shared
knowledge (background knowledge)
e.g. A: Could you give me a ride home?
B: Sorry, I’m visiting my sister.
There’s no grammatical or lexical link between A’s Q
and B’s reply, but the exchange has coherence,
because both A and B know that B’s sister lives in
the opposite direction to A’s home.
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Coherence (2)
• Coherence: that the text makes sense—
coherence achieved more by people than by
texts (than by language itself)—we expect
coherence—we “try to arrive at an
interpretation which is in line with [our]
experience of the way the world is” (Yule 141).
• Generally, a paragraph has coherence if it’s a
series of sentence that develop a main idea
(i.e., with a topic sentence and supporting
sentences which relate to it).
• An example of coherence without cohesion (Yule
142)
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Coherence (3)
• A cohesive text, without coherence (Yule 141)
• Coherence: sth. Which exists in people
(experience of the world); beyond linguistic
knowledge (i.e., beyond knowledge of the
world, of how conversational interaction
works)
• Obviously, there’s something else involved
[what is it?] in the interpretation of a
conversation, except the information
expressed in the sentences.
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Coherence (4)
• It is clear that language users must have a
lot of knowledge of how conversational
interaction works which is not simply
“linguistic knowledge.”
• This leads us to Conversational Interaction
(e.g., turn-taking, pauses, see Yule 143144  read on your own) and Background
Knowledge and Co-operative Principle.
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Background Knowledge
• Examples (Yule 146-47)—inference, build-up,
changing inference
first two sentences: Who is John?
How’s he traveling? (plane? boat?)
3rd sentence : Who’s John? (How traveling?)
4th sentence: Who’s John?
5th sentence: surprise
• We create what the text is about (not just the
text does this), based on expectations of what
normally happens (=background knowledge).
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The Cooperative Principle (1)
• In conversation participants are assumed (by
others) to be cooperating. (Yule 145-146)
• Four Maxims: set out by Grice (1975)
Quantity: as informative as is required; no
more, no less.
Quality: Don’t say something you believe
to be false or something you don’t
know.
Relation: Be relevant.
Manner: Be clear, brief, and orderly
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The Cooperative Principle (2)
• These are the normal expectations:
• e.g., expectations about Quantity: “To make a
long story short,” “I won’t bore you with all the
details.”
• Quality: “As far as I know”; “Correct me if I am
wrong”; “I think”; “I feel”; “It’s possible that…”
(“maybe”)
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The Cooperative Principle (3)
• The 4 maxims and the whole principle 
allow interpretations (see Yule 145 bottom)
Carol: Are you coming to the party tonight?
Lara: I’ve got an exam tomorrow.
– Lara assumed to be relevant + informative
(quantity): exam tomorrow study tonight  no
party tonight (relying on background knowledge)
– Imagine: she replies: “Linguistics is interesting.”
• Just a brief introduction to Discourse—many
more elements involved, very complex.
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Lexicon (1)
• Lexicon:
– the set of all the words & idioms of any language
– a mental system which contains all the information a
person knows about words
• Q: Do the lexical items (words) of a language have
•
•
some sort of overall structure/organization like
phonology, morphology, and syntax have?
No; not reducible to rules—instead a listing of
meanings—different from other aspects of language;
not predictable from overall rules.
What’s the exact nature of a unit for definition?
That is, what is a lexical unit (a word)?
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Lexicon (2)
• Dictionary entry is not exactly what we think of
as a word. It’s really a paradigm: an example
of all the forms of a word, used to represent
the whole set.
• Examples:
child (the word listed; “head word”)—
represents child, child’s, children, children’s
take—take, takes, taking, took, taken.
• Some sets include only one member: how, yet,
often
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Lexicon (3)
• How is the paradigmatic form chosen?
• e.g. find a new word in the dictionary:
• ritualistic  look up what?
– ritual
• larger look up?
– large
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Unmarked
• The paradigmatic form is the unmarked form: the
form which does not seem “special” in any way; the
form that seems most “basic”, that has nothing added
(phonemes, sounds, morphemes).
e.g. child: child’s, children
large: larger
car: cars
ritual: ritualistic
strangle: strangulation
old/young:
“How old is she?” the normal Q (Which is acquired first?)
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Markedness (1)
• Markedness: the theory that in the languages of the
•
world certain linguistics elements are more BASIC,
NATURAL, and FREQUENT (these elements are
unmarked; less basic, natural, frequent elements are
marked)
Examples:
A. Singular/plural nouns:
car—cars (plural derived from singular in English, so
singular=unmarked; plural = marked)
B. S-V-O sentence: I dislike such people.
O-S-V sentence: Such people I dislike.
Which is marked and which is unmarked?
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Markedness (2)
• Marking may be a basic principle for
assigning universal (and possibly innate)
values to certain kinds of features
Slobin Model
(Nash 91)
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Markedness (3)
C. Frequency: more frequent = ?
e.g. falling intonation vs. rising intonation
D. Common: more common = ?
(more specific = marked)
e.g. dog vs. bitch
E. Distribution: unrestricted (or less restricted
in degree) =
unmarked
e.g. How tall is John? vs. How short is John?
(also, which is more natural?)
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Markedness (4)
• Markedness theory applies at all levels:
A. phonology:
e.g. /p, t, k, s, n/ unmarked consonants
/v, z, Q, ð/ more marked (less common)
falling intonation=unmarked
rising intonation=marked
B. lexicon: e.g. dog vs. bitch (marked)
C. morphology: e.g. car vs. cars (marked)
D. syntax: e.g. active vs. passive (marked)
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Markedness (5)
• Discourse: e.g. politeness
too polite
(marked)
Would you be so
kind just let me
borrow your
pencil for a
minute?
unmarked
Could you lend
me a pencil?
Yun-Pi Yuan
too informal
(marked)
Without saying
anything, just
grasp the pencil.
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Markedness (6)
• Unmarked elements: easier to acquire
• Marked elements: more difficult to acquire
• Some experimental evidence shows that
teaching marked forms can lead to faster
acquisition of both marked and unmarked
forms, but teaching only unmarked forms
won’t help students learn marked forms.
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Markedness (7)
• Problem:
• Judging markedness still mostly by intuition
(but, can we trust that?)
• Which is marked?
– his/her
– easy/difficult
– early/late
– dangerous/safe
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Homework
• On markedness: Yule 125 D (i)
• small/big, short/long, wild/tame,
cheap/expensive, near/far, many/few,
early/late, dangerous/safe, good/bad,
fresh/stale, easy/difficult, strong/weak,
thick/thin, wide/narrow, full/empty
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