1.

1 BASIC CONCEPT

SEMANTICS is the study of MEANING in LANGUAGE. Knowing the meaning of all the words that
make up a language is not sufficient to interpret an utterance, though. We usually need access
to a series of extra-linguistic information about the participants and the context, their
communication intent, the degree of formality of the interactions as well as other elements, like
previous knowledge about a topic, to onvey meaning.

For this reason, linguists usually differentiate between two complementary approaches to the
area of meaning production and interpretation.

The first area is concerned with sentence meaning and is the object of semantics. The second
deals with utterance meaning and is the object of pragmatics (HUTFORD, B; HEASLEY, B &
SMITH, M, 2007; MEYER, 2007)

In order to clarify this, two questions can be addressed

1. What does it mean?

(This question is a request of information and is independent of the participants in a given

interaction and is in the field of Semantics)

2. What do you mean?

This question is a request of information and is dependent of the participants in a given

interaction and is in the field of Pragmatics)

We have outlined the basic concepts of Semantics here. Before we move on to the activities you
shall take a look at the reminders, they summarize the main topics covered in this unit. Make
sure that you understand them. Do go back to the unit, if you have doubts before doing the
activities

1.2 SENTENCES, UTTERANCES AND PROPOSITIONS

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.

Utterances are physical events. Events are ephemeral. Utterances die in 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. 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 pragmatics (HUTFORD, B; HEASLEY, B
& SMITH, M, 2007; MEYER, 2007).

1.3 MEANING AND DICTIONARY

A DICTIONARY can be thought of as a list of the meanings of words, of what words mean.
But...could one make a list of what speakers in general mean?

The answer is NO because speakers may mean different things on different occasions, even
when using the same words, as in the sentence:

"The door is open".

So, it is important to understand two basic definitions: speaker meaning and sentence or word
meaning.

SPEAKER MEANING is what a speaker means, or wants to convey,

when he uses a piece of language

SENTENCE MEANING (or WORD MEANING) is what a sentence (or word) means, i.e. what it
counts as the equivalent of in the language concerned.

This makes us come to two important definitions in our course. The definitions of sentence and
utterance:

SENTENCES are abstract grammatical elements. Utterances are concrete strings of words.

Semantics is part of our grammatical competence and usually focuses on decontextualized

meaning, while pragmatics focuses on contextualized meaning. So, the study of meaning, or
SEMANTICS, has proven to be one of the more challenging levels of linguistic structure for
linguists to describe. A relatively simple word such as the noun CHAIR, is a term to which the
Oxford English Dictionary (OED) assigns 16 different meanings.

Consider one of these 16 meanings as defined in the OED and two other dictionaries:
Ex:

OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY (OED):A seat for one person (always implying more or less of
comfort and ease); now the common name for the movable four-legged seat with a rest for the
back, which constitutes, in many forms of rudeness or elegance, an ordinary article of
household furniture, and is also used in gardens or wherever it is usual to sit.

MERRIAM-WEBSTER' COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY (MW)

(11TH ED): a seat typically having four legs and a back for one person

AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (AHD):

A piece of furniture consisting of a seat, legs, back, and often arms, designed to accommodate
one person.

he three dictionaries agree on two characteristics of a chair: that it seats one person and has a
back. While the OED and MW specify that a chair has four legs, the AHD states simply that it has
legs. The AHD also notes that a chair "often [has] arms", suggesting that arms are optional. The
other two dictionaries say nothing about arms. The OED entry is much more detailed than the
other entries, noting that chairs exhibit "comfort" and "ease", are "moveable", and are regarded
as "household furniture".

Although the definitions in the three dictionaries are similar, there are enough differences to
illustrate the complexity inherent in defining even the simplest notions. For this reason, many
different perspectives for treating meaning have developed within the field of linguistics.
Dictionary definitions fall within the province of lexical semantics, an area of linguistics
concerned with the study of the meaning of individual words. Because dictionaries are intended
as reference guides, they do not provide theoretical statements about the nature of lexical
meaning. However, LEXICOGRAPHERS, those who create dictionaries, have developed
methodologies for discovering the meanings of words and most effectively presenting these
meanings to users of dictionaries.

For this reason, modern lexicographers have abandoned handwritten citation slips created by
thousands of individuals and have turned instead to collecting examples automatically from
very large corpora. For instance, the publisher Harper-Collins created the Collins Word Web as
the source for citation files used to create a number of dictionaries that they have published,
including The Collins English Dictionary (2007). The Collins Word Web is currently 2.5 billion
words in length and contains various kinds of spoken and written English. It is constantly being
updated so that new words entering the language can be detected and included in upcoming

editions of dictionaries.

Advances in software development have also aided in the creation of citation slips. A
CONCORDANCING PROGRAM can be used on any computerized text to very quickly create a
KWIK (keyword in context) concordance. All instances of chair are vertically aligned so that
their use in context can be easily examined. Although only sentence fragments in which chair
occurs can be seen, often, only a limited context is needed to determine the meaning of a word.
If a larger context is desired, most concordancing programs allow for the entire sentence or
surrounding sentences to be viewed.

While lexicographers will need to examine many uses of a word to determine its meaning(s), the
24 instances of chair in Figure 1 begin to reveal it. Three of the examples point to a chair as a
place to sit:

...in his gown, sitting in a chair....

Enter the friar, sitting in a chair....

The back of the chair on which Gennaio is sitting....

One example actually provides a definition of a chair:

A chair consists of four legs, a seat,....

Another contains a few words, "...carved wooden chair....", specifying what a chair is made of.

Other examples indicate that chair is POLYSEMOUS; that is, that it has more than one meaning.
A chair is not simply a concrete object used for sitting, but an abstract noun designating
someone who is the head of something, or who holds some highly esteemed posi a university:

....Gordon Stewart, chair of the Department of History,....

....B. Watson left his academic chair at The Johns Hopkins University....