Semantics

Semantics:
- Involves (1) the literal meaning of words and
(2) the literal meaning of sentences considered outside
their contexts. The literal meaning includes
unstated meanings that are very closely tied to
stated meanings.

Semantics is concerned with meaning as a product of the linguistic

system and, is part of our grammatical competence. It focuses on
decontextualised meaning, as opposed to pragmatics, which focuses on
contextualised meaning.
E.g.: I love you.
Semantics: we can give this a certain meaning based simply on what we
know of the grammar of the language. We know that I
Specifies the speaker, and you the person being addressed, and that
love is a verb indicating a range of feeling which is stronger than like,
but weaker than adore.
Pragmatics: we should have to consider who is talking to whom, and
the situation in which the utterance takes place. These will affect how
the sentence is uttered and understood.
Pragmatics:
- deals with nonliteral meanings that arise in context

Types of meanings and contexts

Meaning

Semantics Pragmatics
(literal, outside context) ( nonliteral, within context)

words sentences linguistic situational

context context
1) linguistic context: the actual words and sentences that precede
and follow an utterance
2) situational context: (extralinguistic context – phi ngôn ngữ):
the situation that accompanies the utterance.

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Speaker meaning: what a speaker means
Sentence meaning: what a sentence means
Word meaning: what a word means

Meaning

Linguistic meaning Speaker meaning

Language Idiolect Literal Nonliteral

meaning meaning

Dialect meaning Irony Sarcasm Metaphor

Regional Social

Sentence meaning is concerned with literal meaning determined by the

grammatical and lexical elements, unaffected by the context or what the
speaker meant to say.

Utterance meaning includes: 1) presupposition. The statement The king

of France is bald presupposes that there is a king of France, 2)
Implicature. The statement it’s hot in here may imply the need to open a
window. 3) Prosodic features. The use of stress and tone, as when He
SAW Mary this morning means that he did not avoid her or telephone
her, in contrast with he saw MARY this morning, rather than or in
addition to anyone else. 4) Speech acts. When a ship is launched with
the words I name this ship..., the usage is not a statement of fact but an
action. Similarly, I declare this meeting closed is an act of closing that
meeting.

1) David: Do you think he’ll give us a pop quiz today?

Tommy: Well, we haven’t reached the end of the chapter yet.
2) Linguistics is fascinating said ironically may be intended by the
speaker to communicate “ Linguistics is deadly boring.”

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 3) In a television programme on holidays the presenter gave the
following advice for those travelling in the Greek islands.
- Obviously, in the outer islands nobody speaks English. So brush
up your English.

No viewer would have taken the presenter to be recommending that

they improve their English for a holiday to Greece: the presenter could
only have meant that they should brush up their Greek.

4) I now pronounce you husband and wife.

- by a minister presiding at a ceremony in which a young couple are

getting married in the presence of their assembled families; or
- by an actor dressed as a minister to two actors before a
congregation of Hollywood extras assembled in the same church
by a director giving instructions for the filming of a television
soap opera.
In the first instance, I now pronounce you husband and wife will effect a
marriage between the couple intending to get married.
In the second instance, the same utterance will have no effect on the
marital status of any party on the movie location. Thus the
circumstances of utterance create different meanings. We say that the
sentence uttered in the wedding context and the sentence uttered in the
film context have the same sentence meaning but are different
utterances, each with its own utterance meaning.

5) …Many experts gloomily predict that the tropical rain forests

will finally vanish around the end of our century. Well done,
20th century! ( Save the jungle – save the world )

Questions:
1) Can we make a list of word meaning?
2) Can we make a list of what a speaker says?

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 Sentences, utterances and propositions

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 is an abstract entity that has no existence in time, but is
part of the linguistic system of a language.
- A sentence is a grammatically complete string of words
expressing a complete thought.

Utterances
- An utterance is anything spoken on a specific occasion. Often
opposed to sentence: e.g. the words “ Come here!”, spoken by a
specific speaker at a specific time, form an utterance which is one
instance of a sentence Come here!
- 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 an event in time - it is produced by some one and at
some particular time.

Propositions
- A proposition is that part of the meaning of the utterance of a
declarative sentence which describes some state of affairs.
- The meaning of a declarative sentence – the kind that can be used to
make a statement and can be true or false – is a proposition.
- The propositional content of a sentence is that part of its meaning
which is seen , in some accounts, as reducible to a proposition. E.g.
The porters had shut the gates, the gates had been shut by the porters,
had the porters shut the gates? If only the porters had shut the gates!
Would be said to have the same propositional content, though in other
respects their meanings differ.

sentences utterances propositions

- neither a - a physical event - part of the
physical event - ephemeral meaning of
nor a physical events the utterance
object - exist in time of a
- conceived - a stretch of talk declarative
abstractly by a particular sentence

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- a string of words speaker on a which
put together by particular describes
the grammatical occasion some state of
rules of a - true/false affairs( things
language - grammatical and people)
- do not exist in - in a particular - the same
time regional accent proposition
- false/true - in a particular may be
(traditional language expressed by
definition) an
- grammatical indefinitely
- in a particular large number
language of sentences
- true/false
- not belong to
any particular
language

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 Reference and Sense
Reference:
- Reference is the relationship between language and the world
( between parts of a language and things outside the language
( in the world) ).
- Reference is concerned with designating entities in the world
by linguistic means.
Sense:
- Sense is the relationships inside a language
( between linguistic units)
- Sense is the meaning a word has within a language – limited
by some linguists to a word’s conceptual or propositional
meaning.
- Expressions may differ in sense, but have the same reference;
and ‘synonymous’ means “ having the same sense”, not
“having the same reference”.

Reference Sense
- Referent: the entity - Lexical ambiguity: a
identified by the use of a word is lexically
referring expression ambiguous if it has
- Extension: the set of all more than one sense or
potential referents for a meaning.
referring expression - Synonymy: two words
- Prototype: a typical are synonymous if they
member of the extension have the same sense;
of a referring expression that is, if they have the
- Coreference: two same values for all of
linguistic expressions their semantic features.
that have the same - Hyponymy: a word
extralinguistic referent whose meaning
- Anaphora: a linguistic contains the entire
expression that refers to meaning of another
another linguistic word, known as the

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 expression
- Deixis: an expression
that has one meaning
but refers to different
entities as the
extralinguistic context
changes
superordinate.
- Antonymy: two words
are antonyms if their
meanings differ only in
the value for a single
semantic feature.

reference

constant variable
the same expression never the same expression can
refers to different things refer to different things

E.g.: proper names E.g. : common nouns

Vietnam my wife
HCMC, Hanoi the monitor of this class
The Morning Star personal pronouns
He, she, you..

Which expressions have the same sense, which can have the
same referent, which have constant reference, and which have
variable reference?
1) a) the Morning Star
b) the Evening Star
c) the planet Venus

Có thể là R và C

2) a) Heineken
b) the beer in the slim bottle
Có thể cùng R, riêng lẻ là a đi với C, b đi với V

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 3) a) Margaret Thatcher
b) the Iron Lady
c) the prime minister of Great Britain in 1982
Có thể là R & C

4) a) Emmanuel Macron
b) the present president of the French republic (present có
thể thay đổi tuỳ theo thời điểm người nói nói
c) the 25th president of the French Republic
có thể là R, a là C, b là V, c là C
5) a) the drink that tastes like dishwater
b) the beverage with the nasty flat taste
Có thể S, R,V
6) a) the victor at Jena
b) the loser at Waterloo
Có thể R và C, R chiến thắng tại Jena và thất bại tại Waterloo là
Naopoleon

REFERRING EXPRESSION

A referring expression is any expression used in an utterance to

refer to something or someone , i.e. used with a particular referent
in mind.

Some expressions can only be used as referring expressions, some

never can, and some expressions can be used to refer or not,
depending on the kind of sentences they occur in.

The five types of definite noun phrases in English are (1) proper
names, e.g. John, Queen Victoria, (2) personal pronouns, e.g. he,
she, it, and (3) phrases introduced by a definite determiner, such as
the , that, this ( the table, this book, those men),(4) certain locative
adverbs: here, there, yonder, (5) Certain temporal adverbs: now,
then, yesterday

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An equative sentence is one which is used to assert the identity of
the referents of two referring expressions, i.e. to assert that two
referring expressions have the same referent.

A sentence in which the subject and complement refer to the same

person or thing is called an equative sentence.
E.g.: Susan is the girl I was talking about.
Exercises
I. Are the following underlined expressions referring
expressions?
1. I got upset over a trivial matter this morning. R.E (xác định)
2. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Not R.E (ko xác định)
3. She drank a glass of water. R.E
4. The first person here should turn on the lights. not R.E
5. I saw the dog that bit you. R.E
6. An apple fell out of your sleeve, Madam. R.E
7. If anyone ever marries Nancy, he’s in for a bad time. Not R.E
8. Dr Jekyll is Mr Hyde. R.E (là 1 tiểu thuyết tên “Strange Case
of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” của nhà văn Robert, ý nói 1 ng lúc xấu
lúc tốt, nó ý nghĩa là 1 người 2 mặt)
9. Ho Chi Minh city is a large city. R.E/ not R.E
10. My father is a teacher. R.E / not R.E
11. Mahmoud is an Egyptian. R.E / not R.E
12. Hanoi is the capital of Vietnam. R.E/R.E  equative semi
13. Ho Chi Minh city is the largest city in Vietnam. R.E / R.E
14. She is beautiful. R.E
15. Edinburgh is between Aberdeen and York. R.E/R.E/R.E
II. When do the phrases in parentheses in the following have
the same referent?
1. (he) studied (himself) in the mirror. always
2. (Clive) watched (him) take the fish out of the can. never
3. the instructor is ( the smartest guy in the room) and (the
oldest person) as well. depend
4. (I) am (Professor Glaston). Sometimes (tuỳ vào speaker)

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 DEIXIS

Deixis ( linguistic pointing):

- a term for a word or phrase which directly relates an utterance to a
time, place, or person(s).
- the marking of the orientation or position of objects and events with
respect to certain contextual points of reference

Adverbs: here, there, yonder ( spatial deixis); yesterday, tomorrow, now,

then ( temporal deixis)
Demonstratives: this, that, these, those ( spatial deixis)
Pronouns: (personal deixis) I, you, he, she ….
Verbs: come, bring ( the movement towards the speaker); go, take ( the
movement farther away from the speaker) (spatial diexis)
Tenses: Past tense, present tense, future tense ( temporal deixis)
- The train arrived. ( any time before this moment)
- The train is arriving. ( right now)
- The train will arrive. (any time after this moment)

Exercises

I. Underline the deictic terms in the following sentences.

1. I understood that there would be an opportunity to meet her there later
that week, and that I would be responsible for bringing the documents. At
least, that‘s what John said.
2. I met this chap at the concert, and we got talking. he said that this Xmas
had been the worst he had ever spent. I’m meeting him again tomorrow.

II. Which of the following sentences are not semantically well formed?
Explain what is wrong with the ones you reject.

1. She bought this book here at a discount sale.

2. She was given this book there by its author.
3. I would like to buy this book you have there.
4. I don’t want that book you have there.
5. I’ll come there and meet you at 4.30.
6. I’ll go and meet you here at 4.30.

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7. If you wait there, I’ll go and meet you after work.

III. There is usually a fixed order for common conjunctions of words,

as for example we say ‘ladies and gentlemen’ but not ‘ gentlemen and
ladies’. In the following pairs of words, what is the fixed order? Find a
general rule.

1. this, that
2. go, come
3. now, then
4. there, here
5. I, you
6. I, he
7. you, he

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