INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTIC

SEMANTICS

ARRANGE BY:
Veronika Rahayu
Dede Sanjaya
Risky Amelia

STKIP MUHAMMADIYAH PAGARALAM

2017
 CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

Studying semantics is important because semantics (as the study of

meaning) is central to the study of communication and as communication
becomes more and more a crucial factor in social organization, the need to
understand it becomes more and more pressing. Semantics is also at the centre of
the study of the human mind - thought processes, cognition, conceptualization -
all these are intricately bound up with the way in which we classify and convey
our experience of the world through language.
Because it is, in these two ways, a focal point in man's study of man,
semantics has been the meeting place of various cross-currents of thinking and
various disciplines of study. Philosophy, psychology, and linguistics all claim a
deep interest in the subject. Semantics has often seemed baffling because there are
many different approaches to it, and the ways in which they are related to one
another are rarely clear, even to writers on the subject. (Leech 1990: IX).
Semantics is a branch of linguistics, which is the study of language; it is an
area of study interacting with those of syntax and phonology. A person's linguistic
abilities are based on knowledge that they have. One of the insights of modern
linguistics is that speakers of a language have different types of linguistic
knowledge, including how to pronounce words, how to construct sentences, and
about the meaning of individual words and sentences. To reflect this, linguistic
description has different levels of analysis. So - phonology is the study of what
sounds combine to form words; syntax is the study of how words can be
combined into sentences; and semantics is the study of the meanings of words and
sentences.
 CHAPTER 2
DISCUSSION

A. Definition of Semantics

If not most, at least, many introductions to semantics begin by asking the

following question: what is semantics? What does semantics actually study? This
seems like a sensible way to start a course on semantics, so we can begin by
looking at some of the answers that different authors provide. According to
Lyons (1977), Semantics is the study of meaning. Semantics is the study of
meaning in language Hurford & Heasley The (1983). Semantics is the study of
meaning communicated through language Saeed (2003). Semantics is the part of
linguistics that is concerned with meaning Löbner (2002). Linguistic semantics is
the study of how languages organize and express meanings (Kreidler, 1998).
(Sutrisno, 2012)
Nowadays, there are two ways of approaching semantics. The formal
semantics approach connects with classical philosophical semantics, that is, logic.
It should not be forgotten that semantics was a part of philosophy for many
centuries. Formal semantics tries to describe the meaning of language using the
descriptive apparatus of formal logic. The goal is to describe natural language in
a formal, precise, unambiguous way. Related (though not identical)
denominations for this type of semantics are truth-conditional semantics, model-
theoretic semantics, logical semantics, etc.
The other approach to semantics we could call psychologically-oriented
semantics or cognitive semantics. This approach does not consider the logical
structure of language as important for the description of the meaning of
language, and tends to disregard notions such as truth-values or strict
compositionality. Cognitive semantics tries to explain semantic phenomena by
appealing to biological, psychological and even cultural issues. They are less
concerned with notions of reference and try to propose explanations that will fit
with everything that we know about cognition, including perception and the role
of the body in the structuring of meaning structures.
So, we can conclude that Semantic is the study of meaning. It is a wide
subject within the general study of language. An understanding of semantics is
essential to the study of language acquisition (how language users acquire a
sense of meaning, as speakers and writers, listeners and readers) and of
language change (how meanings alter over time). It is important for
understanding language in social contexts, as these are likely to affect meaning,
and for understanding varieties of English and effects of style. It is thus one of
the most fundamental concepts in linguistics.
B. The Kinds of Meaning in Semantics
A. Lexical meaning
Lexical is the meaning compatible with dictionary. It need to know that
dictionaries which not actually so to exist the other means not lexical like
figurative meaning.
Example:
I walked five kilos yesterday, and now my legs ache
The ache in my foot prevented me from running fast
B. Grammatical
A grammatical process will happen after covering grammatical process.
Example :
Clouth – using a clouth
Horse – Riding a horse
mis + understand + ing
misunderstanding
copy + able
copable
C. Contextual meaning
Contextual meaning is word avaible in the one context.
Example :
My brother felt by bike
She have fallen in the examination
He felt falling in love to my sister
If price had fallen we would have become bankrupt
D. Referencial and Non referencial meaning
The words have meaning is called referencial and haven’t meaning is
called non referencial. The words like horse, red, and picture (referencial) on the
contrary and, or, but and because (non referencial).
Deictic word is the words included pronoun like she/he, you, and I. the
words explain to room like here, there, those, adverb of time like now,
tomorrow, yesterday. The words called indicator like this and those.
Example :
A word I statement belong to reference it’s not same :
“I met with Mr Ahmad” Ani said Ali
E. Conceptual and Association meaning
Conceptual is the meaning of meaning by words have been free from the contex
or association and association is the meaning of meaning by word agree to there
is relation of word with there is something outside.
Conceptual meaning : horse is kind of animal and has four legs
horse is the habitually of human.
Association meaning: Red : kind of colour
Brave
Corrupt
White : kind of colour
Sacred
Clean
Crocodile : kind of animal
Wicked
F. Denotative and connotative meaning
Denotative meaning is the orginal of meaning or the thruth of meaning so
denotative meaning same with lexical meaning. Connotative meaning is the
other of meaning “additional” to denotative meaning.
Example :
Pig : kind of animal
Group of people : group of people that gather be once of group.
G. Word and Term
Word is lexical meaning, denotative meaning, and conceptual meaning. Term
is the thurth of meaning, clean it’s not hurry although without context.
Example :
Word : Match
Pig
Phiyzic
Term : Linguistics
Integral
IHSG
Manufacture

C. The systematic study of meaning

Linguistic semantics is an attempt to explicate the knowledge of any speakers

of a language which allows that speaker to communicate facts, feeling, intentions
and products of the imagination to other speakers and to understand what they
communicate to him or her.
Three disciplines are concerned with the systematic study of ‘meaning’ in
itself: psychology, philosophy, and linguistics. Psychologists, they are interested
in: how individual human learn, how they retain, recall, or lose information; how
they classify, make judgments and solve problems. In other words, how the
human mind seeks meanings, and works with them; Philosophers of language
are concerned with how we know, how any particular fact that we know or
accept as true is related to other possible facts In other words, what must be
antecedent to that fact and what is a likely consequence, or entailment of it;
what statements are mutually contradictory, which sentences express the same
meaning in different words, and which are unrelated; Linguists want to
understand how language works. Just what common knowledge do two people
posses when they share a language that makes it possible for them to give and
get information, to express their feelings and their intentions to another, and to
be understood with a fair degree of success.
According to Alsayed (2012) meaning covers a variety of aspects of language,
and there is no general agreement about the nature of meaning. Looking at the
word itself, the dictionary will suggest a number of different meanings of the
noun “meaning” and the verb “mean”. The word mean can be applied to people
who use language, i.e. to speakers, in the sense of “intend”. And it can be applied
to words and sentences in the sense of “be equivalent to”. To understand what
meaning is, one has to keep in mind whether we are talking about what speakers
mean or what words (or sentences) mean.
It may seem to you that meaning is so vague, insubstantial, and elusive that it
is impossible to come to any clear, concrete, or tangible conclusions about it. We
hope to convince you that by careful thought about the language you speak and
the way it is used, definite conclusions can be arrived at concerning meaning.
Lewis Carroll had brilliant insights into the nature of meaning (and into the
foibles of people who theorize about it). In the passage above, he is playfully
suggesting that the meanings carried by words may be affected by a speaker’s
will. Lewis Carroll’s aim was to amuse, and he could afford to be enigmatic and
even nonsensical. The aim of serious semanticists is to explain and clarify the
nature of meaning. (Hurford, Heasley and Smith, 2007)
 Semantics deals with:

1. Words meaning

Language is used for communication. In communicating, speakers or writers

communicate meaning to listeners or readers. The nature of the meaning of a
word is its referent. The referent of a word can be an object, an event, a state, a
process, or an action here in this world. Word meaning can also said lexical
meaning (Lyons, 1985) : the meaning of lexemes depends upon the of sentences
in which they occur. (Sutrisno, 2012)
Examples :

1. hot is : [ a state of having a high temperature ]

2. to sew is : [ an action of working with a needle and thread
3. drizzling is : [ the process of raining in small drops ]
4. a party is : [ an event of the gathering of persons, by invitation, for
pleasure ]

2. Sentence meaning

According to Hurford, Heasley and Smith (2007), sentence meaning is what a

sentence means, i.e. what it counts as the equivalent of in the language
concerned. According to Lyons,( 1985) as in Sutrisno (2012), the meaning of
sentence is the product of both lexical and grammatical meaning (the meaning of
the constituent of lexemes and of the grammatical constructions)
Examples :
1. This is a beautiful garden flower
2. This is a beautiful flower garden
In sentence (1) the focus is on flower, where as in sentence (2) the focus is
on garden. It is clear that the conceptual meaning of the sentence depends on
the reference and the structures of the words.
 3. Utterance meaning

Speaker meaning is what a speaker means (i.e. intends to convey) when he

uses a piece of language. (Hurford, Heasley and Smith, 2007), In
communication, the meaning of an utterance is not only determined by the
conceptual meaning of the sentence but also by paralinguistic features such as
stress, pitch, intonation, juncture, body movements, head movements, hand
gestures, eye-contact, and the distance between the interlocutors.
Examples : “It’s one o’clock”, can be interpreted as “It’s really one o’clock” or
“It’s time to have lunch” or “It’s time to stop the lecture.” So the meaning does
not only depends the reference, conceptual sentence but also context, gestures,
intonations etc.

D. The definition of Sentence, Utterance and Preposition

A sentence is a grammatically complete string of words expressing a

complete thought. This very traditional definition is unfortunately vague, but it is
hard to arrive at a better one for our purposes. It is intended to exclude any
string of words that does not have a verb in it, as well as other string. Utterances
of non-sentences, e.g. short phrases, or single words, are used by people in
communication all the time. People do not converse wholly in (tokens of) well
formed sentences. But the abstract idea of a sentence is the basis for
understanding even those expressions which are not sentences. In the
overwhelming majority of cases, the meanings of non-sentences can best be
analyzed by considering them to be abbreviations, or incomplete versions, of
whole sentences. (Hurford, Heasley and Smith, 2007
An utterance is any stretch of talk, by one person, before and after which
there is silence on the part of that person. An utterance is the USE by a particular
speaker, on a particular occasion, of a piece of language, such as a sequence of
sentences, or a single phrase, or even a single word.
 Utterance may consist of a single word, a single phrase or a single sentence.
They may also consist of sequence of sentence. It is not unusual to find
utterances that consist of one or more grammatically incomplete sentence-
fragments. In short, there is no simple relation of correspondence between
utterances and sentences. Utterances are physical events. Events are ephemeral.
Utterances die on the wind. Linguistics deals with spoken language and we will
have a lot to say about utterances in this book. But we will concentrate even
more on another notion, that of sentences.
A sentence is neither a physical event nor a physical object. It is conceived
abstractly a string of words put together by the grammatical rules of a language.
A sentence can be thought of as the ideal string of words behind various
realizations in utterances and inscriptions. We have defined a sentence as a
string of words. A given sentence always consists of the same words, and in the
same order. Any change in the words or in their order makes a different
sentence for our purposes.
It would make sense to say that an utterance was in a particular accent (i.e. a
particular way of pronouncing words). However, it would not make strict sense
to say that a sentence was in a particular accent, because a sentence itself is only
associated with phonetic characteristics such as accent and voice quality through
a speaker’s act of uttering it. Accent and voice quality belong strictly to the
utterance, not to the sentence uttered. Not all utterances are actually tokens of
sentences, but sometimes only of parts of sentences, e.g. phrases or single
words.
A proposition is that part of the meaning of the utterance of a declarative
sentence which describes some state of affairs. The state of affairs typically
involves persons or things referred to by expressions in the sentence and the
situation or action they are involved in. In uttering a declarative sentence a
speaker typically asserts a proposition. In our definition of ‘proposition’ we
explicitly mentioned declarative sentences, but propositions are clearly in the
meanings of other types of sentences, such as interrogatives, which are used to
ask questions, and imperatives, which are used to convey orders. Normally,
when a speaker utters a simple declarative sentence, he commits himself to the
truth of the corresponding proposition: i.e. he asserts the proposition. By
uttering a simple interrogative or imperative, a speaker can mention a particular
proposition, without asserting its truth.
We shall have a lot to say in later units about utterances, sentences and
propositions, since these concepts are at the bottom of all talk about meaning.
We shall see that we have to be very careful, when talking about meaning, to
make it clear whether we are dealing with utterances or sentences. To this end
we shall try summarizing the relationship between these notions.
We shall use the term of ‘proposition’, ‘sentence’, and ‘utterance’ inn such a
way that anything that can be said of propositions can also be said of sentences
can also be said of utterances, but not necessarily vice versa. We have already
seen an example of this when we said it was sensible to talk of sentence being in
a particular language, and also sensible top talk of an utterance being in a
particular language, although one cannot talk of proposition being in a particular
language.
A proposition is an abstraction that can be grasped by the mind of an
individual person. In this sense, a proposition is an object of thought. Do not
equate propositions with thoughts, because thoughts are usually held to be
private, personal, mental processes, whereas propositions are public in the sense
that the same proposition is accessible to different persons: different individuals
can grasp the same proposition. Furthermore, a proposition is not a process,
whereas a thought can be seen as process going on in an individual’s mind.
Unfortunately, of course the word thought may sometimes be used loosely in a
way which includes the notion of a proposition. For the instance, one may say,
‘The same thought came into both our heads at the same time’. In this case, the
word thought is being used in a sense quite like that of the word proposition. The
relationship between mental processes (e.g. thoughts), abstract semantic
entities (e.g. proposition), linguistic entities (e.g. sentences) and action (e.g.
utterances) is problematic and complicated, and we will not go into the
differences further here. (Hurford, Heasley and Smith, 2007)

E. The definition of Reference and Sense

Sense and reference are two very distinct ways of talking about the meaning
of words and other expressions. Sense deals with the relationships inside the
language. The sense of an expression is its place in a system of semantic
relationships with other expressions in the language.
Examples :

1. The relationship between “big” and “small” is oppositeness of meaning

(antonymy).
2. The relationship between “rich” and “wealthy” is sameness of meaning
(synonymy). We will talk more about sense relations in a coming lecture.
In some cases, the same word-form can have more than one sense.
3. Look at the word-form “bank” in the following sentences:

“I have an account at the bank.”

“We took the boat to the other bank of the river.”
In these examples, “bank” has a different sense in each sentence.
Reference is a relationship between parts of a language (words and phrases)
and things outside the language (in the world). By reference a speaker indicates
which things and persons in the world are being talked about. E.g. My son is in
the house. “My son” here refers to a person in the world and “the house” refers
to a thing in the world.
To make the term reference clearer to you, hold a book in your hand and
describe it in a sentence. For example: “This book is about Semantics.”
 The English expression “this book” is part of the language. This expression
can refer to any book. In the example, we used it to refer to part of the world
which is the book you are holding in your hand. “Reference” is the relationship
between the language expression and the real world object.
 CHAPTER 3
CONCLUSION

Semantics is a branch of linguistics dealing with the meaning of word,

phrases and sentences, however, contrary to pragmatics it does not analyze the
intended speaker meaning, or what words denote on a given occasion, but the
objective, conventional meaning.
A sentence is a group of words that are put together to mean something.
A sentence is the basic unit of language which expresses a complete thought. It
does this by following the grammatical rules of syntax. An utterance is any sound
of talk, that human produce. To differentiate utterance and sentence, we usually
use quotation mark (“...”) in written form of utterance. A proposition is that part
of the meaning of the utterance of a declarative sentence which describes some
state of affairs. Besides declarative sentence, proposition also clearly involved in
the meaning of interrogatives and imperative sentences.
Reference is relation between piece of language and the things in the
world. A referent is concrete object or concept that is designated by a word or
expression. Sense: its place in a system of semantic relationships with other
expressions in the language. Sense consists of ‘semantic properties’.
 REFERENCE

Lyons, John. (1977). Semantics, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Huford, J. R. and B. Heasly (1983). Semantics: A Coursebook. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Saeed, John I. (2003). Semantics (2nd edn). Oxford: Blackwell.
Löbner, Sebastian. (2002). Understanding semantics. London: Arnold.
Kreidler, Charles W. (1998). Introducing English Semantics. London: Routledge.
Huford, J.R., B. Heasly and M. B. (2007). Semantics: A Coursebook (2nd Edn).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.