Lesson 5: Semantics
In this lesson we deal with the study of word meaning and its proprieties
Semantics
In this lesson we talk about ‘Semantics’ the field that studies the meaning of words and sentences. The main goal of linguistic description concerns a reflection of a speaker’s semantic knowledge. Certain sentences describe the same situation (the newspapers are behind/next to the computer or the computer is in front/next to the newspapers), other sentences contradict each other (‘the computer is next to the newspapers’ or ‘the computer is not next to the newspapers’ or else ‘the newspapers are not next to the computer’).
By semantic knowledge we intend not what we know about ‘newspapers or computer’ but our knowledge dealing with the relations or functions expressed by items such as ‘next to, behind, not’. Semantics however goes behind an encyclopaedic set of definitions of linguistic expressions.
The context in meaning is very important because certain aspects of meaning change with the context of ‘utterance’( ‘A is young’ 'young' can have different meanings [it can be referred to 'person (male or female), food, place, currency, friend']). Meanings, in short, are held to be objective, that is to say, they are not dependent on the ways any given person happens to understand them, autonomous and disembodied.
This means that they should be considered as independent of what men/women in general do in speaking, understanding, and acting. We can added an other feature called ‘compositionality’ whose aim consists in defining inherent properties which belong to abstract objects by analysing them in terms of components, i.e. “smaller” objects more “primitive” concepts and the like.
Furthermore, it is known that words , sentences, texts, and discourses have meaning in themselves. The meaning, for instance, of a given linguistic object can be unearthed thanks to a sophisticated linguistic analysis that intends to find the correct interpretation or the semantic representation inherent to it. The interpretation of an utterance, a discourse, a text, is never completely inferable from the linguistic object alone but needs for different kinds of background knowledge.
This knowledge is extrinsic to language but usually available to senders/receivers in communication. An example can be seen in the following sentence: ‘That animal is dangerous’. If we want to seize the meaning of this sentence we must use the background knowledge. We (listeners or readers) must deal with a number of questions whose answers aren’t inherent in the semantic representation of this sentence as such. (referential specification) [what kind of animal is], in which way is it dangerous? To whom is it a threat? Where does it live? (local specification, intensional precisation, eliminations of ambiguity and vagueness).
