Study of Meaning

The chapter revolves around the study of meaning, presenting semantics and pragmatics as two
dichotomic linguistic fields that conduct this study. While Semantics viewed as the study of the
encoded knowledge within a word or vocabulary, thus, the book author label it as a “Toolkit”,
and, suffice to say, it’s patterns for building more elaborate meanings, Pragmatics, in other
hand, consists on using all these tools in meaningful communication; Pragmatics is essentially
about creating a bridge between semantic knowledge and our knowledge of the world
considering the context.

Denote- it labels connection between what’s said compared to the reality. Either is real or
imagination. Eg: Take a dive- denotes a situation the speaker desires to be in(imagination).
Expression- any meaningful language unit, sequence of meaningful units, from a complete
sentence, clause, phrase, word. In the word beautifully- we have the following expressions:
beauty and -ful; ‘not’ is not considered Expression since it doesn’t label anything.
1.3Refference- what speakers our writers chose to do when they use expressions to their
particular audience. What we use to refer in our discourse is referent.

1.4Communication
Communication is not like pressing button on a remote control and thereby affecting the tv set
circuits and expect the desirable feedback. It evolves active sender-addressee collaboration, not
less importantly, it depends on what will enable the addressee to recognize the sender’s
intention at that very time.
1.5. Utterances- the raw data in linguistic. It is the data produced by a particular sender in a
specific situation whether spoken or written.
Pragmatics and Semantics- distinguishing features
Utterances are recollected for sentences. “at 10 AM”- it is a utterance. I can assume it is
recollected from the sentence-’ The lesson starts at 10 AM.’ which originally comes from the
question ‘ When does the lesson start.’. Sentences, of that, are abstract, not tied to any
context.
Summary

Pragmatics- is the study of the utterance meaning.

Semantics- study of sentence meaning and word meaning.

Distinguish stages
Given the sentence: ‘’That is the first bus’’
Literal Meaning- based on the semantic information given in the sentence. That- equated to
earlier time. Is- present simple. First- the initial. No context is considered.
An Explicature- basic interpretation utterance using contextual knowledge and th knowledge of
the world to work out what is being referred to. Utterances go beyond literal meaning. They are
based in linguistic context (literal meaning) and non-linguistic aspect (context and background
and knowledge).
An Implicature- is based on the relationship between sender and addressee; being the last stag,
it will not base only on the literal meaning, context, the knowledge of world but rather, create
hints, inferences over what would really be the message being conveyed.
Summary
Literal meaning- the semantics of sentences in abstract.
Explicature- the pragmatics of reference and disambiguation.
Implicature- Pragmatics of hints.
Types of meaning
Senders meaning- related to the writer or speaker intends to convey.
Sentence meaning and Literal meaning taken as the same by the author. Meaning that people
people familiar with the language can agree to be the same.

Semantics as a descriptive subject

As a descriptive subject, it is the study of word meaning and sentence meaning abstracted away
from context of use.
Propositions
Different sentences can have the same meaning, as in the example
a) Lions hunt Hyenas.
b) Hyenas are hunted by lions
c) Lions are hyenas’ predators
All the sentences above do convey the same message despite the semantical
differences. In the last sentence c), for instance, we do not have verb “to hunt” as in the
previous two yet the message is still the same. This is all possible due to – Proposition,
which is the sense a meaning and a context meaningful. Propositions can be either true
or false.