LING2004 Semantics Semester I, Dr Jason F. Siegel

 By the end of this class, you will be able to  Situate linguistic signs among other types of signs in the world  Categorise the differences among sentence, utterance and proposition  Discuss various types of meaning 2

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 How does the first set of signs differ from the second set?  The first are natural signs  The second are conventional signs  Natural signs have an automatic meaning, while conventional signs have an agreed upon meaning within a given community  Conventional signs need a human sender and receiver, while natural signs need neither 10

 What three things need to happen for information to be communicated via a sign?  We need to somehow sense the sign, through our eyes, nose, tongue, fingers, or most relevantly for linguistics, ears  This is the perception stage of information transfer  We need to be able to relate it to something we already know  This is the identification stage  We need to be able to make sense of the sign in its context  This is the interpretation stage  Do these stages take place in language? 11

12 CONVENTIONAL NATURAL

 When people talk about winter in Barbados, what types of things are associated with that?  These are the word’s connotations  This can’t explain all the meaning though  We have to talk about the actual phenomenon that the word represents  This is the word’s denotation or referent  These are NOT synonyms  See next slide  What does winter denote? akita? wuk up? broughtupsy? 13

 Distinguishing between the denotation and the referent  Who is the present king of Barbados?  Who is Freundel Stuart?  The present king of Barbados shows us that words can denote things without having a real-world referent  Freundel Stuart shows us that having the same real world referent does not mean that words like MP for St Michael South, Prime Minister of Barbados, leader of the Democratic Labour Party and Chair of CARICOM denote the same thing 14

 Sentence meaning  A speaker-neutral sense of what is meant  Utterance meaning  The message that the individual speaker wants to convey by saying it  Literal and non-literal  Take the sentence: I can give you a pill for your menstrual cramps.  The sentence meaning will remain unchanged no matter who uses it  The utterance meaning will change depending on, say, whether it’s used by a doctor speaking to a woman reporting abdominal pain during menstruation or by a man talking to another man who is complaining  Sentences are usually meaningful, even when not informative  We can understand the meaning of What the hell is going on here? even though it doesn’t inform us of anything, but Caesar is a prime number is literally nonsensical 15

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 What is a phone?  What is a phoneme? 17

 So you’re already used to the idea of having abstractions and concrete realities  The use of a piece of language by a particular speaker on a particular occasion is called an utterance  Sequences of words  Single phrases  Single words  Utterances are ephemeral  Part of our performance  May be incomplete thoughts  We will adopt the convention of writing utterances between single quotes 18

 When we say the term sentence in semantics, we have a slightly different meaning than the everyday use of the term  What does sentence mean in everyday use?  For us, a sentence is an abstraction, a group of words put together by the grammatical rules of a language, one that expresses a complete thought (i.e. contains a predicate)  The same sentence can underlie two different utterances  In this clip, which two utterances correspond to the same sentence?  Please, please note how I’ve phrased these last two points  When you write your exams, I expect you to distinguish very clearly between an utterance, a sentence and a proposition  Some utterances do not faithfully reflect the sentence that underlies them  ‘Milk please’, ‘just like that’, ‘woo!’  What sentences might these utterances correspond to? 19

 We can say that two sentences are the same if and only if they have the exact same sequence of words  One of these things is not like the others  One of these things isn’t like the others  These sentences share their meaning  They correspond to the same proposition 20

 Propositions  are even more abstract than sentences  are formulated as declarative sentences  Questions and their answers may correspond to the same proposition  They eat pudding and souse on Saturdays.  Do they eat pudding and souse on Saturdays?  describe some state of affairs  This state of affairs may be true or false  are language-neutral, i.e. sentences in Haitian, Spanish and English can correspond to the same proposition  Mwen chèche manman m.  Busqué a mi madre.  I looked for my mother. 21

Which pairs of sentences correspond to the same proposition? What tells you that the others don’t?  We cleaned the mess up  Jamal did eat the mangoes  Wunna ain’t got no class  We at she house.  All two did go to Oistins.  Sir knows how to speak Bajan.  (in Barbados) I ate a ackee  They gave their mother a present.  We cleaned up the mess  Jamal did not eat the mangoes  You people don’t have any class  We lef she house.  Did all two go to Oistins?  Does Sir speak Bajan?  (in Jamaica) I ate a ackee  Their mother received a present from them. 22