WSP TWP Summer Term 2001/2002
1
Ewa Mioduszewska-Crawford www.rrt2.neostrada.pl/ewamioduszewska.htm
# 165 Introduction to Semantics http://rrt2.neostrada.pl/mioduszewska/
Mail:
Aim
The aim of the course is to introduce basic data (intuitions about meaning) and problems of semantics, as opposed to pragmatics as well as to give a survey of most important solutions offered in contemporary Anglo-American linguistic literature.
Reading list
1. Grice, P. 1989. Study in the Way of Words. MIT Press.
2. Grice, P. 1975. Logic and conversation. In: (1)
3. Grice, P. 1978. Further notes on logic and conversation. In: (1)
4. Grundy, P. 1995. Doing pragmatics. Edward Arnold.
5. Horn, L.R., G. Ward. 2004. The Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell.
6. Hurford, J.B. Heasley. 1983. Semantics. CUP.
7. Leech, G. 1974. Semantics. Longman
8. Levinson, S. 1983. Pragmatics. CUP.
9. Lyons, J. 1977.Semantics. CUP.
10.Thomas, J. 1995.Meaning in Interaction. Oxford: OUP.
11. Yule, P. 1997. Pragmatics. Longman
Topics
1. Intuitions about meaning (handout)
2. Seven types of meaning (7)
3. Communicating the meaning – coding model of communication – criticism. (10, 11)
4. P. Grice’s theory of communication (2,3)
5. P. Grice’s system of sentential inferences (1,2,3)
6. The semantics/pragmatics distinction (4,5,6,10,11)
7. Basic notions of semantics (7,8,9,10))
Requirements
1. Midterm test
2. Follow-up exercises in class
3. Final test
Topic 1. Intuitions about meaning
1. Analyticity
Cats are animals
Bachelors are unmarried
John’ s nine year old brother is a boy
Cats are not vegetables
If it breaks it breaks
2. Syntheticity
Cats never live longer than twenty years
Bachelors are lonely
John’s brother is nine years old
Cats are not dangerous
If it breaks, you’ll have to mend it
3. Contradictoriness
a) Cats never live longer than 20 years
Cats live longer than 20 years
b) Bachelors are lonely
Bachelors are not lonely
c) John’s only brother is nine years old now
John’ s only brother is not nine years old now
4. Contradiction
Cats are vegetables
Bachelors are female
John’ s nine year old brother is a girl
If it breaks, it doesn`t break
5. Hyponymy = meaning inclusion = super-ordination/subordination of meaning
Superordinate Hyponyms
cnota: uczciwość. lojalność,...
koń: klacz, źrebię, ogier,...
flower: rose, tulip,...
6. Synonymy
mother - female parent; pavement - sidewalk; oculist - eye-doctor
7. Paraphrase
John opened the door = The door was opened by John
They say John is clever = John is said to be clever
8. Antonymy = incompatibility of meaning
Binary: married - unmarried; dead-alive
Gradable: hot-cold; long-short
Incompatibles: breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, supper; days of the week
Converses: borrow-lend; own-belong to; below-above
9. Homonymy: bank, bark, punch, mina
10.Homophony: meat, meet.
11.Homography: lead
12. Literal talk
Mary: Where’s the car, John?
John: The car is in the garage.
13. Loose talk
Mary lives 3 km out of the city limits of Paris. She is at a party in London. She doesn’t know Peter.
Peter: Where do you live?
Mary: I live in Paris
14. Polysemy: fork, tail, lip, maska
15. Metaphors (speaking of one thing in terms of another)
Jeremy is a lion.
You are a piglet
16. Hyperbole (overstatement)
Sam is the nicest person there is
17. Litotes (understatement)
Context: John saved your family and your belongings from a fire.
You: John behaved rather nice.
18. Metonymy (using the name of one thing to refer to another if the two things are somehow related, e.g. source-product; cause-effect)
You should read Mickiewicz
The whole world is singing
19. Synecdoche (type of metonymy; the relation between the things is that of part and whole)
They were afraid of his iron (=arms)
Ma 20 wiosen (= lat)
Topic 2. Semantics: Intuitions about meaning - Seven types of meaning
conceptual, connotative, stylistic, affective, reflected, collocative, thematic
a) conceptual = denotative = cognitive
- contrastiveness: +/- human, +/- male, +/- adult. Cf. woman, girl, boy, man
- constituent structure = compositionality: Cf. John killed a man vs John killed a woman
b) connotative: community and time relative, not limited to language
- woman: (biped, having a womb), subject to maternal instinct, experienced in cookery, prone to tears, gentle, hard working
c) stylistic: social circumstances of language use - idiolects, dialects, time, channel, number of participants, subject matter, status (politeness)
- steed, horse
d) affective: emotional expression through style
e) reflected:
-The Comforter - warm; the Holy Ghost - admiration
- taboo contamination
f) collocative: pretty versus handsome
-* pretty airliner
g) thematic - functional sentence perspective
Topic 3. Semantics: Communicating the meaning: coding-decoding model of communication – criticism
a) literal talk
b)loose talk
c)metaphor, hyperbole, litotes, metonymy, synecdoche
d)irony, sarcasm
f)connotative meaning
3a. Speaker’s meaning versus language meaning
conventional - non-conventional; literal - non-literal; explicit - implicit; said - implied
a) I’ll come tomorrow - referents assignment
b)Bill is tall - vague terms, scalar terms
c)Betsy’s gift made her very happy - ambiguity (structural, homonymy, polysemy)
d)What an honest fellow John is - irony
e) You’re leaving - speech acts
f) My family and other animals - implicatures
g) Some people believe in justice
h) I’ve got 100 PLN in the bank
i) A. When will tea be ready?
B. The kettle’s boiling
j) Nice day!
k) The flag is white
l) A: Is John already in ?
B: It’s five o’clock
m) They washed and went to bed
n) Durham is in Durham
o) You’re the cream in my coffee
3 b. Sentences, utterances, propositions
a) An utterance is any stretch of talk, by one person, before and after which there is silence on the part of that person. An utterance is the USE by a particular speaker, on a particular occasion, of a piece of language, such as a sequence of sentences, or a single phrase, or even a single word
b) A sentence is neither a physical event nor a physical object,. It is, conceived abstractly, a string of words put together by the grammatical rules of a language. A sentence can be thought of as the ideal string of words behind various realizations in utterances and inscriptions
We adopt the convention that anything written between double quotation marks represents an utterance, and anything underlined represents a sentence or (similarly abstract) part of a sentence, such as a phrase or a word.
c) A proposition is that part of the meaning of the utterance of a declarative sentence which describes some state of affairs. True propositions correspond to facts, in the ordinary sense of the word fact. False propositions do not correspond to facts. One can entertain propositions in the mind regardless of whether they are true or false, e.g. by thinking them or believing them. Only true propositions can be known
- Pamela considered the fact that her mother was alive and realized that it could not possibly be true
- Pamela considered the proposition that her mother was alive and realized that it could not possibly be true
Propositions can be asserted or mentioned. Corresponding declaratives, interrogatives and imperatives have the same propositional content.
Examples:
a) A: Jerzy dzwonił, że nie będzie na naszym ślubie.
B: Co to znaczy?
b) A: Odchodzę.
B: Co to ma znaczyć?
Speaker` s meaning: what he means
Language meaning: what language means
Questions:
1. Which meaning is „more important”?
2. Which meaning may be written down in dictionaries?
3. Can there be a full discrepancy between the two types of meaning?
4. Which meaning is a precondition for which?
proposition: - Harry took out the garbage.
Harry took the garbage out.
- Mary loves John.
John loves Mary.
- Dr Brown killed Mary.
Dr Brown caused Mary to die.
states of affairs, facts
asserting and mentioning a proposition --- propositional content
Have you seen my toothbrush?
Go away, will you?
Pigs might fly.
I` m a Dutchman.
Mary was given a book by John.
A book was given to Mary by John.
John gave Mary a book.
It was a book that John gave to Mary.
Janek dał Marii książkę.
Topic 4. Semantics: Communicating the meaning. Paul Grice’s Theory of Communication
The Cooperative Principle (CP)
Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.
The Maxims
Quality:
Try to make your contribution one that is true
(i) do not say what you believe to be false
(ii) do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence
Quantity
(i) make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange
(ii) do not make your contribution more informative than is required
Relevance
make your contribution relevant
Manner
(i) avoid obscurity
(ii)avoid ambiguity
(iii) be orderly
I. Observing the maxims
A: I’ve just run out of petrol
B1. You can get petrol in a garage around the corner
B2: Oh, there’s a garage just around the corner
II. Flouting (exploiting) the maxims
A. Let’s get the kids something
B. OK but I veto I-C-E-C-R-E-A-M-S
III. Maxim clash (quality versus quantity)
A. Where does John live?
B. In the south of France
IV. Opting out
A. What’s John’s surname?
B. I won’t tell you
V. Violating the maxims
Context: John’s surname is Brown
A. What’s John’s surname?
B. Smith
Standard Implicatures (observing the maxims)
1. Quality
A. John has two cows
> I believe he has and have adequate evidence that he has
2.Quantity
A. John has 14 children
> John has only 14 children
A. The flag is white
> The flag is all white
3.Relevance
A. Pass the salt
> Pass the salt now
A. Can you tell me the time?
B. Well, the milkman has come
> It’s past 8 o’clock
4. Manner
A. The lone ranger jumped on his horse and rode into the sunset
A. Open the door
A. Walk up to the door, turn the door handle clockwise as far as it will go, and then pull gently towards you.
Non-standard implicatures (flouting the maxims)
1. Quality
A. Queen Victoria is made of iron
A. Teheran is in Turkey, isn’t it Teacher?
B. And London’s in America, I suppose
2. Quantity
War is war
Either John will come or he won’t
If he does it, he does it
3. Relevance
A. I do think Mrs Jenkins is an awful bore, don’t you?
B. Huh, lovely weather for March, isn’t it?
4. Manner
Mrs. Singer produced a series of sounds corresponding closely to the score of an aria from Tosca
Conversational implicatures:
a) Definition
S’s saying that p conversationally implicates q iff:
(i) S is presumed to be observing the maxims, or at least the CP (in the case of maxim exploitation)
(ii) in order to maintain this assumption it must be supposed that S thinks that q
(iii) S thinks that both S and H mutually know that H can work out that to preserve the assumption in (i) q is in fact required.
b) Conditions on calculating the implicatures
For H to be able to calculate the implicature q, H must know or believe that he knows
(i) the conventional content of the sentence p uttered
(ii) the Cooperative Principle and its maxims (tacit knowledge)
(iii) the context of p
(iv) certain bits of background information (e.g. that p is obviously false)
(v) (i)-(v) are mutual knowledge shared by S and H
c) General pattern for working out implicatures
(i) S has said that p
(ii) there is no reason to think that S is not observing the maxims, or at least the CP
(iii) in order for S to say that p and be indeed observing the CP, S must think that q
(iv) S must know that it is mutual knowledge that q must be supposed if S is to be taken to be cooperating
(v) S has done nothing to stop H thinking that q
(vi) therefore S intends me to think that q and in saying that p he has implicated that q
Examples
1. A. Where’s Bill?
B. There’s a yellow VW outside Sue’s house
2. John: Hello Sally, let’s play marbles
Mother: How’s your homework getting along Johnny?
3. Joe teased Ralph and Ralph hit him
4. Some of the boys went to the soccer match
5. Mary is in the dining room or in the kitchen
6. The tree wept in the wind
7. John is an eel
8. A. What kind of mood did you find the boss in?
B. The lion roared
Topic 5: Communicating the meaning - the system of sentential inferences in Paul Grice`s model of linguistic communication
I. Linguistic communication in P. Grice’s theory
Speaker communicated (the meaning intended by the sender)
Speaker said Speaker implicated
(semantics: explicit meaning (pragmatics: implicit meaning, inferential coding-decoding communication) communication)
entailments implicatures
conventional conversational
(language based) (context based)
generalized particularized
(assumed linguistic context) (assumed extra-linguistic context)
Example:
A. Do you think that Mary loves Bill?
B. Well, his brother often asks her out to the cinema or to the theatre
1. Mary exists; Bill exists; Bill has a brother - entailments
2. „Well” ---- hesitation, doubt - conventional implicature
3. His brother does not always ask her out - < always, often, sometimes> generalized implicature derived by the quantity maxim
4.He does not take her to the cinema and to the theatre at the same time <and, or> - generalized implicature
5. I don`t think Mary loves Bill - particularized implicature
6. I think Mary loves Bill - particularized implicature (in a different context it might change)
Features of various inferences: cancellability, calculability, truth-conditionality, source
1. entailment: non-cancellable, non-calculable, truth-conditional, source: words or sentence structure
e.g. John has 3 cows entails John exists; John has two cows