- Semantics is the study of meaning in language. It focuses on the literal meaning of words and sentences. Pragmatics studies meaning based on context. - Key terms in semantics include ambiguity, entailment, contradiction, compositionality, and metaphor. Compositionality is the principle that the meaning of an expression is determined by its parts and structure. - Semantics analyzes features of words, semantic roles, lexical relations, theories of meaning, and more. Pragmatics examines how context influences meaning through speech acts, implicature, and deixis.

1. Meaning of Language:
Semantic
Lovely Mae Prieto
Ye Jin Kim

2. Terms
• Semantics • Enduring
• Pragmatics • Element
• Ambiguity • Entity
• Entailment • Feature
• Contradictory • Agent
• Compositionality • Theme
• Anomaly • Denote
• Metaphor • Instrument
• Idioms • Experiencer
• Pragmatics • Designate
• Speech acts • perception
• Conversational implication
• Deixis

3. Characteristics of semantics
• Semantics
- study of the meaning of linguistic expressions
- aims to account for what is linguistically encoded
- linguistic meaning: made up from the sum of the meanings
of its parts
- meaning of sentence: words + syntactic makeup
- focus on literal meaning (non-literal meaning for pragmatics)
• Meaning of a sentence : 2 truth values: true and false
- negation: truth valued is switched.
• Ambiguous: more than one meaning
- words: lexically ambiguous
- phrases: lexically ambiguous and/or structurally ambiguous
• Entailment
- “I dance gracefully.” entails “I dance.”
• Contradictory
- entails the negation of the other sentence.

4. Principle of compositionality
• “expression is composed of the meanings of its parts
and how they are combined structurally.”
• Semantic rule : determine the meaning of a phrase or
sentence based on its composition.
- Rule one: meaning of NP (an individual) is a member
of the meaning of VP (a set of individuals), then the S
is true, otherwise it is false.
Ex. “I dance”
- Rule two: meaning of ( V NP) is the set of individual
VP
X such that X is the first member of any pair in the
meaning of V whose second member is the meaning
of NP.
Ex. “Jack kissed James”

5. Exceptions to principle of
compositionality
• Anomaly: One or more words in a sentence do not
have a meaning, so we can‟t understand the
sentence and when individual words have
meanings but cannot be combined together.
Ex. “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”
• Metaphor: requires a lot of creativity and
imagination to the the meaning of the expression.
Ex. “Time is money”
• Idioms: have fixed non-compositional meanings
Ex. “It is raining cats and dogs”

6. Lexical semantics
Subfield of semantics that studies word
meanings in a sentence and their
relationships with each other
Example:
“I saw my mother just now.”

7. Semantic Features
Tells about the characteristics and properties
of a word
Example:
Mother Father
+human +human
+adult +adult
+married +married
-male +male

8. Semantic Roles (thematic roles)
The noun phrases such as people and thing
in the sentence at describes the role
entities and that involves action
 Agent and Theme
 Instrument and Experiencer
 Location, Source and Goal

9. Lexical Relations
• Synonymy
• Antonymy
– Gradable Pairs
– Complimentary Pairs
• Hyponymy
• Polysemy
• Metonymy
• Homonyms
• Homophones
• Homographs
• Heteronyms

10. Theories of meanings
• Reference
• Sense
• Coreferential

11. Pragmatics
• Understanding of language in context
• Aspect of meaning which cannot be found in the plain
sense of words or structure.
• Speech Acts: many utterances are equivalent to
actions
- Locutionary acts: speech acts that have taken place
- Illocutionary acts: real actions which are performed
by utterance
- Perlocutionary acts: effects of the utterance on the
listener
• Conversational implication: how the hearers manage
to work out the complete message when speaker
mean more that they say
Ex. “Have you got any cash on you?”

12. Pragmatics-cont.
• Deixis: concerns the way in which languages encode and thus also
concerns ways in which the interpretation of utterance depends on the
analysis of that context of utterance
„verbal pointing‟
- Deictic expressions
. Personal or possessive pronouns (I, you, mine, yours)
. Demonstrative pronouns (this, that)
. Spatial or temporal adverbs (here, there, now)
. Other pro-forms (so, do)
. Personal or possessive adjectives (my, your)
. Demonstrative adjective (my, your)
. Article (the)
- primary deixis (deixis): used to point to a situation outside a text
(situational deixis) or to the speaker‟s and hearer‟s (shared) knowledge
of the world (knowledge deixis).
- secondary deixis (endophoric deixis): refer either backwards or
forwards to other elements in a text
. Anaphoric deixis: backward pointing (such, said, similar, same)
. Cataphoric deixis: forward pointing (the
following, certain, some, this, these, several)

13. Reference
1. Saeed, J. I. (2009). Semantics third edition. West Sussex, UK: Blackwell
Publishing Ltd.
2. Yule, G. (2010). The study of Language fourth edition. New York, USA:
Cambridge University Press.
3. Fromkin, V., Rodman, R. & Hyams, N. (2010). Introduction to Linguistic
Philippine Edition. Pasig city, Philippines: Cenage learning Asia Pte. Ltd.
(Philippines branch).
4. Thomason, R. H. (1996, December). What is semantics?. Retrieved
November 30, 2011 from the World Wide Web:
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~rthomaso/documents/general/what-is-
semantics.html.
5. Clark, B. Sentence Meaning. Retrieved November 30, 2011 from the
World Wide Web: http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/139.
6. Bach, K. Ambiguity. Retrieved November 30, 2011 from the World Wide
Web: http://userwuw.sfsu.edu/~kbach/ambiguity.html.
7. Moore, A. (1999, March). Pragmatics and speech acts. Retrieved
December 1, 2011 from the World Wide Web:
http://www.teachit.co.uk/armoore/lang/pragmatics.htm#top.
8. O‟Grady, W., Dobrovolsky, M. & Katamba, F. (1997). Contemporary
Linguistics an Introduction. Hong Kong: Longman Asia Limited.