Semantics Anggiat Mananda Hutabarat

@uki.semantics.2013

1. Psychology 2. Philosophy 3. Linguistics 4. Semantics

5. Pragmatics

 How individual humans learn. How they retain, recall, or lose information. How human mind seeks meanings and works.

 How

we know, how any particular fact is considered true and related to other possible facts. How to identify an antecedent (presupposition) and entailment, contradictory, synonyms, etc.

 How language works to make meanings. Identifying meaningful elements of specific

languages. Indentifying meaningful elements through modulations of a speakers voice (pronunciation).

 The systematic study of meaning:

knowledge encoded in the vocabulary of the language and its patterns for building more elaborate meanings, up to the level of sentence meanings.

 The

study of use of language meaningful communication.

in

a. Animals stimulus-bound
communicating for something exists only repertoire communication for survival and food

b. Humans
stimulus-free communicating for what does not exist or yet creative producing new utterances due to arbitrariness resulted in arbitrariness

. Humans Language Acquisition Processes

a. Pre-Linguistic Phase b. Linguistic Phase Knowledge about language

Humans Language Acquisition Processes

b. Linguistic Phases

Babbling
One-word Phase Two-word Phase Telegraphic Phase

b. Linguistic Phases Babbling

six to ten months producing a large variety of sounds; not of house hold learning to distinguish the sounds of his/her own from

those not of his/her own /i/, /u/ and fricatives and nasals producing syllabic-type sounds

b. Linguistic Phases
One-Word (Holophrastic) Phase

Age of 12 months Imitating their parents ways of naming what is in the

environment Talking about objects around them

b. Linguistic Phases
Two-Word Phase
Age of 18 months Expressing two words to refer to a sentence

b. Linguistic Phases
Three or More-Word (Telegraphic Speech) Phase
Between 2 and 3 years of age Using more complex utterances in strings of lexical

morphemes Acquiring questions and negative statements Being able to make use of utterances, as in real communication, such as: expressing feelings and thoughts (ablility to use and to think and to conceptualize)

All the knowledge of language acquired is partly conscious and explicit; but to another extent it is unconscious and implicit.

We know and use the language, but we do not know what we know; because we do not remember the process of acquiring the knowledge; but are consciously able to use it.

What Makes Meaningful Utterances?

Knowledge of Language Knowledge of How to Use the Knowledge

1. Knowledge of Language

Vocabulary
to produce utterances
to understand others utterances

2. Knowledge of How to Use the Knowledge

a. how to form the vocabulary (Morphology) (The description of morphological knowledge of the mental grammar is termed Grammar)

Grammar:
Semantics (Meaning)
Mental knowledge of words to be understood and to

understand. Mental knowledge of word understood and to understand.

combination

to

be

2. Knowledge of How to Use the Knowledge

b. how to pronounce the vocabulary items and recognize others utterances through their pronunciation (Phonology)

Phonology:
The mental speech sound arrangement knowledge

The speech sounds are termed phonemes.

Phonemes: sounds that contrast one another

The contrastive units: Homonyms: two words with the same sounds but have different
meanings. Ambiguity: a sequence of words .with the same pronunciation with different interpretation. Prosody: different melodies with different meaning.

2. Knowledge of How to Use the Language

c. how to combine the words (Syntax)
Knowledge, or description, of the classes of words and the

combination to go to form phrases and sentences.

The relation between syntactic knowledge and semantics: The meaning of a sentence is based on or more than the meanings of the words in the sentence. The meaning of a word often depends on those going together with

Required Abilities/Competences
1. Possession of Vocabularies 2. Pronouncing vocabularies

1. Possession of Vocabularies
a. to produce meaningful utterances to others b. to understand others 2. Pronunciation

a. to pronounce vocabularies to others b. to recognize others pronunciation

10 Aspects of a Speakers Knowledge

1. Adjency pair
Any utterance or answer that can go together and related to the first
Examples:
1. How did he leave?

on foot

by plane

by bus

alone

10 Aspects of a Speakers Knowledge

2. Ambiguity
A sentence with two meanings
Examples:
1. Flying planes can be dangerous. 2. The English history teacher is here now.

10 Aspects of a Speakers Knowledge

3. Anomaly
An utterance sounds meaningful, but in fact meaningless
Examples:
1. The leaves are dancing to the left and right. 2. House I live in.

4. Antonym
Two words making opposite statements about the same subject
Examples:

1. All the students passed the test. (failed) 2. They are selling fruit. (buying)

5. Contradictory
sentences that contain opposite statements about te same subject
Examples:

1. Its a thick book. (thin)

6. Entailment
a word which entails another
Examples:

1. She has some children. Two of them are girls.

7. Paraphrases
sentences with the equivalent statements about the same entities
Examples:

a. The spaces are rented by the owner. b. The owner rents the spaces.

8. Presupposition
the message of sentence presupposes other sets of knowledge
Examples:

1. Harry teaches English at the school. a. There is a person named Harry. b. Harry teaches. c. English is the subject Harry teaches. d. There is a school where Harry teaches.

9. Semantic Features
words with some elements of meaning
Examples:

leave go travel journey voyage

10. Synonymy
words with the same sense in a given context
Examples:

He is looking for his wallet. (searching)