Mohamed Elhannaoui

I. What is semantic
 It is the study of the meaning of words, phrases and sentences, separated of the
context.
 It can be applied to entire texts or to single words.

II. The importance of semantics

 Clear understanding of meaning allows students and teachers to communicate
their messages clearly.
 Semantics provides speakers with a structure to use when they need to put words
into sentences to create meaning.

 The true power of semantics is that it is less structured than syntax and easier way
to communicate information

For example:

If I said “the color of the sky is blue”, or “the sky is now blue”, or “I see a blue sky”,
you would get the same meaning. It focuses on the meaning.

III. Some fondamental concepts

1. Lexicon: (vocabulary)
 The vocabulary of a particular language, field, social class, person, etc.
2. Lexeme:
 Lexemes are the words listed in the dictionary.
 The term lexeme means a language's most basic unit of meaning, often also thought
of as a word in its most basic form. Not all lexemes consist of just one word, though,
as a combination of words are necessary to convey the intended meaning. Examples
of lexemes include walk, fire station, and change of heart.
3. Referent:
 The entity (object, person, state of affairs etc.) in the external world to which a
linguistic expression relates in a particular situation.
4. Reference:
 The relationship that exists between a word and its referent.

5. Denotation
 The literal meaning of a word or phrase

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IV. Two types of meaning:

1. Conceptual (denotative/literal) meaning
 It's just the straightforward, literal, dictionary definition of the word.
 The term is also called denotation or cognitive meaning.
E.g. money: it is an object that allows people to buy things.

2. Associative (connotative) meaning

 It means the concepts that we add to the original meaning.
 Different people might have different associations or connotations attached
to a word.
 The word money can be associated to Rich, power, tired, to work, etc.
 The connotation of a word can be positive, negative, or neutral.
 It can also be either cultural or personal.

How can we describe the meaning of different words?

There are three types of semantic analysis:

 Words as containers Semantic features.
 Roles they fulfill Semantic roles
 Relationship with other words Lexical relation

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I. Semantic features
 An element of a word's denotation or denotative meaning. For example, young,
male, and human are semantic features of the word boy.
 Also called a semantic component.
 We have considered semantics From the point of view of linguists; who have
studied meaning through lexical decomposition.

Lexical decomposition
Lexical decomposition: the method that has been used to characterize the sense (meaning) of a word
in terms of the semantic features.
Advantages: Drawbacks:
 It helps us to consider, for  It is unable to agree on which
instance, the meaning of man exactly how many and which
and boys is closely related than features constitute the universal
are the meaning of man and set of semantic properties.
girl.  It is difficult to generate features
 It allows us to characterize the from abstract nouns.
senses of a potentially infinite
set of words with a finite
number of semantic features.

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II. Semantic roles (thematic roles)

 Semantic roles don’t care about the structure of the sentence, but what a word actually
means.
1. Agent: is the semantic role of a person or thing who is the doer of an action.
The dog bit him

2. Patient: is he who receives the action.

The dog bit him

3. Theme: what???OBJECT

4. source:
 It serves the origin of an action.
Jhon came from Mexico.

5. Goal:
 It serves as intended end state of an action.
She walked to school.
6. Location:
 It serves as the place where the action occurred.
He cried at the Zoo.
7. Experiencer:
 One who receive something
Jhon has a headache.
8. Stimulus:
 Causes emotion/sensory response without agency.
 Without action.
He loves pizza.
9. Force:
 Entity that non-deliberately causes action, usually nature.
The wind slammed the door.

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I. Lexical relations
 Not only can words be treated as ‘containers’ or as fulfilling ‘roles,’ they can also
have relationships
 Lexical relationships are the connections established between one word and
another; for example, we all know that the opposite of “closed” is “open” and that
“literature” is similar to “book”

1. Synonyms
 A synonym is a word that has the same or slightly different meaning as
another word.
 Absolute synonymy does not exist: there always some contexts in which one
member of the pair cannot be used.
Almost/Nearly----buy/purchase

 We can find formal/informal (register)

 They can differentiate in positive or negative connotations

For instance:

Sanitation engineer vs garbage collector

 Geography

2. Hyponymy
 It is the state or phenomenon that shows the relationship between more general
term (lexical representation) and the more specific instances of it.

o Thus, we can say red is a hyponym of color (hypernym= superordinate)

o Hypernym = superordinate term
o Hyponym= subordinate term
o co-hyponyms = the set of words which are hyponyms of the same superordinate term

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Overlap:

 Two words overlap in meaning if they have the same value for some (but not all) of
the semantic features that constitute their meaning.

For instance:

Sister, mother, husband are overlapping because they share some semantic features
but not all.
Hyponymy Vs Overlap
The meaning of one word is entirely included in The meanings of two words intersect, but neither
the meaning of another. one includes the other.
Ex: sister and niece. They share female feature.
The meaning of color is included in the meaning
of blue (all blue, green are colors)

3. Antonyms
 Antonyms are words that have opposite meanings.
 They are two forms with opposite meaning.
Bad/good-----Hot/ cold

 In general, we can categorize antonyms as gradable or non-gradable.

3 types of antonyms:

A. Non-gradable (complementary pairs distribution----Binary

antonyms)
o They are synonyms which not admit a midpoint.
Alive---dead
Male—female
Open—closed

B. Gradable antonyms
o Two predicates are gradable antonyms if they are at opposite ends of a continuous scale of
values.
For instance:
Hot and cold (between them is continuous scales of values;
warm, cool).
Young and Old (between them is continuous scales of
values; teenagers, adult.
C. Relational antonyms (converses)
o In which one word implies its opposite related word even if it is not mentioned.
o It refers to the same situation in different perspective.
Above---below

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Polysemy Homonyms
.

o It can be defined as one form o A homonym is a word, written or spoken, which has
(written or spoken) having multiple two or more unrelated meanings.
meanings that are all related by
extension.
o Meaning is determined by context.
Bright means shining
and intelligent.
Head: object of the
head of your body
At the top of a company or
department

o Homonyms are words that have separate meanings

and histories, but have accidentally come to have
exactly the same form.

Homograph(homo=the same---graph=written)
Words which have :
o Same spellings
o
o Different pronunciation
o Different meaning
He used a saw to cut the board
I saw my friend after school.

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4. Homophony
o Homophones are two or more words which have the same pronunciation but different
spellings.
See ---- sea
Ate----eight
Meat---meet
Too---two
Flour---flower

5. Metonymy: figure of speech. A whole part relation

Car/wheels—king/crown.

6. Collocations
o They are words that tend to occur with other words. They are like in relationship.

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I. Basic semantic relationships

1. Paraphrase: one statement has the same meaning as another.

2. Entailment:

 Entailment is the principle that under certain conditions the truth of one
statement ensures the truth of a second statement.
 A entails B
 Whenever A is true, B is true.
 Sentences have entailement.

For instance:

Jim rides a bike to school every morning.

Jim can ride a bike.

 Entailment is what occurs if a proposition is true. If the first proposition Jim

rides a bike to school every morning is true then that proposition entails a
few things:

Jim can ride a bike

Jim goes to school every morning

 If the first sentence is true, then the second sentence must be true as well.
That is, if Jim rides his bike to school every morning, then he must be able to
ride a bike.
 We can say that the first sentence entails the second sentence.

Entailment could be thought of as

 If X, then Y.

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3. Presupposition
 It is something that a person believes to be true and he uses as the beginning of an
argument even though it has not been proven.
 A presupposition constitutes a necessary assumption required to understand the
meaning of a sentence
 Presupposition deals with implicit meanings conveyed by the speaker through the use of
particular words
 John forgot to call Mary” typically has a presuppositional inference that John was
supposed to call Mary.
John knows that Baird invented the television
>> Baird invented the television.

John regrets that he kissed Mary

>> John kissed Mary.

Mary has stopped beating her boyfriend

>> Mary has been beating her boyfriend

A. The existential presupposition

 The speaker presupposes the existence of entities.
 It is the assumption of the existence of the entities named by the speaker.

My brother washed the car.

>> We suppose that I have a brother.

Marie’s house is new.

>>Marie exists
>>Marie has a house

B. Factive presupposition
 The assumption that something is true due to the presence of some as "know“,
"realize“, “be glad”, “be sorry”, “regret”, “aware”, “odd” etc
 The verbs indicate that something is fact.
She didn’t realize he was ill
>> she was ill

We regret telling him

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>> we told him

I wasn’t aware that she was married

>> she was married

It isn’t odd that he left early

>> he left early

I’m glad it’s over

>> it’s over

C. Non-factive presupposition
 Certain words indicate that some things are not truth.
 It is related with words like dream, pretend, hypothesis situations, etc.

D. Structural presupposition
 The use of certain words&phrases to make presuppositions (the use of WH-
questions)
When did he leave?
>> he left
Where did you buy the bike?
>> you bought the bike

E. Lexical presupposition
 The speaker can use one word to convey another meaning.
 In this case, the use of word “stop”, “start”, “again” presuppose another
(unstated) concept.
He stopped smoking
>> he used to smoke

They started complaining

>> they complaining before

You’re late again

>> you were late before

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F. Counterfactual presupposition
 Conditional type 2 and 3
 It is the assumption that what is presupposed is not only untrue, but is the opposite
of what is true, or contrary to facts.
If you were my friend, you would have helped me
>>You are not my friend .
If I were not short, I would have became a
stewardess
>> I am short

Presupposution vs Entailement
Speakers have presuppositions Sentences have entailements

 if we negate the sentences in (1),  The negation of the 1st sentence will
as in (2), we recover the same affect the truth of the second one.
presuppositions, and i twill stay
truth. The king was assasinated
 The king died
Her car is now
 She has a car. The king was not assasinated
 The king is alive.
Her car is not new.  If is not affected, it is
 She has a car. presupposition.

4. Contradiction
 If one statement is true the other must be false. (e.g. Joan is a spinster contradicts Joan
has been married three times)

5. Anomaly
 A sentence has no meaning in the everyday world (e.g. Colourless green ideas sleep
furiously)

6. Lexical ambiguity
 A word allows more than one meaning in context: Bank, for example, can mean ‘financial
institution’, ‘edge of a river’, or other things.

7. Metaphor:

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 A relationship of similarity between two objects or concepts. A Word is transferred from

one conceptual domain to another

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