Semantics and Phonology

SEMANTICS
The term semantics, originally a Greek term, is a recent addition to the English language.
However in its early use in the 19th century the term was not used simply to refer to
meaning, but to its development; what we today call historical semantics. Despite
additional attempts around 1900 the term did not catch on until Ogden and Richards
published their now famous book The Meaning of Meaning in 1923. Today semantics is
one of the central areas within linguistics with ambitious goals and numerous
applications and influences, but also one of the most problematic ones.
Linguists working within semantics study the ways in which words or sentences acquire
meaning and the processes by which native speakers of a language can assign stable
interpretations to word strings. Since meaning can be influenced by various linguistic
factors semantics plays an important role in most branches of linguistics with the
exception of phonetics and of course semantics itself.
Semantics and Phonology

Phonology is the study of the sound systems of particular languages semantics is
related to meaning studies in several ways phonemes can distinguish meanings by
means of establishing so-called minimal pairs such as ben and pen. The exchange of one
phoneme by another one leads to a difference in meaning; thus the two items must be
two different phonemes.
The sound system also carries meaning through the patterns of stress that we
adopt in speaking cases of lexical stress in present-day English where we have examples
such as contrast and contrast or export versus export. Cases like these, where the
placement of stress within a word changes the word class are well known. Or for
example, take a simple sentence such as Jim enjoys playing country songs in bars: here
the choice of the nucleus influences the meaning of the sentence Jim enjoys playing
country songs versus hip hop songs in bars; or Jim enjoys playing country song in bars
versus in concert halls.
And finally variations of pitch may lead to different tonal effects and by means
of which we can influence the meaning of several chunks of speech; we can create
different sentence types such as Mary passed her exams yesterday which is a declarative
sentence but with a rising tone on yesterday Mary pass your exams yesterday? We can
easily create an intonation question. So tonal differences may lead to the change of the
meaning of words and sentences.
Semantics and Morphology
Morphology studies the internal structure of words and how words are built out
of smaller components. There are three central processes but they differ with respect
to the degree of semantic transparency of the word forms they produce.
Inflection is semantically fully transparent and it doesn't involve a change of the

basic forms meaning and the affix, if there is one, can clearly be associated with a fixed
meaning. For example take the present-day English affix -ed which clearly means past
time reference.
In derivational processes the meaning of the affixes involved is in many cases
not clearly definable, i.e., the affixes cannot be straightforwardly associated with a fixed
meaning, so unlike inflectional affixes they are semantically non-transparent. For
example the affix ion in items such as destruction, election, qualification.
Finally, compounds can be fully transparent as in endocentric compounds such
as school-boy or school-girl; or totally in transparent as in exocentric compounds such
as pickpocket which is not a type of pocket or redskin which is not a type of skin.
Semantics and Syntax

Syntax investigates how words combined into successively larger structures to
form phrases and sentences. Semantics deals with the way the resulting syntactic
structures are interpreted and the syntactic structure of a sentence determines its
semantic interpretation to a considerable extent. For example if we swap around the
elements in the present-day English The lion chases the mouse we can create a totally
different meaning by changing the word order: The mous chases the lion. Here we have
a different meaning because the parts of the sentence are structurally related to each
other and in present-day English this structure is reflected in the word order.
The exact division of labor between syntax and semantics and the way they
interact that is their interface are among the most interesting and central, but also the
most controversially discussed issues in linguistics.
Semantics and Pragmatics

Drawing the line between semantics and pragmatics is difficult and controversial
since both fields are concerned with the transmission of meaning. Through language,
however, we might say that whereas semantics studies meanings abstracted away from
language users in situations, pragmatics is concerned with the meanings that linguistic
expressions have in particular contexts in which they are uttered, and with various
functions that speakers assign or choose to perform with them.
In trying to determine what someone actually wants to say people regularly go
beyond the conventional meanings of the words spoken by taking into account
contextual aspects. For example, to understand the girls answer in this dialogue what
time is it the milkman has just arrived? you have to interpret the situation the
participants the history of the interaction. And beyond your world knowledge you have
to have the ability to draw inferences, conclusions. For example that it is 8 o'clock
because the milkman generally arrives at around that time.
Semantics and Other disciplines
Linguists are not the only scholars with an interest in semantics. In fact meaning
is studied in various other academic disciplines, some of which are represented on this
flip chart.
Philosophy
While linguists take the notion of meaning as given and start working from there
the philosopher takes one step back and ask questions like how is it possible for
anything to mean anything? or what sort of relation must hold between x and y for it
to be the case that X means Y? and so on and so forth.
Psychology
Researchers working in the area of psychology of language or psycholinguistics
are concerned with a number of fundamental questions related to the mental
processing of meaning such as how is meaning represented in the human mind? or
what mechanisms are involved in encoding and decoding linguistic messages? and last
but not least how do children acquire meaning psychological and psycholinguistic
frameworks? commonly take an experimental approach to find answers to these
questions.
Semiotics
In semiotics, the study of signs, language is viewed as one symbolic system
among many. Linguistic meaning is regarded as a special subset of the more general
human capacity to make one thing stand for another, i.e., to identify and create signs.
Semioticians are interested in the types of relationship that may hold between a sign
and the entity it represents, which include the following relationships between sign and
symbol:
iconic
arbitrary
conventional
discrete
Cognitive science
It is an interdisciplinary approach bringing together what is known about the
human mind from linguistics, psychology, computer science and philosophy. It seeks to
answer the following central questions what sources of knowledge do humans utilize
in speaking, hearing and thinking? or how is knowledge organized and represented in
the human mind? and how is this knowledge put to use? and what cognitive
processes underlie the application of this knowledge? Semanticists, inspired by the
ideas of cognitive science, see language as part of our general cognitive ability. They
argue that we have no access to a reality, which is independent of human categorization.
From their point of view the structure of reality is a product of the human mind created
with language. This school of thought which is in sharp opposition to traditional
approaches to semantics is called cognitive semantics.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence has been defined as the science of making machines do
things that would require intelligence if done by humans. This includes the ability to
handle language in applications such as:
machine translation
information extraction and retrieval
man-machine interfaces
intelligent tutoring
In order to succeed in any of these machines require knowledge about the meanings of
words and how word meanings combine to form sentences. Besides such linguistic
knowledge, they also need encyclopaedic knowledge about the way the world works.
Goals and objectives of semantics

Semantic analysis is trying to achieve a number of fundamental goals:
1. Goal of description: semanticists have to find ways to describe the meaning of
isolated words, words in context, sentences and utterances.
2. Variation: these items may vary in context, so semantics seeks to define the
principles that underlie this phenomena of variation.
3. Complexity: often meaning is complex or multi-dimensional to describe this
composite effect of meaning is among the goals of modern semantics.
4. Combination: and what happens if simple meanings combine into compounds
phrases sentences and beyond? To answer this question is another major goal of
semantics.
All this has to be highly systematic because the semanticists want to describe meaning
in a maximally economic way; thus the use of mathematical formalisms as descriptive
devices is very common within semantics.

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SEMANTICS

Semantics and Phonology

Inflection is semantically fully transparent and it doesn't involve a change of the

Semantics and Syntax

Semantics and Pragmatics

Semantics and Other disciplines

Goals and objectives of semantics

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