Semantics
This section covers the material in File 7 in Language Files.
Background
a) A quick definition
Just as syntax is the study of sentence structure and morphology is the study of word structure, semantics is the study of meaning.
b) Two issues
Meaning!

c) Problem: Just what is meaning?

That is, just what do we mean by meaning? The issue is trickier than we might think. Here's some ideas. All problematic as explanations in and of themselves.
d) Dictionaries
One place people go to find out what a word means is the dictionary. This is problematic. It is, in fact, something that I find irritating. Why? This brings us to the other problem with looking towards dictionaries to understand what "meaning" is. Dictionaries define words in terms of other words; this is circular and can keep you up at night if you've been drinking too much coffee. Here's a trivial example taken from Language Files: An even more problematic example is this kind of runaround: This is an egregious example of circularity. But it again points to the problem of dictionaries inability to escape words in trying to characterize the meanings of words. In some sense, it seems necessary to view meaning independent of language. Think back to the basic notion of Mentalese that Pinker advocates. Having bashed them, it is important to say that dictionaries are practical and useful for people who already know a language. It's just that they don't really tell us what meaning is in a deeper sense.


e) Mental Images

In an attempt to escape language, some people have argued that meaning can be best understood in terms of mental images. That is, meaning is the mental image conjured up by a word. This seems to work pretty well for examples like this: Big Ben. You probably get a strong mental image of a big brown tower with a clock (I think there's a flag somewhere in my mental image but I'm waivering).

Anyway, there are problems with this. Here's a list:

Bottom line. If we want to advocate a theory of meaning based primarily on viewing meaning in terms of mental images, we have to address the serious challenges raised by these problems.


f) Meaning and Reference

What if we assume that meaning is the thing that a word points to in the world (its referent). Well, here's some of the problems that arise.

Not all words point to real things in the world (Santa Clause, Klingon). Simply put, words can point to completely imaginary things and we can clearly know what these words mean.

There's also a logical issue here. Consider the following set of sentences.

The third sentence is not true. Yet, Cassius Clay and Mohammed Ali refer to the same person. Here's another set of examples. What's the deal? If Bill Clinton and the President refer to the same individual in the world, why can't we substitute one for the other? That is, why is the last sentence not a paraphrase of the third sentence? Bottom line. If we want to advocate a theory of meaning based primarily on viewing meaning in terms of mental images, we have to address the serious challenges raised by these problems.


g) Sentence Meaning

Okay, so we haven't arrived at a simple understanding of meaning. But, we can see that meaning must have something to do with the way language relates to the world, and mental images and reference must have something to do with this, even if they are not, in and of themselves, the who enchilada. One other issue that we must face is that we not only need to understand how words mean, but also, how combinations of words (e.g. sentences) mean.

h) Meaning and Truth

One way that linguists and philosophers of language have dealt with this problem is to explore the possibility of sentence meaning in terms of an understanding of what it of takes for a sentence to be true. Consider the following sentences. Our knowledge of what this sentence means can be characterized in terms of our knowing what it takes for the sentence to be true. The first sentence would be true just in case the individual denoted by the name Jon Bon Jovi had the quality of not having hair on his head. The second sentence would be true just in case the man denoted by the name Bob Dole engaged in the activity of residing in the place denoted by the name Washington.

Think about how this is useful for sentences like "Santa Claus lives in the North Pole." We can understand what such a sentence means, because we know what it would take for it to be true. We'd need to identify a possible world in which an individual who delivers presents at Christmas with the name Santa Claus engaged in the activity of residing in the place denoted by the name North Pole.

Okay, now remind yourselves of this pair of sentences.

What we see is that the conditions of being president and of being Bill Clinton are not the same. Hence, one cannot be substituted freely, even though they refer to the same person. Calculating sentence meaning in terms of what it takes for a sentence to be true. The truth conditions for these two sentences are quite different. One will always be true (at least while Clinton is alive) while the other will cease to be true in a few months.
i) Meaning and Language Use
It's worth noting that many sentences can't be viewed in terms of truth conditions. How do we know whether a question is true? A command? The meaning of these other types of sentences require other tools, tools which are discussed in file 8 on Pragmatics, the study of language in context or in use.
Meaning Relationships

j) Relations between words

This section will review meaning relationships between/among words. We're just scratching the surface here, but it is important to see that much of what it means to know words is to know how they are related to other words in our lexicon. This helps to give us a sense that our mental dictionary is not just a messy box full of words. Rather, it is a complexly structured machine.
k) Synonymy
Synonymy refers to a situation in which there is a clear meaning overlap between words. This is a gradient phenomenon in that we have a sense that some words are closer synoyms than others. Pinker (and others) argue that there are no true synonyms, that people are very parsimonious in chunking up the meaning space. Anyway, here are some obvious synonyms in English.


l) Homonymy

Sometimes, two meanings share the same phonetic form. That is, two words sound identical but are different in meaning. This is homonymy.


m) Antonymy

Other times words have opposite meanings. This is antonymy.


n) There are 3 flavors of antonymy

Note that relational opposites are different from contradictory pairs. You don't have to be a cop if you're not a robber. But, if you aren't male, you have to be female (genetically). And note that relational opposites are scalar. There's not a scale between cop and robber on which you fall. By contrast, you can clearly locate yourself on a scale between happy and sad or hot and cold.
o) Semantic features and lexical decomposition.
One way to analyze meaning is to attempt to break the meanings of words down into yet more basic meanings. This activity has a couple of fancy sounding names. One is lexical decomposition, and the other is componential analysis. What they amount to is basically our attempt to study the ways in which the meanings of some words are built up out of the meanings of others. Consider the examples of the words mare, stallion, hen, and rooster that are given to you in the book. One way you can approach understanding what you know about these words is to see that they all share the property of being animals. You could say they have the feature [+animal]. For their part, mare and hen share the feature [+female], while stallion and rooster share the feature [+male]. The point here is that we can decompose the concept of rooster into more primitive elements. The set of that elements can help encode what we know about the meaning of rooster and it can encode ways in which rooster is semantically related to other concepts. Nouns like these lend themselves more straightforwardly to this kind of lexical decomposition into sets of features than do more abstract nouns or verbs.

With this notion of decomposition in mind, consider the following pairs of words..

If we look at the first word of each pair, we see that if its meaning holds, so does the meaning of the second. The term your book gives for this is hyponymy. In simple terms, if you are a mare, you MUST also be a horse. That is, the set of mares is always a subset of the set of horses, so we can say that mare is a hyponym of horse.  Logically,  mare entails horse. If you are a dog, you MUST also be a mammal. If you are a woman, you must also be a human. In all of these cases, the first, more specific word of the pair entails the second.

Rules of entailment:

That's how entailment works. This will be useful when we discuss pragmatics, as sentences have entailment relations. For example, if you hear the sentenc "Chip lives in North Carolina" we know that "Chip lives in the United States." Living in North Carolina entails living in the United States.
p) Question: Does horse entail mare?
Nope. Because if you are a horse, you are not necessarily a mare. And if you aren't a mare, you still might be a horse!


q) Semantic decomposition again

How might we understand a bit better how entailment works? Well we can decompose the word mare semantically. This means that we can take its meaning apart to look at the elements that make up "mare-ness" (note that this word is odd precisely because [-ness] is a fairly unproductive derivational suffix, but you all know what it means). I'm going to use capitals here to indicate that all of the decomposition below is actually happening in mentalese rather than in English in particular.
Now we can see the nature of the entailment relation. Mares are a subset of the set of horses because HORSE makes up part of the meaning of MARE. If something isn't a horse, we know it can't be a mare. So, mare entails female and adult-animal as well.

By the way, this type of semantic decomposition is important. Here's a sentence:

Componentially, if we break down "lost" we see that it might mean something like "be defeated/not win". But defeat, which means "prevail over X or beat X, i.e. to win." By decomposing lost and defeated we can see why this sentence makes no sense.
Semantic composition

r) What is it?

What we just did above also required interpreting a sentence in terms of the combined meanings of its parts. This is semantic composition, not to be confused with semantic decomposition, which is about looking at what sub-meanings make up the meaning of a word like "mare". Here's a definition:
s) Some sentences are ambiguous for syntactic reasons. Look at these:
In these cases, we need to know, for example, whether the PP [with bincoluars] part of the NP [an octopus with binoculars] or not. We need to know whether "moving" and "visiting" are adjectives describing "sidewalks" and "relatives" or whether they are acting as progessive verbs. So, where things are attached in the tree matters in how we interpret the meaning of a sentence. We've already seen this in syntax, and that's part of semantic composition.

t) Idioms

Idioms, in fact, call our attention to compositionality precisely because they are NON-COMPOSITIONAL. Consider these sentences: The idiom "kick the bucket" isn't about "kicking" and it isn't about "buckets". The meaning of the idiom cannot be derived from the combined meanings of its parts. This is what makes idioms special. For our purposes, we can use idioms to call attention to the generally compositional nature of our sentences. "I lifted the box" is entirely compositional. Even a sentence like "John kicked the bucket" is compositional to a large degree. If we know that the idiom means "die", then we put that together with "John" and we get the meaning of the whole thing.
u) More on compositionality
Syntactic structure alone isn't enough to understand compositionality in sentences. A clear illustration of this come is Adj + N combinations. Consider these examples:
What's going on here is that although all three are syntactically identical, they do not mean in the same way. The problem is that we have to dig even deeper and look at the different ways that adjectives work.

v) Types of adjectives (and end of semantics review)