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Three Perspectives of Meaning

The document discusses three perspectives of meaning in language: 1) lexical semantics, which are the meanings of individual words, 2) formal semantics or compositional semantics, which is how word meanings combine to make sentence meanings, and 3) discourse or pragmatics, which is how sentence meanings combine with context to make meanings of full texts. It then covers various relationships between word meanings, including homonymy, polysemy, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, hypernymy, and meronymy.

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Mashair oshi
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113 views5 pages

Three Perspectives of Meaning

The document discusses three perspectives of meaning in language: 1) lexical semantics, which are the meanings of individual words, 2) formal semantics or compositional semantics, which is how word meanings combine to make sentence meanings, and 3) discourse or pragmatics, which is how sentence meanings combine with context to make meanings of full texts. It then covers various relationships between word meanings, including homonymy, polysemy, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, hypernymy, and meronymy.

Uploaded by

Mashair oshi
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Three perspectives of meaning:

1. Lexical Semantics
– The meanings of individual words
2. Formal Semantics (or Compositional Semantics)
– How those meanings combine to make meanings for individual sentences or
utterances
3. Discourse or Pragmatics
– How those meanings combine with each other and with other facts about various
kinds of context to make meanings for a text or discourse.
– Dialog or Conversation is often lumped together with Discourse.
Preliminaries
What’s a word?
– Definitions we’ve used over the class: Types, stems, roots, uninflected forms,
etc…
*Lexeme: An entry in a lexicon consisting of a pairing of a form with a single meaning
representation
*Lexicon: A collection of lexemes
How is the lexicon structured?
 Lexical items belong to semantic fields
 words that belong to the same “topic” ,“subject” or “usage”
 lexical relations are often strongest within a semantic field
 different senses of a word often fall into different fields
 Examples:
 computing: gigabyte, CPU, memory, disk, monitor
 administration/diplomacy/politics: monitor, parliament, election
 Notice that monitor here has two senses, each falling in a different field.

Relationships between word meanings

1
• Homonymy
• Polysemy
• Synonymy
• Antonym
• Hypernomy
• Hyponomy
• Meronomy

Homonymy
Lexemes that share a form
• Phonological, orthographic or both
• But have unrelated, distinct meanings
• Clear example:
• Bat (wooden stick-like thing) vs
• Bat (flying scary mammal thing)
• Or bank (financial institution) versus bank (riverside)
• Can be homophones, homographs, or both
• Homophones:
Write and right
Piece and peace
Homographs:

• words that have the same spelling regardless their pronunciation with different senses.

articulate (ADJ) / articulate (V)

Polysemy
• The bank is constructed from red brick
I withdrew the money from the bank
• Are those the same sense?

2
• What about river bank?
• What about: The food bank is having a donation drive next week.
• Different senses but some more related than others…
• When two senses are related semantically we call it polysemy (rather than homonymy)
• A single lexeme with multiple related meanings (bank the building, bank the financial
institution)
• Most non-rare words have multiple meanings
• The number of meanings is related to its frequency
• Distinguishing polysemy from homonymy isn’t always easy (or necessary)
Synonymy
• Words that have the same meaning in some or all contexts
• Filbert / hazelnut
• Couch / sofa
• Big / large
• Automobile / car
• Vomit / throw up
• Two lexemes are synonyms if they can be successfully substituted for each other in all
situations
• If so they have the same propositional meaning
• synonyms—different words that share (nearly) the same meaning.
• Lawyer, attorney, counsel, …
• Couch, sofa, …
• Little sister, small sister, …
• Police, cop, pig, fuzz, …
• Antonymy
• Senses that are opposites with respect to one feature of their meaning
• Otherwise, they are very similar!
• Dark / light

3
• Short / long
• Hot / cold
• Up / down
• In / out
• More formally: antonyms can
• Define a binary opposition or are at opposite ends of a scale (long/short, fast/slow)
• Antonyms are in opposition, and come in a number of different flavors.
• An animal might be alive or dead, but not both. You might pass or fail a test, but not
both.
Hyponomy
• One sense is a hyponym of another if the first sense is more specific, denoting a subclass of
the other
• Car is a hyponym of vehicle
• Dog is a hyponym of animal
• Mango is a hyponym of fruit
• Conversely
• Vehicle is a hypernym/superordinate of car
• Animal is a hypernym of dog
• Fruit is a hypernym of mango

Superordinat Vehicl Fruit Furnitur mamma


e e e l
Hyponym Car Mang Chair Dog
o

• Some words are related in an inclusion relation.


• Couch, furniture.

• Meronymy: Part-whole relations:

4
• Word/sentence/paragraph/page/chapter/book

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