This document summarizes key concepts from a seminar on semantics and word properties. It discusses how dictionaries provide phonological, grammatical, and semantic information about words. Specifically, it examines how dictionaries represent the different senses of words like "man" and "human" as separate entries. The document also distinguishes between the goals of linguistic semanticists who study word meanings, and encyclopedias which provide factual information. Finally, it notes that the distinction between dictionary definitions and encyclopedic information is blurring, as understanding word meanings involves world knowledge.

1. Department of English Language and Literature
Major: English Language and Literature
Semantics Session 9
“Semantics and word properties: Word Meaning”
Dr. Badriya Al Mamari
Academic year 2021/2022

2. A dictionary
• A dictionary is a central part of the description of any
language. A good ordinary household dictionary typically
gives (at least) three kinds of information about words:
• 1.phonological information about how the word is
pronounced,
• 2.grammatical (syntactical and morphological) information
about its part of speech (e.g. noun, verb) and inflections (e.g.
for plural number or past tense),
• 3.semantic information about the word’s meaning.

4. • A dictionary tells you what words mean. The semanticist
dictionary-writer and the ordinary dictionary-writer have
quite similar goals, but they differ markedly in their style of
approach and the emphasis which they place on their various
goals.

5. • Man is given two
separate senses
here (numbered 1
and 4) and
human is given
three senses (1, 2,
and 3).We will
treat each sense
as a different
item,
representing
them as man1,
man4, human1,
human2, and
human3.

6. • The first point to note about all dictionaries is that their
definitions are necessarily interconnected.

7. • Traditionally, the linguistic semanticist is interested in the
meanings of words and not in non-linguistic facts about the
world. Linguistic semanticist makes the assumption that non-
linguistic facts are not particularly relevant to the study of
linguistic meaning (that is, the meanings conveyed by the
sense relations of the words within the language itself as
opposed to meaning conveyed by information from the
context or situation in which the language is used).

8. • Sibling is not a word in the everyday English vocabulary, but
is a technical term used to refer to someone who is either a
brother or a sister.
• Parent refers to father and mother!
• The meaning of sibling contains no concept of sex. Clearly,
the two predicates brother and sister form a natural class.
• These are called Theoretical’ or ‘technical’ predicates (session6)

9. Dictionary vs Encyclopaedia
• A Dictionary describes the senses of predicates.
• An Encyclopaedia contains factual information of a variety of
types, but generally no information specifically on the
meanings of words.

10. • The stereotype of a predicate contains, strictly speaking, only
encyclopaedic information, although the importance of
stereotypes in the use and understanding of words fuzzes the
distinction between dictionary and encyclopaedia. (session 8)
• From a traditional point of view, the descriptive semanticist is
basically interested in that information about words which can
give rise to sentences containing them being either analytic (e.g.
The cheetah is an animal) or contradictions (e.g. The cheetah is
not an animal). Any other information is not strictly semantic
but encyclopaedic, at least under the assumption that such a
distinction can indeed be made.

11. • Many semanticists are coming to the realization that the
study of meaning has to include the study of encyclopaedic
information in some way along with dictionary information
in order to represent more adequately the knowledge a
speaker has about the language.

12. References:
Hurford, J. R., Heasley, B., & Smith, M. B. (2007). Semantics: a
coursebook. Cambridge university press. (pp. 141 -151