semantics

1. definition of Semantics

If not most, at least, many introductions to semantics begin by asking the following question: what is semantics? What does semantics actually study? This seems like a sensible way to start a course on semantics, so we can begin by looking at some of the answers that different authors provide. According to Lyons (1977), Semantics is the study of meaning. Semantics is the study of meaning in language Hurford & Heasley The (1983). Semantics is the study of meaning communicated through language Saeed (2003). Semantics is the part of linguistics that is concerned with meaning Löbner (2002). Linguistic semantics is the study of how languages organize and express meanings (Kreidler, 1998). (Sutrisno, 2012)

Nowadays, there are two ways of approaching semantics. The formal semantics approach connects with classical philosophical semantics, that is, logic. It should not be forgotten that semantics was a part of philosophy for many centuries. Formal semantics tries to describe the meaning of language using the descriptive apparatus of formal logic. The goal is to describe natural language in a formal, precise, unambiguous way. Related (though not identical) denominations for this type of semantics are truth-conditional semantics, model-theoretic semantics, logical semantics, etc.

The other approach to semantics we could call psychologically-oriented semantics or cognitive semantics. This approach does not consider the logical structure of language as important for the description of the meaning of language, and tends to disregard notions such as truth-values or strict compositionality. Cognitive semantics tries to explain semantic phenomena by appealing to biological, psychological and even cultural issues. They are less concerned with notions of reference and try to propose explanations that will fit with everything that we know about cognition, including perception and the role of the body in the structuring of meaning structures.

So, we can conclude that Semantic is the study of meaning. It is a wide subject within the general study of language. An understanding of semantics is essential to the study of language acquisition (how language users acquire a sense of meaning, as speakers and writers, listeners and readers) and of language change (how meanings alter over time). It is important for understanding language in social contexts, as these are likely to affect meaning, and for understanding varieties of English and effects of style. It is thus one of the most fundamental concepts in linguistics.

2. The systematic study of meaning

Linguistic semantics is an attempt to explicate the knowledge of any speakers of a language which allows that speaker to communicate facts, feeling, intentions and products of the imagination to other speakers and to understand what they communicate to him or her.

Three disciplines are concerned with the systematic study of ‘meaning’ in itself: psychology, philosophy, and linguistics. Psychologists, they are interested in: how individual human learn, how they retain, recall, or lose information; how they classify, make judgments and solve problems. In other words, how the human mind seeks meanings, and works with them; Philosophers of language are concerned with how we know, how any particular fact that we know or accept as true is related to other possible facts In other words, what must be antecedent to that fact and what is a likely consequence, or entailment of it; what statements are mutually contradictory, which sentences express the same meaning in different words, and which are unrelated; Linguists want to understand how language works. Just what common knowledge do two people posses when they share a language that makes it possible for them to give and get information, to express their feelings and their intentions to another, and to be understood with a fair degree of success.

According to Alsayed (2012) meaning covers a variety of aspects of language, and there is no general agreement about the nature of meaning. Looking at the word itself, the dictionary will suggest a number of different meanings of the noun “meaning” and the verb “mean”. The word mean can be applied to people who use language, i.e. to speakers, in the sense of “intend”. And it can be applied to words and sentences in the sense of “be equivalent to”. To understand what meaning is, one has to keep in mind whether we are talking about what speakers mean or what words (or sentences) mean.

It may seem to you that meaning is so vague, insubstantial, and elusive that it is impossible to come to any clear, concrete, or tangible conclusions about it. We hope to convince you that by careful thought about the language you speak and the way it is used, definite conclusions can be arrived at concerning meaning. Lewis Carroll had brilliant insights into the nature of meaning (and into the foibles of people who theorize about it). In the passage above, he is playfully suggesting that the meanings carried by words may be affected by a speaker’s will. Lewis Carroll’s aim was to amuse, and he could afford to be enigmatic and even nonsensical. The aim of serious semanticists is to explain and clarify the nature of meaning. (Hurford, Heasley and Smith, 2007)

Semantics deals with:

1.  Words meaning

Language is used for communication. In communicating, speakers or writers communicate meaning to listeners or readers. The nature of the meaning of a word is its referent. The referent of a word can be an object, an event, a state, a process, or an action here in this world. Word meaning can also said lexical meaning (Lyons, 1985) : the meaning of lexemes depends upon the of sentences in which they occur.  (Sutrisno, 2012)

Examples :

1.  hot is : [ a state of having a high temperature ]
2.  to sew is : [ an action of working with a needle and thread
3.  drizzling is : [ the process of raining in small drops ]
4.  a party is : [ an event of the gathering of persons, by invitation, for pleasure ]

2. Sentence meaning

According to Hurford, Heasley and Smith (2007), sentence meaning is what a sentence means, i.e. what it counts as the equivalent of in the language concerned.   According to Lyons,( 1985) as in Sutrisno (2012), the meaning of sentence is the product of both lexical and grammatical meaning (the meaning of the constituent of lexemes and of the grammatical constructions)

Examples :

1. This is a beautiful garden flower

2. This is a beautiful flower garden

 In sentence (1) the focus is on flower, where as in sentence (2) the focus is on garden. It is clear that the conceptual  meaning of the sentence depends on the reference and the structures of the words.

3. Utterance meaning

Speaker meaning is what a speaker means (i.e. intends to convey) when he uses a piece of language. (Hurford, Heasley and Smith, 2007),    In communication, the meaning of an utterance is not only determined by the conceptual meaning of the sentence but also by paralinguistic features such as stress, pitch, intonation, juncture, body movements, head movements, hand gestures, eye-contact, and the distance between the interlocutors.

Examples :  “It’s one o’clock”, can be interpreted as “It’s really one o’clock” or “It’s time to have lunch” or “It’s time to stop the lecture.” So the meaning does not only depends the reference, conceptual sentence but also context, gestures, intonations etc.

3. The definition of  Sentence, Utterance and Preposition

A sentence is a grammatically complete string of words expressing a complete thought. This very traditional definition is unfortunately vague, but it is hard to arrive at a better one for our purposes. It is intended to exclude any string of words that does not have a verb in it, as well as other string. Utterances of non-sentences, e.g. short phrases, or single words, are used by people in communication all the time. People do not converse wholly in (tokens of) well formed sentences. But the abstract idea of a sentence is the basis for understanding even those expressions which are not sentences. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the meanings of non-sentences can best be analyzed by considering them to be abbreviations, or incomplete versions, of whole sentences. (Hurford, Heasley and Smith, 2007)

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.

Utterance may consist of a single word, a single phrase or a single sentence. They may also consist of sequence of sentence. It is not unusual to find utterances that consist of one or more grammatically incomplete sentence-fragments. In short, there is no simple relation of correspondence between utterances and sentences. Utterances are physical events. Events are ephemeral. Utterances die on the wind. Linguistics deals with spoken language and we will have a lot to say about utterances in this book. But we will concentrate even more on another notion, that of sentences.

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 have defined a sentence as a string of words. A given sentence always consists of the same words, and in the same order. Any change in the words or in their order makes a different sentence for our purposes.

It would make sense to say that an utterance was in a particular accent (i.e. a particular way of pronouncing words). However, it would not make strict sense to say that a sentence was in a particular accent, because a sentence itself is only associated with phonetic characteristics such as accent and voice quality through a speaker’s act of uttering it. Accent and voice quality belong strictly to the utterance, not to the sentence uttered. Not all utterances are actually tokens of sentences, but sometimes only of parts of sentences, e.g. phrases or single words.

A proposition is that part of the meaning of the utterance of a declarative sentence which describes some state of affairs. The state of affairs typically involves persons or things referred to by expressions in the sentence and the situation or action they are involved in. In uttering a declarative sentence a speaker typically asserts a proposition. In our definition of ‘proposition’ we explicitly mentioned declarative sentences, but propositions are clearly in the meanings of other types of sentences, such as interrogatives, which are used to ask questions, and imperatives, which are used to convey orders. Normally, when a speaker utters a simple declarative sentence, he commits himself to the truth of the corresponding proposition: i.e. he asserts the proposition. By uttering a simple interrogative or imperative, a speaker can mention a particular proposition, without asserting its truth.

 We shall have a lot to say in later units about utterances, sentences and propositions, since these concepts are at the bottom of all talk about meaning. We shall see that we have to be very careful, when talking about meaning, to make it clear whether we are dealing with utterances or sentences. To this end we shall try summarizing the relationship between these notions.

We shall use the term of ‘proposition’, ‘sentence’, and ‘utterance’ inn such a way that anything that can be said of propositions can also be said of sentences can also be said of utterances, but not necessarily vice versa. We have already seen an example of this when we said it was sensible to talk of sentence being in a particular language, and also sensible top talk of an utterance being in a particular language, although one cannot talk of proposition being in a particular language.

A proposition is an abstraction that can be grasped by the mind of an individual person. In this sense, a proposition is an object of thought. Do not equate propositions with thoughts, because thoughts are usually held to be private, personal, mental processes, whereas propositions are public in the sense that the same proposition is accessible to different persons: different individuals can grasp the same proposition. Furthermore, a proposition is not a process, whereas a thought can be seen as process going on in an individual’s mind. Unfortunately, of course the word thought may sometimes be used loosely in a way which includes the notion of a proposition. For the instance, one may say, ‘The same thought came into both our heads at the same time’. In this case, the word thought is being used in a sense quite like that of the word proposition. The relationship between mental processes (e.g. thoughts), abstract semantic entities (e.g. proposition), linguistic entities (e.g. sentences) and action (e.g. utterances) is problematic and complicated, and we will not go into the differences further here. (Hurford, Heasley and Smith, 2007)

4. The definition of Reference and Sense

Sense and reference are two very distinct ways of talking about the meaning of words and other expressions. Sense deals with the relationships inside the language. The sense of an expression is its place in a system of semantic relationships with other expressions in the language.

Examples :

1. The relationship between “big” and “small” is oppositeness of meaning (antonymy).
2.  The relationship between “rich” and “wealthy” is sameness of meaning (synonymy). We will talk more about sense relations in a coming lecture. In some cases, the same word-form can have more than one sense.
3.  Look at the word-form “bank” in the following sentences:

“I have an account at the bank.”

“We took the boat to the other bank of the river.”

In these examples, “bank” has a different sense in each sentence.

Reference is a relationship between parts of a language (words and phrases) and things outside the language (in the world). By reference a speaker indicates which things and persons in the world are being talked about. E.g. My son is in the house. “My son” here refers to a person in the world and “the house” refers to a thing in the world.

To make the term reference clearer to you, hold a book in your hand and describe it in a sentence. For example: “This book is about Semantics.”

The English expression “this book” is part of the language. This expression can refer to any book. In the example, we used it to refer to part of the world which is the book you are holding in your hand. “Reference” is the relationship between the language expression and the real world object.

 CONCLUSION

Semantics is a branch of linguistics dealing with the meaning of words, phrases and sentences, however, contrary to pragmatics it does not analyze the intended speaker meaning, or what words denote on a given occasion, but the objective, conventional meaning.

A sentence is a group of words that are put together to mean something. A sentence is the basic unit of language which expresses a complete thought. It does this by following the grammatical rules of syntax. An Utterance is any sound of talk, that human produce. To differentiate utterance and sentence, we usually use quotation mark (“….“) in written form of utterance. A Proposition is that part of the meaning of the utterance of a declarative sentence which describes some state of affairs. Besides declarative sentence, proposition also clearly involved in the meaning of interrogatives and imperative sentences.

Reference is relation between piece of language and the things in the world. A referent is concrete object or concept that is designated by a word or expression. Sense : its place in a system of semantic relationships with other expressions in the language. Sense consists of 'semantic properties'.