ĐẠI HỌC NGUYỄN TẤT THÀNH

CHAPTER 6

SEMAN
The meaning of language

TICS
PRESENTED BY GROUP 7

LECTURER: NGUYEN THI THANH LOAN

LÝ CÔNG MẪN TRẦN NGUYỄN HOÀNG PHÚC NGUYỄN TÔN THUẬN
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 Meaning  Entailment and related notions
Compositional Semantics
 Truth  Ambiguity and the Principle of When compositionality goes Awy
compositionality Anomaly
 INTRODUCTI
ON
What is Semantics?
 Semantics is a study of the meaning of
linguistics expressions, such as morphemes,
words, phrases, clauses, and sentences.
 Lexical semantics
Concerned with the meaning of words.
 Compositional semantics
Concerned with the meaning of words are combined to
form the meaning of larger syntactic units such as
phrases and sentences
What Speaker Know about
Sentence Meaning
To determine whether a sentence true or false, whether
Sentence has multiple meanings. One way to account for
this knowledge is by formulating semantic rules that build
the meaning of a sentence from the meaning of its words
and the way the words combine syntactically This is often
called: Truth-conditional semantic ( Compositional
semantics)
 Truth
SS are true or false in a given situation (Jack swims) is true for you know he can swim, and is
false for you know he never learned to swim
Tautologies (analytic)
SS are always true regardless of circumstances, their true is guaranteed solely by meaning of
parts and ways they are parts together
Ex: Circles are round.
Person who is single is not married
Contradictions: SS are always false.
Ex: Circles are square
A bachelor is married.
 Entailment and Related Notions
One sentence entail another if whenever 1st sentence is true, 2nd is also true in all conceivable

circumstances.

Ex: Jack swim beautifully entail Jack swims

Entailment goes only in one direction

Ex: Jack swims doesn’t entail Jack swims beautifully

On the other hand, negating sentences reverses the entailment.

Jack doesn’t swim entail Jack doesn’t swim beautifully

Semantic Knowledge of Language Speakers
EX:
A. Rebecca got home before Robert.
B. Robert arrived at home after Rebecca.

o The sentences are paraphrases of each other. They are Synonymous.

o When two sentences are synonymous, they entail each other.
 o Jack is alive.

o Jack is dead.

o If two sentences are contradictory, their

conjunction with and is a contradiction.

o Jack is alive and Jack is dead.

o Two sentences are contradictory if one entails the

negation of the other.
 Ambiguity
 Our semantic knowledge also tells us
when words or phrases have more than
one meaning, or are ambiguous
 Syntactic ambiguity

 Syntactic ambiguity arises from multiple syntactic

structures corresponding to the same string of words.

 Lexical ambiguity
 Lexical ambiguity arises from multiple
meanings corresponding to the same word or
phrase
 EX: We met at the bank
 I saw a bat