Lecture 1: Introduction to formal semantics

Semantik (MODUL 04-006-1006 Grammatiktheorie)

, Universität Leipzig, 10. April, 2014
Sandhya Sundaresan

1 Burocratic Issues
Burocratic Issues

+ The course will be taught in English.

+ This will be an interactive course with both teacher and students participating: so regular
class participation and questions are expected.

Ways to contact me:

You can contact me in any of the following ways:

• Talk to me before/after class if you have quick questions. If it’s a question about something I
said in the lecture, I would prefer if you asked me during the lecture: this way, others in the
class may also benefit from the answer.

• Email me: sandhya.sundaresan@uni-leipzig.de to schedule a meeting.

• Sprechstunden: My Sprechstunden this semester are nach Vereinbarung. Office Loca-

tion: H 5.13, Institut für Linguistik Beethovenstrasse 15, Uni Leipzig

Tutorials:

+ In addition to our Thursday classes, there will also be weekly tutorials for the class where you
will practise exercises, clarify questions etc.

+ Your tutors are, in alphabetical order: Aaron Doliana and Katja Stärk.

+ The tutorial schedules are as follows:

1. Stärk: Mondays, 15.00-17.00.

2. Doliana: Thursdays, 9.00-11.00 (before this class).

+ You are expected to attend the tutorials regularly.

Grading and other requirements:

+ The final grade for the course will be based on an exam (Klausur) at the end of the semester.

+ Bonus points for regular attendance and participation.

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Lambda Calculator sofware:

+ We will be using the interactive software tool, Lambda Calculator, which was designed
precisely to help semantics students learn λ-calculus.

+ You should use this software regularly to practise exercises that will be uploaded on the course
webpage every week. This will be useful for you in the exam.

+ The solutions to the exercises will typically be discussed in the weekly tutorials.

+ The software can be freely downloaded here: http://dylanbumford.com/LambdaCalculator/.

+ If you have any questions concerning the semantics, ask me or your tutors. If you have any
questions about technical issues surrounding the software, send a bug report here: https:
//github.com/dylnb/LambdaCalculator/issues.

Required readings:

+ Every week, there will be a lecture handout which I will put up on my homepage: http:
//www.uni-leipzig.de/~sundaresan – it will typically be available the day before the class,
i.e. by Wednesday.

+ In addition, there will be assigned readings every week from the textbook “Semantics in Gen-
erative Grammar” by Irene Heim and Angelika Kratzer. The book can be downloaded for free
online, here: http://eecoppock.info/CompositionalSemantics/HeimNKratzer.pdf.

Additional recommended readings:

+ What is meaning?: Fundamentals of Formal Semantics. Paul H. Portner. 2005. Blackwell.

(NOTE: less technical, but excellent beginner’s textbook to understand the basic concepts).

+ Introduction to Semantics: an essential guide to the composition of meaning. Thomas Ede

Zimmermann and Wolfgang Sternefeld. 2013. De Gruyter Mouton.

+ Schritte zur Satzsemantik I : online lectures by Arnim von Stechow. http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.

de/~astechow/Aufsaetze/SchritteI.pdf. (NOTE: this is quite technical).

Course Topics:
These is the rough order of topics we will cover in this course (don’t worry if you don’t understand
all the technical terms being used here!):
+ Sets and functions

+ Arguments and predicates.

+ Truth values and truth conditions: learning to compute semantic meaning from syntactic struc-
ture.

+ Semantic types, denotations, and type-driven interpretation: introduction to λ-calculus.

+ Types of predicate: verbal and non-verbal

+ Predicate modification

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+ Relative clauses and variable binding

+ Quantification (involving terms like: any, all, every, some etc.

+ If there is time, we will look at the semantics of pronouns, and anaphors, and take a first look
at intensional semantics (semantics of complex clauses: e.g. embedded clauses under verbs
like believe, think, dream, wonder and say.

2 Introduction
Introduction
Semantics is the study of meaning. There are various kinds of meaning, and they can be examined
from several different perspectives, but this course is about:

Linguistic semantics: The study of meaning in natural language

+ Even when we restrict our attention to linguistic semantics, there are several different ap-
proaches that people take.

+ Here we’ll mainly follow the approach known as formal semantics.

Formal semantics is not a specific theory, but a broad approach, with lots of people working on it and
a lot of room for variation. Here are the main points that specific formal theories have in common:

+ They use rigorous formalisms adopted from logic and mathematics to represent meaning, im-
plicitly if not always explicitly.

+ They ultimately anchor the meaning in terms of reference to things in the world. A true
sentence is one which accurately matches the situation it is talking about.

+ They further understand meaning in terms of truth-conditions. So knowing the meaning of

a sentence is knowing the conditions under which it would be true.

3 The merits of formalism

Formal semantics can be rather difficult.

+ In order to really work with it, you first need to learn a whole bunch of logical and mathematical
symbols and be able to interpret and manipulate formulas, which at times can be extremely
complex.

+ For example, 1 is a (simplified!) formula representing a possible denotation (meaning) for the
English word everything.

(1) λf ∈ De,t .∀x ∈ De , f (x) = 1.

However, it is worth the trouble. The use of formalism has a couple of critical advantages:

(i) They allow and indeed require precision and clarity because of the use of well-understood
systems of logic. The implications of a particular analysis are easy to determine and test.

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+ This is invaluable, because when you’re talking about meaning, it’s really hard to make
really clear what you mean, and figure out whether other people mean the same thing.

(ii) Defining the meanings of words and sentences in terms of symbols avoids a potential circu-
larity, because the symbols are themselves independently defined.

+ If you defined the meanings a word in terms of 3 other words, you’d then have to define
those 3 other words, and if you used 3 more words to do that for each, you’d have to
define those 9 new words. . .

4 What is a meaning?
What is a meaning?
+ We all know intuitively what “meaning” means.
Based on this knowledge, we can say that two things have the same meaning, i.e. are synonymous:
(2) a. dog
b. canis familiaris
(3) a. Francine saw Billy.
b. Billy was seen by Francine.
We can say that two elements of language that don’t fit fit together in terms of their meaning are
contradictory:
(4) a. dead
b. alive
(5) a. The book is on the table.
b. The table is on the book.
Sometimes, if we know that one element of language is an accurate description of a thing or situation,
we can also be sure that another element will be an accurate description of the same thing or situation.
The first entails the second:
(6) a. a maple
b. a tree
(7) a. The circle is inside the square.
b. The circle is smaller than the square.
+ However we understand meaning, whatever theory we have for it, it should be able to deal with
these facts in a natural way.
Let’s consider some possibilities.

4.1 Are meanings words?

Are meanings words?
One definition would be to say that meanings are just words. But there is a problem with this:
• How do we understand the meanings of the words?
• We use other words. Now we need even more words to explain these other words.
+ We have a circularity problem.

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4.2 Are meanings ideas?

Are meanings ideas?
To avoid circularity, we want to ground meanings in something that’s outside of language.

• The meaning of a word like dog isn’t literally a bunch of other words like ‘mid-sized, four-
legged, carnivorous mammal with a long snout, usually domesticated as a pet or for assistance
in hunting, herding or guarding’.

• Of course, when I say dog, I have some idea of a dog in my mind, and I’m essentially trying to
tell you something involving that idea.

+ So it seems reasonable to think that the meaning of dog is just that idea.

But there are some problems with the idea theory of meaning too:

(i) It’s easy to imagine an idea or concept corresponding to dog, which is independent of language
and has reality in our minds, but it’s harder to pin down the idea corresponding to although,
not or the passive voice.

(ii) Furthermore, two people will commonly have different concepts in their heads when they think
of dogs or clothes or food, but that doesn’t mean we would say that the words dog, clothes,
food mean different things for them.

– E.g. life-long vegetarians often don’t think of meat as food, but that doesn’t mean they
misunderstand me when I say Let’s go get some food.

It is clear at some intuitive level that we have ideas and concepts and that they are related in some
fashion to the words we use and the meanings of those words.

+ But ideas are not the right foundation on which to build our theory of meaning.

4.3 No, meanings are out in the world

No, Meanings are out in the world
Instead of all of these possibilities, we’re going to adopt the idea that meanings are anchored outside
of language and outside the mind in the real world.

• Names like Barack Obama simply refer to the relevant person. Not to a mental picture of that
person, or a definition like ‘the president of the United States’.

• The word dog describes all of the things in the world which are actually dogs, independent of
the concept that you or I may have of dogs.

+ For other words, phrases and sentences things are going to get more complicated, but this is
the basic idea that will get things started.

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5 Truth-conditional meaning
It’s easy to see how the meaning of a noun like dog or a name like Barack Obama could be based on
something out in the world, but what about a sentence, like 8?

(8) The diamond is to the left of the spade.

+ There’s meaning of this sentence isn’t exactly something you could find in the world and point
to.

+ Even if you draw a picture like ♦♠ , it wouldn’t be quite right to say that the sentence means
the picture, in the same way that Barack Obama means the US president.

5.1 What are truth-conditions?

What are truth-conditions?
The way to approach this instead is to think about what you can do as an English speaker by virtue
of understanding a sentence like 8:

• If I show you that picture ♦♠ , or any number of other pictures, like a number of other
pictures, like ♦ ♠ or ♦♥♠ or ♦♠♥ , you can tell me that sentence 8 is true.

• If I show you a picture like ♠♦ ♠ ♦ or ♠♥♦ , you can tell me that sentence 8 is false.

+ Indeed, for any picture of this kind, you’ll be able to tell me whether 8 is true or false (or perhaps
uncertain, say with something like ♠♦♠ ), because by understanding the sentence, you
know what’s necessary for it to be true.

+ In other words, you know the conditions that have to hold in the world, for the sentence
to be true.

Truth-conditional semantics:
The truth-conditional theory of meaning holds that this kind of knowledge is the basis for the
meaning of sentences.

+ The meaning of a sentence is quite simply the set of conditions that must be met in
order for that sentence to be true.

+ This crucially gets us our connection to the outside world, because the truth-conditions are
actually conditions on how the world must be.

+ A sentence is true iff it is an accurate description of the world.

+ Note crucially that the meaning of a sentence is not its truth-value, i.e. whether it is true or
not, but its truth-conditions, i.e. the way the world would have to be in order for it to be
true.

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6 How to approach sentence meaning

+ We’ve adopted the idea that that meaning of a sentence is its truth-conditions.
+ But how do we take a given sentence and figure out what its truth-conditions are?
+ For words it’s reasonable to think that there’s just something like a mental dictionary lexicon
where we look up the meanings.
+ There’s a finite list of (basic) words, and to a large extent their meanings are unpredictable.
But this clearly isn’t right for sentences, for two reasons:
1. The sentences of a language are infinite and unlistable. We’d never be able to put together
the complete dictionary of sentence meanings, because there would always be more sentences.
2. The meanings of sentences are, for the most part, not completely arbitrary. The speakers
of a language have no trouble understanding sentences they head for the first time.
The issue is that sentence formation is a productive (or generative) process.
• This is actually one of the defining properties of syntax – it is a potentially infinite discrete
combinatory process.
• So we need our semantics to be able to work hand-in-hand with the syntax, somehow inter-
preting the potentially infinite number of structures that the syntax creates.
Fortunately, sentential semantics seems to have a very convenient property that makes all of this
manageable. It is compositional:
Compositionality: The meaning of an expression is determined by the meaning of its component
parts and the in which they are combined and nothing else.
• So the reason why we’re able to understand the sentences people say to us and to produce
new sentences with the meanings we intend, is because the interpretation of sentences follows
a predictable pattern.
• As long as we know the meanings of the individual words and can figure out (with the help
of the syntax) how they’re put together, we can reliably figure out the meaning of the whole
thing.
+ This is one of the most important ideas of linguistic semantics, and the central principle on
which this course will be built.
+ The principle of compositionality is usually attributed to Gottlob Frege, a 19th century philoso-
pher.
Compositionality is particularly important within truth-conditional semantics.
+ Our main job isn’t to figure out what a sentence ‘means’ or even what its truth-conditions are.
+ Rather, we need to figure out how this is built up out of the meanings of the words and how
they are combined.
+ This means that the meaning of any word or phrase is just the contribution it makes to the
meaning of the whole sentence.
+ So we can work backwards from the meaning of a sentence and of the pieces we already know
to figure out the meanings that other kinds of words and phrases must have.

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7 Predicates and saturation

Now, the way that Frege thought about composition specifically involved the saturation of one
meaning component by another.

• You have one piece (a word or phrase) whose meaning is somehow incomplete and another
piece whose meaning can supply the sort of thing that the first piece is missing.

• Composition is just using the meaning of the second to fill the gap in the meaning the first, or
saturating it.

Let’s take an example to see how this works:

(9) Barack Obama is sleeping.

+ We’ve already decided that names refer, e.g. the meaning of Barack Obama is just that it points
to the actual person Barack Obama. Here’s a representation:

JBarack ObamaK =

+ And we’ve decided that the meaning of a sentence is its truth conditions. So we can try to
represent the meaning of 9 like this:

zzz → true
JBarack Obama is sleepingK =
... → false

So what is the meaning of just a verb phrase, like is sleeping? This is where compositionality starts
to help us out:

+ The meaning of the whole sentence should be the result of combining together the meanings
of the parts.

+ We know the meaning of the sentence, and we know the meaning of Barack Obama. So we
should be able to figure out the meaning of is sleeping by taking the meaning of the sentence
and removing the meaning of Barack Obama.

Here’s what we get:

zzz → true
Jis sleepingK =
... → false

• This drawing, with its empty box, gets across the idea that the meaning of is sleeping is
somehow incomplete.

• It will become a proposition if we can get something to fill that empty space.

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• We say that it is an unsaturated predicate or a property.

This makes it pretty obvious, then, how the proposition, the meaning of the complete sentence comes
about:

(i) We start with the unsaturated predicate meaning of is sleeping, which has an empty slot for
an argument.

• Then we take Barack Obama, a name referring to a person, which is of the right type to fit into
that empty slot.

(ii) Then we saturate the predicate by inserting the argument, yielding a complete proposition with
the appropriate truth-conditions.

(iii) Of course, is sleeping isn’t on its own something about Barack Obama, so we can always
saturate the predicate with a different individual:

zzz → true
JJohn M cCain is sleepingK =
... → false

Notice now that the pattern here is not something special about is sleeping, but works equally well
for any property.

• We could draw analogous diagrams for is tall, likes robots, works for Daimler or fell over, with
different details where we now have the zzz .

• But the basic outline would be the same, with true and false on the right and an empty box
for the missing argument on the left.

Notice also that we can use the strategy here to work out more of the details that we’re glossing over
here.

• E.g. we can break is sleeping down into is + sleep + ing (and perhaps even further) and try
to figure out which chunk of meaning each piece contributes.

• We’ll even find that some properties contain further predicates and arguments – so likes robots
is created from likes and robots by saturation as well.

+ Thus we can see that assuming the principle of compositionality gives us a clear way to proceed
in exploring the meanings not just of entire sentences, but of words and phrases as well.