 Why does one set of words mean

one thing and a similar set mean

something very different?
 When do two different sentences
mean the same thing?
 How can one sentence mean more
than one thing?
 What is meaning?

SEMANTICS- attempts
to answer these
(There is no higher authority than the general community of
native speakers of the language)
 One must know the meanings of the words used in a definition.
Example:
ectomere- ‘a blastomere that develops into ectoderm’
 Sometimes the circularity of a set of dictionary definitions is apparent by looking up
just a few words.
Example:
divine- ‘being or having the nature of a deity’, but deity – ‘divinity’
pride- ‘the quality or state of being proud’, but proud as feeling or showing
pride’
Dictionaries are written to be of partial aid to people who already
speak the language, not to make theoretical claims about the nature
of meaning.
A dictionary entry doesn’t really explain the meaning of a word or
phrase in
 This is an attractive idea in many ways because words often do seem to
conjure up a particular mental images.
Example:
Mona Lisa - may will cause an image Leonardo da Vinci’s painting
to appear in your mind
(However, a mental image can’t be all there is to a word’s
meaning, any more than a dictionary definition can be. )
 Different people’s mental images may be very different from each other,
without the words really seeming to vary much in meaning from individual to
individual.
Example:
lecture – image of one person standing in front of a blackboard
and talking
(in the mind of a student)
- image consist of audience of students sitting in rows
facing forward
 Meaning is just a mental images (the image associated with a word
tends to be of a typical or ideal example of the kind of thing the world
represents)
Example:
bird- if you are like most of the people, your mental image
was not one of an ostrich or a penguin.
(Analysis should also provide some indication of what the
typical bird is like, but clearly some provision must be
made. )
 Mental image exclude atypical exemplars of the word
Example:
forget- have no clear image attached to it
Aspect-
(Only certain words seem to have definite images, but no one
would want to say that only these words have meanings. )
 referent- actual thing a word refers to
 Words for things that don’t exist.
Example:
Santa Clause- do not exist but the word is not
meaningless
(Note: however, this would not cause a problem for a
mental images… )
 Language can be used to talk about fiction, fantasy, or
speculation in addition to the real word, and any complex
explanation of meaning must take account of this fact.
 Some sentences about the real world present problem that its
meaning is just its referent.
Example: Bill Clinton- the winner of the 1996 U.S. presidential election
* Bill Clinton is married to Hillary Rodham Clinton.
*The winner of the 1996 U.S. presidential election is
married to Hillary Rodham Clinton.
* Robin wanted to know if Bill Clinton was the winner of he 1996 U.S.
presidential election.

 Theory of reference: prepositions, abstract nouns, and words such as

forget and the still have no clear meaning (no real word entities could
theses words possibly refer to)
 Meaning involves a relation between language and the world
 Sentence meaning more than word meaning

Example: Bill Clinton is asleep.

 Truth Conditions - conditions under sentence meaning would be true
Example: Bill Clinton is asleep.
 Truth Value – whether the sentence really is true or false

Note: Truth conditions and truth value of a sentence relate

it to the world but in somewhat different way than ordinary
reference relates particular words or expressions to the
world.
Example: Santa Clause…
Example: Santa Clause is asleep right now.
-has a truth Value = presupposition
 Reference to the same individual is not enough to
guarantee that two words or phrase have identical
meanings.
Example: Bill Clinton- the winner of the 1996 U.S.
presidential election
 “ Possible situations” or alternatively “Possible scenarios”
Example: counterfactual sentence:
If I had an apple, I would eat it right now.
true true

Example: indicative conditionals:

Bill Clinton is in Columbus.
(information content –set of all possible scenarios)
 The meaning of the sentence, a linguistic object, is explained in terms
of nonlinguistic objects (scenarios).
 The information content of the sentence , when uttered, amounts to
letting the hearer know that the actual world fits one or another of
these scenarios.
 Imaginary items and individuals can receive referents.
(Allow referents for non actual scenarios)

Example: Santa Clause

referent: large man in red suit who lives at North Pole.
difference: this man exist only in non-actual scenarios.
 Many types off sentences do not even seem to be true or false at all. It
should be clear then that truth conditions are just one aspect of
sentence meaning.

 The conditions under which sentence is true, meaning is probably

also determine in part by the conditions under which sentence may be
used.
Example: Questions used differently from assertions, orders
are used differently from wishes, and so on.
 SEMANTICAL- another way two words can be related

Example: pot is intuitively more closely relater

semantically to the word pan than it is to the word floor.
 NOUNS (N) – can be given a fairly straightforward
characterization using the formal notion of sets.
sets- a collection of items of any sort
elements or members – items belong to a particular set
Ex. The set of whole numbers from 1 to 5.
 - X is a hyponym of word Y if in all
possible scenarios, X’s set is always contained in
(always subset of) Y’s set.
Example: poodle and dog
 Hyponymy can be viewed as “the loss of specificity” .
-moving specific to something more general

- Two words are synonymous if they

have the same meaning
-In case of nouns and adjectives: two words are
synonymous if the sets of entities they pick out are
always equivalent.
 pairs of words that are 100% interchangeable
Example: couch/sofa, cat/feline ,
groundhog/woodchuck, and quick/rapid
- meaning being “opposite” in some
sense, but there turn out to be several ways a pair words
can be opposites.
- Complementary or contradictory pairs – words X and Y,
if every entity in the world is either in X’s set or in Y’s
set but both then X and Y form a complementary pair.
Example: married/ unmarried, visible/invisible
- Relational opposite or contraries – two words X and Y
are relational opposite if everything in the world is
either X’s set, in Y’s set or neither , but in both sets.
Example: over/under, alive/dead, and married/bachelor
- Scalar antonyms or gradable pairs
- Very similar to related opposites, but includes the
concept of a scale between two endpoints – if two
words X and Y under consideration fulfill the criteria
for being relational opposites but in addition can be
seen as endpoints on some scale (of temperature,
size, height, age, etc. )
- Example: good/bad, hot/cold and strong/weak
- something can be hot or cold nor neither
(lukewarm), but it can not be hot and cold at the same
time.
Example: mare, stallion, hen, and rooster all have the
common meaning of “animal” in them.

Example: lexical decomposition comes from causatives

The water boiled . Robin boiled the water.

The door opened. The wind opened the door.
The cake baked. Robin Baked the cake.
The car turned. Robin turned the car.
 Example:
The sheriff killed Jesse, but Jesse is not dead.
Jesse was killed but not dead.

 Semantic Features can also help uncover meaning

relationships of the type of semantic relation
We don’t just add up the meanings to get the meaning
of the whole.
Example: The cat chased the dog.
The dog chased the cat.
 Principle of Compositionality- the relationship between
meaning and syntactic structure in which they are
combined. “Frege’s Principle”
 Structural ambiguity- sentence formed by combining
words and phrases in two different ways
Example: They are moving sidewalks.
They are visiting relatives.
 Exemption cases are called IDIOMS.

Example: He kicked the bucket. (‘he died’)

As for the meaning of sentence, we want to know two
things:
1. whether it is in fact true or false given what we know
about the world (its truth value)
2. the minimal conditions (its truth conditions)
S: false (since Sandy S: True (since Sandy
is not a member of is a member of the
the set (Robin, Lee, set (Robin, Sandy)
Kim)
Pure intersection-
Green, screen