【重点大学语言学】Chapter 5Semantics Teaching Plan.doc

Chapter 5 SemanticsObjectivesThe students will learn how to understand meaning in language and enhance their language ability so that they will become better-informed and thus more-qualified English teachers in the near-future. Students will be able to1) identify and analyze various approaches to meaning,2) identify and analyze the meaning of words or sentences3) produce effective and appropriate utterances.Key Points1) The schools of semantics 2) The definition of semantics3) Approaches to meaning4) Word meaning5) Sentence meaning6) Sense relationships7) Semantic analysisTime required: 160 minutesProcedureStep1. Introduction (10 minutes)Teacher introduces semantics to students by starting with a few interesting cases of meaning in language in daily life to arouse students interest in semantics.Step2. Presentation (90 minutes)Step2.1 (30 minutes)5.1The definition of semantics5.2 Approaches to meaning5.2.1 Meaning as naming5.2.2 Meaning as concept5.2.3 Meaning as behaviour5.2.4 Meaning as context5.2.5 Meaning as truth conditionsTeacher (T) teaches the above contents students (Ss) summarize and T gives feedback Ss do exercises and T gives feedbackStep2.2 (30 minutes)5.3 Word meaning5.3.1 Sense and reference5.3.2 Seven types of meaning5.3.2.1 Conceptual meaning5.3.2.2 Connotative meaning5.3.2.3 Social meaning5.3.2.4 Affective meaning5.3.2.5 Reflective meaning5.3.2.6 Collocative meaning5.3.2.7 Thematic meaning5.3.3 Lexical fields5.3.4 Componential analysis5.3.5 Semantic relationships between words5.3.5.1 Homonymy5.3.5.2 Polysemy5.3.5.3 Homophony5.3.5.4 Synonymy5.3.5.5 Antonymy5.3.5.6 Hyponymy5.3.5.7 MeronymyT teaches the above contents, Ss give more examples Ss summarize and T gives feedback Ss do exercises and T gives feedbackStep2.3 (30 minutes)5.4 Sentence meaning5.4.1 Sentence and proposition5.4.2 Semantic roles5.4.3 Semantic relationships between sentences5.4.3.1 Entailment5.4.3.2 Presupposition5.4.3.3 Synonymy5.4.3.4 Inconsistency5.4.3.5 ImplicatureT teaches the above contents, Ss give more examples Ss summarize and T gives feedback Ss do exercises and T gives feedback Ss do some more exercises to enhance the knowledge just gainedStep 3. summary (10 minutes)Ss summarize what have been taught in Semantics class, T gives feedback.Step4. Exercises and discussion (50 minutes) Check what students have learnt in Semantics class by doing after-text exercises and make students discuss the assigned topics in group. Lecture NoteChapter 5Semantics5.1 The definition of semanticsSemantics is the branch of linguistics which studies meaning in language. It stands at the very center of the linguistic quest to understand the nature of language and human language ability because expressing meanings is what languages are all about. Meaning can be studied from different angles. As a result, there are different approaches to the study of meaning. Linguists have investigated the way in which meaning in a language is structured and have distinguished between different types of meaning, for example, its literal meaning and non-literal meaning. There are a number of well-known theories of meaning. 5.2Approaches to meaningLet us first consider two sentences:(3) a. The word “dog” means a certain species of mammal.b. The red light means that you cannot go in.Do you say the two means in them have the same meaning? We should like to know what exactly it means to mean something. The words to mean or meaning occur in all kinds of natural sentences, such as the ones in (4): (4) a. Those clouds mean rain.b. The Chinese word “ai” means “love”.c. His losing his job means that he will have to look again.d. This building is meant for storage.e. What do you mean by that look?f. The opinions of critics meant little to him.g. Do you know the meaning of the word hypochondriac?h. What is the meaning of life?Dictionaries give signify, import, denote, represent as synonyms of to mean and provide descriptions such as “to be defined or described as, to denote, to convey” for (4a), “to convey the same sense as, to refer to the same thing as” for (4b), “to imply, to result in” for (4c), “to design for a certain purpose” for (4d), “to intend to convey or indicate” for (4e), “to be of a specified importance or significance, to matter” for (4f), etc. The noun meaning is described as “something that is signified, something that one wishes to convey, especially by language” for (4g), “something that is felt to be the inner significance of something” for (4h). C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, in their famous book The Meaning of Meaning (1923), have given a list of twenty-two definitions of the word meaning. One purpose of semantics is to distinguish these different ways in which language “means”.5.2.1 Meaning as namingThe view that the meaning of an expression is what it refers to, or names, is often called referential theory or naming theory. The word tree, for example, names the object tree in the real world. The object tree is called the referent. The word tree stands for the properties that all trees have or for the class of trees. So, nouns name objects or events and adjectives name the properties of those objects or events. Verbs name actions and adverbs name their properties. In this view, words are “names” or “labels” for things in our mind or in our experience.Of course, there are some problems with this view. One of them is that it is not always immediately obvious what is being named. What do conjunctions like but and and refer to? Even those concrete words are not always well defined. The word tree can stand for a particular tree or any tree or all trees in the world.5.2.2 Meaning as conceptOne of the most usual ways to cope with some of the problems involved with the theory of naming has been to take the view that expressions actually mean the concept or idea associated with them. Ogden and Richards (1923: 11) have suggested a modelsemantic triangle (Figure 1) illustrating the view of meaning as concept.Thought (concept) Symbol Referent (the word)(the object)Figure 1: Semantic triangleHere, the “symbol” is the linguistic element, i.e. word, sentence, etc., and the “referent” is the object in the world of experience, while “thought” is concept. According to this view, there is no direct link between symbol and referent, that is, between language and the world. The link is via thought, the concept in our minds. 5.2.3Meaning as behaviourThe American linguist L. Bloomfield illustrated this view by the well-known story of Jack and Jill. Jill is hungry. She sees an apple and by saying something gets Jack to fetch it for her. If she had been alone she would have first received a STIMULUS (S) (hunger) which would have produced a RESPONSE (R)she would have made a move to get the apple. This can be diagrammed as follows:S RHowever, since Jack was with her, the stimulus produced not the response R, but a linguistic response, that of saying something to Jack, which can be symbolized by r. The sound waves resulting from this in turn created a stimulus for Jack, a linguistic stimulus (s), which results in his non-linguistic response R of getting the apple. We now have a more complicated figure.S r.s RBloomfield argued that meaning exists in the relation between speech (that is, Jills speech to Jack and Jacks linguistic response, which is shown by rs) and the practical events (Jills stimulus S of hunger) and (Jacks response R of getting the apple) that precede and follow it. The meaning of a linguistic form is thus defined as observable behaviour. Such an approach to meaning is called behaviourism, or behaviourist theory, which clearly draws on psychology.5.2.4Meaning as contextThe context determines the meaning. The view that meaning is found in the context within which a particular expression is uttered suggests that we can derive meaning from, or reduce it to, the observable context. examples:(5) I dont like her. Shes tall and thin and moves like a crane.(6) I do like her. Shes tall and thin and moves like a crane.The second parts of the two sentences are the same but in (5) we have the impression of awkwardness while in (6) we have the impression of elegance. They have taken on different meanings as a result of the different contexts supplied by the first sentence in each case.Two kinds of context are recognized: a linguistic context and a situational context. Every utterance occurs in a particular spatial-temporal situation. Each utterance is limited by various factors of the situational context. These factors include:(i) the setting (formal, informal, )(ii) the speaker and hearer (relationship, position,)(iii) the activities they are engaged in at the time(iv) the presence or absence of other participants (relationship, position,)(v) the presence of various external objects and eventsThe linguistic context alone is the weaker form of contextual views. It is principally concerned with the probability of words or expressions co-occurring or collocating with each other. This is obviously an aspect of meaning.The British linguist J. R. Firth advanced a contextual view of meaning embodying both linguistic and situational contexts. He held the view that “we shall know a word by the company it keeps”. Like Bloomfield, he was concerned with reducing meaning to a set of observable features. Unlike Bloomfield, he chose to focus on a more sociological view rather than a psychological one. 5.2.5Meaning as truth conditionsThe sentence “The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776” is true, and the sentence “The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1976” is false. We know the meaning of both sentences equally well, and knowing their meaning means knowing their sense of truth conditions. The sense of a declarative sentence permits you to know under what circumstances that sentence is true. Those “circumstances” are called truth conditions of the sentence. The truth conditions of a declarative sentence are the same as the sense of the sentence. We compare their truth conditions with “the real world” or some historical fact, and can thus say which one is true and which one false. Put it more simply, this means that knowing the meaning of a sentence is the same as knowing the conditions under which the sentence is true or false. And knowing the meaning of a word or expression is knowing the part that it plays in the truth or falsehood of the sentence containing it. Such an approach to meaning is called truth-conditional theory/semantics, which clearly draws on formal logic. Statements about meaning are based on the formulation that:(7) S is true if and only if PHere, S is a sentence. P is the set of conditions which guarantees the truth of S. So, for example, if we assert that “Peter is married”, we need to recognize that for the statement to be true, there must be some individual called Peter, that there is a social institution called marriage and that this individual is involved in this state of marriage.This view sounds reasonable, but it also has its problems. If we adopt such a truth conditional approach, we limit semantics to being concerned principally about meaning in relation to truth and falsehood. Some linguists have objected that this is too narrow a view. For example, how can we discuss the truth or falsehood of a question or a command? Truth conditions apply most obviously to declaratives or statements.5.3Word meaning5.3.1Sense and referenceSense and reference are two different, though related, aspects of meaning. The semantic links between elements within the vocabulary system is an aspect of their sense. Since sense is to be defined in terms of relationships which hold between the linguistic elements themselves (mostly words), it is concerned with intralinguistic relations. For example, the English words bachelor and married have the sense relationship of bachelor= never married. The sense of chair in English is defined by the existence of other words like stool. Similarly, the sense of red is defined by the other terms in the color system: brown, orange, yellow, etc.Reference or extension deals with the relationship between the linguistic elements (words, sentences, etc.,) and the non-linguistic world of experience, e.g. things, actions, events, and qualities. For example, the word tree refers to the object tree, and the word book refers to the object book. It was pointed out that, under certain circumstances, the question “What is the meaning of the word x?” can be answered by means of obvious definitionby pointing to, or otherwise indicating, the referent or referents of the word. Of course, it is not always possible to draw a clear-cut line between sense and reference for the reason that the categories of our language correspond, to some degree at least, to real-world distinctions. Whether language determines the shape of the world or vice versa is probably a “chicken and egg” problem. However, we have to keep in mind that not all languages will make the same distinctions, and that there is considerable indeterminacy in the categorization of the real world. It is because of this that we can distinguish sense and reference, however, we must admit that there is no absolute dividing line between them, between what is in the world and what is in language.5.3.2Seven types of meaningAccording to the British linguist G. Leech, meaning in its broadest sense can be classified into seven types: conceptual, connotative, social, affective, reflective, collocative, and thematic meanings. Among them, connotative, social, affective, reflective, and collocative meanings are called associative meaning.5.3.2.1Conceptual meaningIf you had to say what the words woman and man meant, one answer would be to say that a woman was a “human, adult, female”, and a man would be a “human, adult, male”. These items of information, or semantic features, serve to categorize the terms woman and man, as well as to distinguish them from related terms. We can set out the relationships in formal terms as below:man:+HUMAN +ADULT +MALEwomen:+HUMAN +ADULT +FEMALEgirl+HUMAN ADULT +FEMALEboy:+HUMAN ADULT +MALEbull:HUMAN +ADULT +MALESemantic feature analysis attempts to account for the conceptual meaning of a word according to the presence or absence of a specific semantic feature in the word. Conceptual meaning, also called denotative or cognitive meaning, is the essential and inextricable part of what language is, and is widely regarded as the central factor in verbal communication. It means that the meaning of words may be discussed in terms of what they denote or refer to. Usually conceptual meaning can be studied in terms of contrastive features or a binary feature format. For example, the word woman can be specified as +HUMAN, MALE, +ADULT, as distinct from the word boy, which can be defined +HUMAN, +MALE, and ADULT.5.3.2.2Connotative meaningConnotative meaning is the communicative value that a word or a combination of words has by virtue of what it refers to, over and above its purely conceptual content. It can vary from age to age, from society to society, and from individual to individual. Compared with conceptual meaning, connotative meaning is peripheral, and relatively unstable, that is, it may vary according to culture, historical period, and the experience of the individual. In addition, connotative meaning is indeterminate and open-ended in a sense in which conceptual meaning is not. Connotative meaning is open-ended in the same way as our knowledge and beliefs about the universe are open-ended: any characteristic of the referent may contribute to the connotative meaning of the expression which denotes it.5.3.2.3Social meaningSocial meaning is that which an expression conveys about the contexts or social circumstances of its use. It chiefly includes stylistic meaning of an utterance. In fact, we rarely find words which have both the same conceptual meaning and the same stylistic meaning. True synonyms do not exist. Lets look at some other examples:cast(literary)diminutive(very formal)throw(general)tiny(colloquial)chuck(casual, slang)wee(colloquial, dialectal)These are two groups of near synonyms, but they have different stylistic meanings. They must be used in different contexts, for example, cast must be used in literature, throw is a general word which can be used in any context, but chuck is slang, which should be used in casual contexts. 5.3.2.4Affective meaningThe level of meaning that conveys the language users feelings, including his attitude or evaluation in shaping his use of language is called affective meaning or emotive meaning. It is largely a parasitic category in the sense that to express our emotions we depend on the mediation of other categories of meaning as conceptual, connotative or social. For example, nigger, originally a word denoting a certain race, has virtually become a term of abuse or contempt; and a similar development has occurred with part of the political vocabulary, such as fascist.Some words have different affective meanings, though they have the same conceptual meaning. Take politician and statesman for example; the former has a derogatory sense while the latter has not. The sentence below is a good example to show their differences:(8) I hope for the sake of peace and stability that Clinton will prove himself more statesman than politician. (Time, No. 4, 1993)5.3.2.5Reflective meaningReflective meaning is the meaning which arises in cases of multiple conceptual meanings, when one sense of a word forms part