LIN1180/LIN5082 Semantics
Lecture 2
On sense, reference and
denotation
Doing semantics
Remember this?
John: Let’s go to the movies!
Mary: I’m tired.
- What does Mary mean?
- What does Mary say?
As linguists, it is important to distinguish between
SEMANTICS: Literal/conventionalised meaning
“core meaning”, independent of context
PRAGMATICS: Speaker meaning & contextual effects
What a speaker means when they say something, over
and above the literal meaning.
Semantics -- LIN1180
Why is this important?
To successfully analyse meaning as used by speakers of a
language, we need to distinguish various aspects of a
communicative situation.
Mary utters: I’m tired.
Mary’s UTTERANCE communicates different meanings
in different contexts:
John: Let’s go to the movies!
John: What are you cooking for dinner?
John: It’s 9pm and you’re going to bed?
John: How are you feeling?
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Why is this important?
Still, the SENTENCE that Mary utters is the same across
contexts: “I’m tired.”
A sentence is the grammatical object that each utterance
corresponds to.
Semantics deals with sentence meaning and pragmatics
with utterance meaning.
Semantics is important because sentences carry some
meaning that is independent of the context in which
they are uttered. And this meaning is purely linguistic.
This can be the meaning we reproduce when we quote
someone: e.g. “Mary said that she is tired.”
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Semantic content
How can we approach the semantic content of “I’m
tired”?
It is convenient to think that a sentence’s meaning is the
underlying thought it expresses in all its utterances.
In logical terms, this thought is called a PROPOSITION.
Propositions abstract away from the grammatical aspects
of sentences:
e.g. “John loves Mary”. vs. “Mary is loved by John”.
Both sentences semantically express the same proposition:
there is an entity x and an entity y, such that x is a person
called John and y is a person called Mary, and x loves y.
Semantics -- LIN1180
Semantic content
So, our analysis involves the following levels:
UTTERANCE
(bound to a specific situation, a specific speaker etc)
SENTENCE
(An abstraction of the grammatical and lexical content of an
utterance)
PROPOSITION
(A further abstraction of the logical content of the sentence)
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Semantic content
But how do sentences mean outside of context?
Remember this?
The small blue circle is in front of
the square.
The square is behind the small
blue circle.
We are capable of verifying that both sentences are true in
this particular situation.
We know the meaning of these two sentences because we
know what the world must be like in order for these
sentences to be true.
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Semantic content
Truth conditions: In general, we know what a sentence
means, when we know the conditions under which it
can be taken to be true.
In this sense, linguistic semantics explicates how linguistic
meaning is related to the world. (i.e. it deals with the
truth conditions of a sentence’s encoded proposition)
- Lexical semantics explicates the relationship between
words and the conceptual representation of entities in
the world (including abstract ones like happiness).
- Sentential semantics explicates the relationship
between sentences and the propositions they encode.
Let’s see how!
Semantics -- LIN1180
Reference
Imagine you’re standing
in front of this painting
by Velasquez in Prado:
The guy next to you asks:
“Which of those figures is
the Princess of Spain?”
You know that it’s the
figure marked “e3”
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Reference
Clearly, there are many
ways to reply:
“the girl in the white
dress.”
“the girl in the middle.”
“the person being
tended to by the
kneeling maid.”
Obviously, these different
phrases mean different
things, i.e. they have
different contents.
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Reference
But they all pick out the same entity in this
context:
They all REFER to the princess of Spain =>
In a different context, “the girl in the white dress” could pick
out something different or even nothing at all.
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Towards sense
So, reference is a context-bound speaker action.
You will probably think: Then, if semantics is about linking expressions
with worldly objects, semantic contents are just referents...
Not quite... (Gottlob Frege -1892- Über Sinn und Bedeutung)
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Towards sense
‘Superman’ and ‘Clark Kent’ are co-referential
expressions (= refer to the same individual in the
world), but they have different SENSES.
Substituting these expressions across sentences wouldn’t
preserve the same truth value.
e.g.
1. “Lois Lane believes that Superman is handsome”.
2. “Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent is handsome”.
(1) can be true and (2) false at the same time.
Two sentences differ in cognitive significance iff it is
possible for a rational agent who understands both to
take one to be true while doubting that the other is true.
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Towards sense
The postulation of senses helps address these differences
in cognitive significance.
Remember this?
Thinking of word meaning as “definition” is problematic
because people won’t necessarily agree on definitions,
and definitions are either way linguistic, so their
components will themselves need definition...
If we take context-independent meanings of expressions
to be concepts in our minds, we can say that we have
the concept GIRL, when we know the sense of the word
‘girl’.
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Towards denotation
In this respect, in everyday use, our concepts (and
effectively senses) help us determine reference.
e.g. We need to know what the words ‘girl’, ‘white’, ‘dress’
mean in order to understand which entity in our painting the
expression “The girl in the white dress” refers to.
So, if we have acquired the concept GIRL (that is, if we
know the sense of the word ‘girl’), we also know its
DENOTATION (or extension): the set of things of
which the word is true.
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The semiotic triangle (Ogden & Richards, 1923)
CONCEPT
(sense)
GIRL
means determines
expression: girl objects in the world
denotes
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Denotation vs. Reference
We therefore distinguish between:
the sense of an expression
what the expression denotes
We should also distinguish:
Our knowledge of the sense and denotation.
What a person intends to refer to by means of a
linguistic expression.
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Denotation vs. Reference
Denotation is a stable relationship between expressions
and things:
e.g. The word ħuta (“fish”) always denotes a certain kind of
thing in the world. It can only apply to a specific set of
objects.
This is independent of who uses the word and when.
Reference depends on speakers and contexts:
I can use ħuta to refer to different individual fish in different
situations.
So, in each situation, my use can pick out different referents.
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Two major theories of semantics
1. The denotational theory
A direct relationship between
expressions (words, sentences)
and things in the world.
This is a realist view.
things
linguistic
&
expressions
situations
Semantics -- LIN 1180
Two major theories of semantics
1I. The representational theory
The relationship between
expressions (words, sentences)
and things in the world is
mediated by the mind.
This is a cognitivist view.
things
linguistic mental model
&
expressions of the world
situations
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Questions
?
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Homework
Core reading: Saeed, Chapter 1 (AGAIN!!!!) and Chapter
2, section 2.1 (Yes, only pages 23, 24 & 25)
Additional reading: Take a look at the first few pages of
Frege’s ‘On Sense and Reference’.
COME BACK WITH QUESTIONS!
Semantics -- LIN1180
