GROUP 1








Trương Thành Khải
Nhan Thị Thủy
Nguyễn Thị Lệ Hằng
Võ Duy Nhất
Nguyễn Thị Mỹ Nga
Võ Trường Sơn
Nguyễn Xuân Quang
CHAPTER 1
SEMANTICS & THE SUBJECT MATTER OF SEMANTICS
CHAPTER CONTENT
What does semantics do?
The meaning of “meaning”
Theories of meaning
Semantics properties
Components of the word-meaning
Lexical meaning & grammatical meaning
Sentence & utterance meaning
Discourse
Semantics, a branch of linguistics, deals with the literal meaning of words, sentences, and utterances.
Ex: The meaning of “remarried” can be analyzed in 3 different levels.
+ Word level
+ Sentence level
+ Utterance level

1. What does semantics do?
At the word level: remarried may be regarded as a set of 4 following semantic features: |+human|,
|+female|,
|+used to be married|, |+married again|
Semantic features are the smallest units of meaning in a word. (Richards et al, 1987:254)

SEMANTICS & THE SUBJECT MATTER OF SEMANTICS
At the sentence level: When remarried occurs in She is not married, only the fourth semantic feature of the word, namely |+married again|, is informative.
SEMANTICS & THE SUBJECT MATTER OF SEMANTICS
At the utterance level: Within the particular context of the following conversation when remarried occurs in B’s response, it is the word that helps the utterance presuppose that Pastors are allowed by rule to get married and implicate that the pastor was once married.
A: “How is the pastor?
B: “He is remarried.”
SEMANTICS & THE SUBJECT MATTER OF SEMANTICS
(C.K.Ogden and I.A.Richards, 1932) a number of meanings can be associated with this term:
An intrinsic property
The other words annexed to a word in a dictionary
The connotation of a word
The place of anything in a system
That to which the user of a symbol actually refers
That to which the user of a symbol ought to be referring
and believes himself to be referring
That to which the interpreter of a symbol: refers, believes himself to be referring and believes the user to be referring
2. The meanings of "meaning"
Let us now take the case of the verb “mean”. It gives a lot of meanings.
(1) Smith means well.
(2) That red flag means danger.
(3) Smoke means fire.
(4) Mary means business.
(5) She didn’t really mean what she said.

2. The meanings of "meaning"
There are several distinguishable, and more or less well-known philosophical, theories of meanings.
The referential (denotational approach)
The ideational (mentalistic theory)
The behaviourist theory
The meaning-is-use theory
The verificationist theory
The truth-conditional theory
Bloomfieldian theory
A theory in the former Soviet Union

3. Theories of meaning
4.1 The semantic properties of a word is what speakers of the language agree. They can be used to define the meaning of a word. A method involving the use of these properties is called componential method.
Ex: The police are looking for the assassin just because he wanted to be famous.
Our adequate knowledge of the meaning of the word “assassin” includes knowing that the individual to whom that word refers is
+ human
+ murder
+ a killer of important people

4. Semantic properties
4.2 The meaning of all content words and even some of the function words such as WITH or OVER can at least partially be specified by such properties.
4.3 The same semantic property may be part of the meaning of many different words. Or the same semantic property may occur in words of different parts of speech.
4. Semantic properties
Semantic property Words having it
Female: bitch, mare, woman, widow
Human: doctor, dean, professor, …
Motion: bring, walk, fall, run, …
Sense: see, hear, feel, …
4. Semantic properties
There are 4 major components of meaning
Denotation
Connotation
Structural meaning
Categorical meaning
5. Components of the word-meaning
5.1 Denotation is the core, central or referential meaning of the word found in a dictionary and is described in terms of a set of semantic features that serve to identify the particular concept associated with the word.
Ex: Woman is denotatively described as |+human|, |+mature|, |+adult|, |+female|
5. Components of the word-meaning
5.2 Connotation (social, affective meaning) is the additional meaning that the word has beyond its denotative meaning. It shows people’s emotions and / or attitudes
Ex: Woman
Under a circumstance, woman may positively be connoted as |+devoted| or
|+patient|
Under another circumstance, woman may negatively be connoted as |+wicked| or
|+talkative|
5. Components of the word-meaning
5.3 Structural / associated meaning
+ Reflected meaning:
+ Collocative meaning
+ Associated meaning
+ Thematic meaning
5.4 Categorical meaning is one part of grammatical meaning.

5. Components of the word-meaning

6. Lexical meaning
& grammatical meaning
Being forms of one and the same words, they share a lexical meaning but differ in grammatical meaning.
Lexical and grammatical meaning do not exist separately but always go together to make up the meaning of a word.
Ex: want - wanted
-is what a sentence means
regardless of the context or
situation in which it may be
used.
-is determined by word
meanings and grammatical
structures.
-is highly context-independent.
& Utterance meaning
-is what a speaker means
when he makes an utterance
in a certain situation.

-is highly context-dependent.
7. Sentence meaning
Discourse typically consists of more than a single sentence and we do not communicate using just a single utterance.
The situation is often a combination of sentences used to get our message across.
8. Discourse
Thank You !