UNIT 1. What is semantics?
How can meaning be communicated?
The study of meaning in general is carried out by semiotics.
➢ Semiotics: Studies hoy ‘signs’ mean, how we can make one thing stand for
another.
A three-way distinction:
• Icon: A relation of similarity between the sign and what it represents (e.g. a portrait
of a person)
• Index: A cause-effect relationship, contiguity in space or time (e.g. smoke and fire)
• Symbol: An arbitrary, conventional relationship between sign and meaning (e.g.
red flag and danger)
How is meaning communicated through language?
Phonology
• Phonosemantics (or sound symbolism): A non-arbitrary connection between
sound and meaning or ‘words that sound like what they mean’.
Another example of relationship between sound and meaning
→ Onomatopeia (bow-wow for the barking of a dog)
→ Phonestesia (the sound of the word remind us of the action/object > ‘crack’)
→ Phonestemes (an association of certain sounds combination with a given
meaning in a rather random way > ‘gl’ with verbs related to light ‘gleam’, ‘glitter’,
‘glow’)
Morphology
• Inflectional morphemes: Do not change the grammatical category of the stem
(dog + s = dogs, still a noun)
- Plurality, Possession, Gender, Size, Tense, Person and number, Aspect
• Derivational morphemes: Change the category of the stem; sometimes they may
not change the category of the word but alter its meaning in a significant way
-er, -less, -al, -ation, -ness, -ian, -ly, -able, -ful, -ology
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How can meaning be communicated?
The study of meaning in general is carried out by semiotics.
➢ Semiotics: Studies hoy ‘signs’ mean, how we can make one thing stand for
another.
A three-way distinction:
• Icon: A relation of similarity between the sign and what it represents (e.g. a portrait
of a person)
• Index: A cause-effect relationship, contiguity in space or time (e.g. smoke and fire)
• Symbol: An arbitrary, conventional relationship between sign and meaning (e.g.
red flag and danger)
How is meaning communicated through language?
Phonology
• Phonosemantics (or sound symbolism): A non-arbitrary connection between
sound and meaning or ‘words that sound like what they mean’.
Another example of relationship between sound and meaning
→ Onomatopeia (bow-wow for the barking of a dog)
→ Phonestesia (the sound of the word remind us of the action/object > ‘crack’)
→ Phonestemes (an association of certain sounds combination with a given
meaning in a rather random way > ‘gl’ with verbs related to light ‘gleam’, ‘glitter’,
‘glow’)
Morphology
• Inflectional morphemes: Do not change the grammatical category of the stem
(dog + s = dogs, still a noun)
- Plurality, Possession, Gender, Size, Tense, Person and number, Aspect
• Derivational morphemes: Change the category of the stem; sometimes they may
not change the category of the word but alter its meaning in a significant way
-er, -less, -al, -ation, -ness, -ian, -ly, -able, -ful, -ology
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Lexicon
• Open-class words: Noun, adjectives, verbs, adverbs.
- Most neologisms are open-class words (app, spam, Google, balconing...)
- Prepositions may contain open-class words (in front of, in addition to...)
• Closed-class words: Prepositions, determiners, conjunctions
Syntax
• Syntactic bootstrapping: Phenomenon by which children use syntactic
information to infer the meaning of unknown words.
UNIT 2. Analysing Meaning: Some methods
• Summary of problems of binary semantic features
- There are many words that cannot be easily analysed with this method
- Semantic feature analyses are sensitive to the subjectivity of the analyst
- There are meaning ‘residues’ that cannot be analysed
- It’s difficult to agree on what a semantic feature should be
- They cannot capture imagistic information
• Vectorial semantics: a method that derives the meaning of the co-occurrences
of a word in statistic terms
• LSA: Latent Semantic Analysis
• Psycholinguistic methods
- Online measures: participants are actively processing the experimental
stimuli (lexical decisions tasks, naming tasks and reading times)
- Offline measures: based on the information that can be collected once the
processing of the stimuli has been completed (feature listing)
• Priming: The participants are presented with a string of letters on a computer
screen and they have to decide as quickly as possible whether they correspond to
a word in their language or not, typically by pressing a key.
• Saccade: Rapid eye movements we perform
Event-Related Potentials (ERP)
- Several ‘peaks’ in the waveform
→ P600 (positive): has to do with syntactic/grammatical alterations
→ N400 (negative): has to do with semantic anomalies
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• Open-class words: Noun, adjectives, verbs, adverbs.
- Most neologisms are open-class words (app, spam, Google, balconing...)
- Prepositions may contain open-class words (in front of, in addition to...)
• Closed-class words: Prepositions, determiners, conjunctions
Syntax
• Syntactic bootstrapping: Phenomenon by which children use syntactic
information to infer the meaning of unknown words.
UNIT 2. Analysing Meaning: Some methods
• Summary of problems of binary semantic features
- There are many words that cannot be easily analysed with this method
- Semantic feature analyses are sensitive to the subjectivity of the analyst
- There are meaning ‘residues’ that cannot be analysed
- It’s difficult to agree on what a semantic feature should be
- They cannot capture imagistic information
• Vectorial semantics: a method that derives the meaning of the co-occurrences
of a word in statistic terms
• LSA: Latent Semantic Analysis
• Psycholinguistic methods
- Online measures: participants are actively processing the experimental
stimuli (lexical decisions tasks, naming tasks and reading times)
- Offline measures: based on the information that can be collected once the
processing of the stimuli has been completed (feature listing)
• Priming: The participants are presented with a string of letters on a computer
screen and they have to decide as quickly as possible whether they correspond to
a word in their language or not, typically by pressing a key.
• Saccade: Rapid eye movements we perform
Event-Related Potentials (ERP)
- Several ‘peaks’ in the waveform
→ P600 (positive): has to do with syntactic/grammatical alterations
→ N400 (negative): has to do with semantic anomalies
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Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI): hemodynamic method > tells us the
specific brain are that is being activated thanks to the blood flaw
UNIT 3. Language and Thought
Two opposing views:
• Formal semantics (symbolic or amodal view): tries to describe the meaning of
languages using the descriptive logic; it started with Aristotle until Tarski
• Embodied semantics (cognitive view): does not consider the logical structure of
language to be important for the description of the meaning in language and tends
to disregard notions as truth values
The Formal Approach: Meaning as Amodal symbols
- Truth-condition: You have to know which conditions must obtain in the world for a
sentence to be true
The Language of Thought Hypothesis (Jerry Fodor): The complementary idea that says
that thought must be basically ‘language-like’. What we actually do is translate the words
we hear into an internal language of thought > mentalese
Glenberg’s Indexical Hypothesis: Meaning is mainly based on action and that people
understand language by simulating the actions described in phrases and sentences.
➢ It relies on the notion of affordance, which are the possible actions that a given
object offers to a given organism.
UNIT 4. Word meaning
• Reference: The act that speakers carry out when they pick out objects (the
referent) in the world by using words; it can be variable depending on context, user,
etc.
• Denotation: The relationship between a word and the objects out in the world; it
is stable and not user-dependent
• Extension: The set of all objects in the world that can be picked out by a word
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specific brain are that is being activated thanks to the blood flaw
UNIT 3. Language and Thought
Two opposing views:
• Formal semantics (symbolic or amodal view): tries to describe the meaning of
languages using the descriptive logic; it started with Aristotle until Tarski
• Embodied semantics (cognitive view): does not consider the logical structure of
language to be important for the description of the meaning in language and tends
to disregard notions as truth values
The Formal Approach: Meaning as Amodal symbols
- Truth-condition: You have to know which conditions must obtain in the world for a
sentence to be true
The Language of Thought Hypothesis (Jerry Fodor): The complementary idea that says
that thought must be basically ‘language-like’. What we actually do is translate the words
we hear into an internal language of thought > mentalese
Glenberg’s Indexical Hypothesis: Meaning is mainly based on action and that people
understand language by simulating the actions described in phrases and sentences.
➢ It relies on the notion of affordance, which are the possible actions that a given
object offers to a given organism.
UNIT 4. Word meaning
• Reference: The act that speakers carry out when they pick out objects (the
referent) in the world by using words; it can be variable depending on context, user,
etc.
• Denotation: The relationship between a word and the objects out in the world; it
is stable and not user-dependent
• Extension: The set of all objects in the world that can be picked out by a word
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Generic, Indefinite and Specific Reference
➢ Generic refers to a category (e.g. chair)
➢ Specific refers to a particular object (e.g. this chair)
➢ Indefinite refers to one instance in the category
• Sense: Two expressions could have one and the same reference and yet have a
different meaning; the sense is related to two different things: 1) its relation to
other words in the system, 2) our knowledge of the word itself
• Intension (very similar to sense): Set of properties shared by all members of its
extension
Classical view of categories:
a) There is a fixed set of necessary and sufficient conditions defining the membership to
each category
b) All members of a category have equal status
c) All non-members of a category have equal status
d) All necessary and sufficient features defining a category have equal status
e) Categories have clear and well defined boundaries
A new view of categories
→ Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance
→ Labov: context affect the way in which we categorize objects
Hedges/Hedging constructions: are the ways languages have to allow speakers to
indicate whether an expression is to be construed as a central/prototypical member of a
category, or as a more peripheral one.
Some characteristics of the Prototypical Approach:
• The prototype is the best example of a category. It is the member that is judged as
the most representative of the category.
• Categories have a graded structure. Members of a category are more or less
central depending on their similarity to the prototype; category membership is thus
a matter of degree.
• Fuzzy boundaries. Categories do not have clear boundaries.
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➢ Generic refers to a category (e.g. chair)
➢ Specific refers to a particular object (e.g. this chair)
➢ Indefinite refers to one instance in the category
• Sense: Two expressions could have one and the same reference and yet have a
different meaning; the sense is related to two different things: 1) its relation to
other words in the system, 2) our knowledge of the word itself
• Intension (very similar to sense): Set of properties shared by all members of its
extension
Classical view of categories:
a) There is a fixed set of necessary and sufficient conditions defining the membership to
each category
b) All members of a category have equal status
c) All non-members of a category have equal status
d) All necessary and sufficient features defining a category have equal status
e) Categories have clear and well defined boundaries
A new view of categories
→ Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance
→ Labov: context affect the way in which we categorize objects
Hedges/Hedging constructions: are the ways languages have to allow speakers to
indicate whether an expression is to be construed as a central/prototypical member of a
category, or as a more peripheral one.
Some characteristics of the Prototypical Approach:
• The prototype is the best example of a category. It is the member that is judged as
the most representative of the category.
• Categories have a graded structure. Members of a category are more or less
central depending on their similarity to the prototype; category membership is thus
a matter of degree.
• Fuzzy boundaries. Categories do not have clear boundaries.
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• There is no set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Not all members can be
defined by the same set of conditions; central examples share more features with
the rest that peripheral members.
• Cue validity. When the presence of a feature makes it very probable that the
exemplar belongs to the category, that feature has a high cue validity.
Category and Concept
Barsalou thinks that all the information that we have about a concept forms our
categorical information and that notion of concept are the elements that become active
in a given context.
Barsalou also uses ad-hoc categories: categories that are not very well established in
long-term memory and they are created on-line for a specific purpose (e.g. Things to put
in a suitcase for a one-week stay at the beach or Things that you would take out of your
house in case of fire)
Connotation and Denotation
Reference and sense have their related notions, another notion can be added:
▪ Denotation: equated with reference and extension - primary meaning of a word
▪ Connotation: equated with sense and intension - secondary meanings and highly
cultural
UNIT 5. Meaning Relations
Word association strength: The probability that one word is mentioned after another one
in a word association test; the higher the probability, the stronger the association.
Another proof of the connections among words is lexical priming (words are processed
faster when a related word has been shown before)
Types of relations: Semantic, Associative, Thematic
• Associative relations are those that connect word forms to each other based on
co-occurrence (e.g. Dog and Cat tend to co-occur in context)
• Semantic relations some words are related to other words because of an overlap
in their meaning; these relations are synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy
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defined by the same set of conditions; central examples share more features with
the rest that peripheral members.
• Cue validity. When the presence of a feature makes it very probable that the
exemplar belongs to the category, that feature has a high cue validity.
Category and Concept
Barsalou thinks that all the information that we have about a concept forms our
categorical information and that notion of concept are the elements that become active
in a given context.
Barsalou also uses ad-hoc categories: categories that are not very well established in
long-term memory and they are created on-line for a specific purpose (e.g. Things to put
in a suitcase for a one-week stay at the beach or Things that you would take out of your
house in case of fire)
Connotation and Denotation
Reference and sense have their related notions, another notion can be added:
▪ Denotation: equated with reference and extension - primary meaning of a word
▪ Connotation: equated with sense and intension - secondary meanings and highly
cultural
UNIT 5. Meaning Relations
Word association strength: The probability that one word is mentioned after another one
in a word association test; the higher the probability, the stronger the association.
Another proof of the connections among words is lexical priming (words are processed
faster when a related word has been shown before)
Types of relations: Semantic, Associative, Thematic
• Associative relations are those that connect word forms to each other based on
co-occurrence (e.g. Dog and Cat tend to co-occur in context)
• Semantic relations some words are related to other words because of an overlap
in their meaning; these relations are synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy
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• Thematic relations: a temporal, spatial, causal, or functional relation between
things that perform complementary roles in the same scenario or event
Homonymy: Two or more words that sound the same but have different meanings and
they are not related.
Polysemy: Same word with different meanings but they are related; the more frequent a
word is, the more senses it tends to have (prepositions, verbs, etc. // in morphology, in
grammatical constructions or in intonation)
Synonymy: Two words have the same meanings
→ Total synonymy: does not exist as there are no exactly same meanings for words
or expressions
→ Partial synonymy: synonyms that are different either in formality or in syntagmatic
relations (e.g. quick and fast)
Antonymy
→ Canonical antonyms: antonymic pairs whose association has become
maximally conventional and entrenched (e.g. slow-fast, good-bad, weak-strong,
small-large)
→ Non-canonical antonyms: opposed to each other in a context-dependent way,
for example the antonym of white is black, but if we are talking about wine, the
opposite is red
→ Gradable: adjectives that point to a scale that can have intermediate values, one
term of the pair is unmarked (neutral), while the other is marked (e.g. full-empty,
fast-slow, old ‘unmarked’-young ‘marked’)
→ Ungradable (or complementaries): they do not allow variations along a scale
(e.g. dead-alive, pass-fail, identical-different)
→ Converses (or reciprocals): relational terms, these antonyms signal a
relationship between two entities and depending which side you want to highlight,
you get one or the other (e.g. parent-child, teach-learn, doctor-patient)
→ Reversives: words that describe a process of change between two states: they
describe one direction or the other (e.g. dress-undress, create-destroy, pack-
unpack)
In the case of reversives, another sub-group can be easily formed with motion
antonyms (e.g. ascend-descend, enter-exit, rise-fall, come-go, push-pull)
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things that perform complementary roles in the same scenario or event
Homonymy: Two or more words that sound the same but have different meanings and
they are not related.
Polysemy: Same word with different meanings but they are related; the more frequent a
word is, the more senses it tends to have (prepositions, verbs, etc. // in morphology, in
grammatical constructions or in intonation)
Synonymy: Two words have the same meanings
→ Total synonymy: does not exist as there are no exactly same meanings for words
or expressions
→ Partial synonymy: synonyms that are different either in formality or in syntagmatic
relations (e.g. quick and fast)
Antonymy
→ Canonical antonyms: antonymic pairs whose association has become
maximally conventional and entrenched (e.g. slow-fast, good-bad, weak-strong,
small-large)
→ Non-canonical antonyms: opposed to each other in a context-dependent way,
for example the antonym of white is black, but if we are talking about wine, the
opposite is red
→ Gradable: adjectives that point to a scale that can have intermediate values, one
term of the pair is unmarked (neutral), while the other is marked (e.g. full-empty,
fast-slow, old ‘unmarked’-young ‘marked’)
→ Ungradable (or complementaries): they do not allow variations along a scale
(e.g. dead-alive, pass-fail, identical-different)
→ Converses (or reciprocals): relational terms, these antonyms signal a
relationship between two entities and depending which side you want to highlight,
you get one or the other (e.g. parent-child, teach-learn, doctor-patient)
→ Reversives: words that describe a process of change between two states: they
describe one direction or the other (e.g. dress-undress, create-destroy, pack-
unpack)
In the case of reversives, another sub-group can be easily formed with motion
antonyms (e.g. ascend-descend, enter-exit, rise-fall, come-go, push-pull)
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