Semantics: Studying Meaning

A Written Report Presented

By
Ludwig B. Libot
Hafidah M. Buale
Section A3-2 (9-10:30am, T&F)

Mrs. Rosemarie Purganan

Professor, Department of English
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The Process: How the Brain Processes Information

The ability to understand language and produce speech is associated with several
areas of the cerebral cortex. Basically, spoken language is first perceived in the auditory
cortex, while written text, images or sign language, is processed in the visual cortex. This
information is then sent to the Wernicke’s area, in the temporal lobe, where it is matched
against the person’s vocabulary stored in the memory. This where meaning is assigned to
words and language comprehension is achieved. The signals are then transmitted via a
bundle of nerve fiber, known as arcuate fasciculus, to Broca’s area in the frontal lobe.
Broca’s area is responsible for speech production. Output from the Broca’s area goes to
the motor cortex which controls muscle movement necessary for speech.

Aphasia is a language disorder caused by brain damage. Lesion in the Wernicke’s

area cause sensory or receptive aphasia. Wernicke’s aphasics have trouble understanding
language, whether it is spoken or written but have no motor problems. They can speak at a
fluent pace but their speech is often incoherent. It can be described as a strange mixture of
words that may sound like complete sentences but makes no sense and has nothing to do
with the subject of conversation. Patient’s with a lesion in the Broca’s area, on the other
hand can understand language, but have difficulties in speaking. They talk slowly,
searching for words, forming incomplete sentences with poor syntax, but usually manage
to say important words to get their message across.

The Basics: Types of Meaning

Philosophers and linguists alike have long debated the intricacies of language, how
we construct meaning, and how stationary those meanings really are. You've probably
heard the line, 'That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.'
Shakespeare asserts here then that a name doesn't matter - it's what that thing or concept
really is. Even if we ceased to call a rose a rose, we could still smell its fragrance, feel its
velvety petals, and be pricked by its thorns.

Semantics, in general, means the meaning and interpretation of words, signs, and
sentence structure. Griffiths (2006) also defines semantics as “the study of word meaning
and sentence meaning, abstracted away from context of use”. Semantics largely determine
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our reading comprehension, how we understand others, and even what decisions we make
as a result of our interpretations. Semantics can also refer to the branch of study within
linguistics that deals with language and how we understand meaning. This has been a
particularly interesting field for philosophers as they debate the essence of meaning, how
we build meaning, how we share meaning with others, and how meaning changes over
time.

Studying meaning is descriptive and not prescriptive. The purpose of describing

language is to understand the nature of knowledge about meaning in a language that a
person knows while the latter gives or prescribes “speakers and writers into abandoning
some meanings and adopting others” (Griffiths, 2006). Hurford, Heasley and Smith (2016)
simply states that semantics is the study of meaning in language, while Kreidler (2006) and
Cutting (2008) defines semantics as the systematic study of meaning in a language. These
definitions agree with two words: meaning and language.

Sender’s Meaning

Sender’s meaning is the meaning that the speaker or writer intends to convey by
means of an utterance. According to Griffiths (2006), in a communicative exchange, at least
two participants, also called interlocutors, are involved: the sender (speaker or the writer) and
the addressee (receiver or the message). Sender’s meaning is something that addressees are
continually having to make informed guesses about. Addressees can give indications, in their
own next utterances, of their interpretation or by performing other actions.

Sender’s meanings, then, are the communicative goals of senders and the
interpretational targets for addressees. They are rather private, however. Similar to a linear
model of communication, the sender’s meaning is something that an addressee tries to
understand.

Sender’s thoughts are private, but utterances are publicly observable. Other people who
were present when an utterance was produced can be asked what they heard, or saw being
written. We cannot be sure that sender meaning always coincides with addressee interpretation,
so there is a dilemma over what to regard as the meaning of an utterance. Is it sender’s meaning
or the interpretation that is made from the utterance, in context, by the addressee(s)?
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We cannot know exactly what either of these is. However, as language users, we gain
experience as both senders and addressees and develop intuitions about the meaning an
utterance is likely to carry in a given context.

Noam Chomsky, an American linguist, is also known as “the father of modern

linguistics”. His early contributions to the scientific study of language include the language
acquisition device (LAD), transformational grammar (TG), and the language as innate,
among others. While he has some detractors who questions his concepts, Chomsky is also a
cognitive scientist, social critic, and political activist. So, what made say – colorless green
ideas sleep furiously?

At the level where it is right, the syntactic level – can we copy the structure and say
colorful purple umbrellas move playfully? Both have a subject noun modified by an adjective
and a verb modified by the adverb. If semantics deals with sentence meaning, what does the
quotation means from the sender’s point of view?

A sentence is traditionally defined as a group of sentences expressing a complete

thought, that is, with a subject, and a predicate. Is the quotation a sentence?

1. Things cannot be logically colorless and green simultaneously.

2. Ideas cannot sleep and nothing can sleep furiously (can it?)

Although we say sometimes “Share your ideas. Don’t let them sleep”, the mixing of words
in the quotation confuses the reader on its intended meaning. This quotation is an example
grammatically correct quote but semantically anomalous.

Hurfort, Heasley & Smith (2016) define sender’s meaning as speaker’s meaning – what
a speaker means or intends when he/she uses a piece of language.

Sentence Meaning

It is the meaning of a sentence is its literal meaning (Griffiths 2006). A “word” is a

string of characters that can have different meanings (jaguar: car or animal; driver: one who
drives a vehicle or the part of a computer). A “sentence” is a group of words that express a
specific thought: to capture it, we need to understand how words relate to other words
(“Paul, Jack’s brother, is married to Linda “. Linda is married to Paul, not Jack.). People
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who are familiar with the language can agree on meaning in sentence considered in
isolation. Identifying the speakers meaning and sentence is very beneficial in understanding
the various notions of communication people use through language.

Words may sound the same but they mean differently especially when they were
combined with other words Thus, the meaning of the word is the contribution it makes,
people know the meaning of the word based in their languages.

Example:

1. Ariana stopped making her projects yesterday, but she hasn't finished making it.

2. Ariana finished making her projects yesterday, but she hasn't stopped making her
projects.

3. They we're chosen to be the mascot.

4. They we're picked to be the mascot.

5. You were confusing.

6. You were deceiving.

Although these words independently share similarities of meaning, but they are not
interchangeable. This means that there must be a difference in meaning at sentence level.
An alternative is to start with a broader range of examples and ask what are the linguistically
encoded differences between them.

This leads to differentiating different types of;

•lexical meaning

•syntactic meaning

•intonational meaning and;

•contextual inference.
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This leads to the important notion of compositionality, the notion that the linguistic
meaning of an expression is made up from the sum of the meanings of its parts.

Word Meaning

The study of word meaning became a mature academic enterprise in the 19th
century, with the birth of historical-philological semantics (Section 2.2).

The notions of word and word meaning are problematic to pin down, and this is
reflected in the difficulties one encounters in defining the basic terminology of lexical
semantics. The study of word meaning is crucial to the inquiry into the fundamental
properties of human language. In English, if two words have the same meaning, this is
known as synonymy and the words are synonymous (stopped means the same or
synonymous with finished, chosen means the same or synonymous with picked). If these
synonyms are not closely related in meaning then the result can be ambiguity.

If the word has more than one meaning, this is known as polysemy (comes from the
Greek for "many signs") and the word is called polyseme

Examples:

1. The word "word" has many meanings

2. "The word good has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his
grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not
necessarily a good man."

– G.K. Chesterton, "Orthodoxy," 1909

Polysemy in Language

Such polysemy can give rise to a special ambiguity (He left the bank five minutes
ago; He left the bank five years ago). Sometimes dictionaries use history to decide whether
a particular entry is a case of one word with two related meanings, or two separate words,
but this can be tricky.
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Even though pupil (eye) and pupil(student) are historically linked, they are intuitively as
unrelated as bat(implement) and bat (animal)." – Adrian Akmajian, et al., "Linguistics: An
Introduction to Language and Communication." MIT Press, 2001

When a word has more than one meaning and it is not possible to decide on the
intended meaning this is called Lexical Ambiguity. Word Rank explores the relationships
of words with other words in a particular language. Sentence Rank seeks to find the
relationships of sentence. These are the two grammatical ranks in semantic investigation of
language. That a word has by virtue of its place in the linguistic system. (Finch,2000)
Antonymy is a sense of opposite meaning and can take number of forms.

Types of Antonyms in English Language:

• Gradable or Graded Antonyms

- These are the sets of word pairs which are responsible for showing variation between the
two opposites.

- Degree of opposition is Gradable

Examples:

Words like narrow, old and young, tall and Short, smart and stupid, healthy and sick.

In each of these pairs, the opposition is not absolute.

• Relational Antonyms

- These are the sets of word pairs which are responsible for showing the relationship
between two opposites such as front and back, Uncle and Aunt, Hello and Goodbye.

• Complimentary Antonyms

- These are the sets of word pairs that have no degree of meaning. For example: Dead and
Alive, Male and Female, On and Off

1. Homonymy refers to the sense of relation between words that sound alike or spelled
identically but not the same in meaning.
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Examples: Blew and Blue, Beach and Beech, Be and Bee, Bare and Bear.

2. Hyponymy shows the relationship between a general term or generic terms.

Examples:

 Color (Hypernym)

Red, White and Black (Hyponym)

 Genre (Hypernym)

Pop, R&B, Jazz, Rock, Reggae (Hyponym)

 Drinks (Hypernym)

Juice, Wine, Beer (Hyponym)

 Flower (Hypernym)

Rose, Jasmine, Orchid, Raflesia, Tulips (Hyponym)

3. Meronyms is used to refer a whole part of hierarchy or a term which denotes part of
something but which is used to refer to the whole of it, e.g. faces when used to mean
people in I see several familiar faces present.

Semantic Field

In linguistics, a semantic field is a set of words grouped semantically (by meaning)

that refers to a specific subject. The term is also used in anthropology, computational
semiotics, and technical exegesis.

Words that are linked and shares the same meaning which can be divided into
subfields or subsets. Differs in certain space in a language, some words differ in Lexical
items available. But language differs.
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Example:

MADNESS

- Insane

- Demented

- Paranoid

- Batty

- Schizophrenic
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References
Canning, J. (2004). "Disability and residence abroad." Subject Centre for Languages,
Linguistics and Area Studies Good Practice Guide. Retrieved 7 October 2008,
from http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/2241
Griffiths, P. (2006). An introduction to English semantics and pragmatics. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press Ltd.

Grice, Paul 1989 Studies in the Ways of Words, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP

Hurford, J.R., Heasley, B., & Smith, M.B (2016). Semantics: A coursebook.UK:
University of Cambridge Pres. Ross. Oxford University Press.

https://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-semantics-definition-examples-quiz.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwVfCjbIJQI

https://expertsystem.com/word-meaning-sentence-meaning/ BASIC SEMANTICS, Blog,

language, Semantic Technology (21 October 2016)

https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/meronym

https://expertsystem.com/word-meaning-sentence-meaning/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/word-meaning/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_field