Semantics and Pragmatics

2024
week One
Introduction
 Definitions
Semantics is the study of meaning in Language. It
concentrates on meaning that comes from purely
linguistic knowledge. It is a theoretical study of what
meaning is and how it operates.

Pragmatics is the study of how language is used in

communication. It concentrates on those aspects of
meaning that cannot be predicted by linguistic
knowledge alone and takes into account knowledge
about the physical and social world.
This division can be roughly illustrated with the example:
I forgot the paper
Semantics provides the literal meaning of the elements I,
forget, past tense, the and paper, and the meaning drawn
from the order of the words giving very approximately ‘the
person who is speaking at some time before the time of
speaking forgot a particular item which is a paper’.
Pragmatics fleshes this out to a more complete
communication depending on the shared context of
situation. It could be the Sunday news paper which the
speaker intends to go back and buy OR it could be a research
paper that the student was supposed to bring to his study
group.
 The relationship between Semantics and Pragmatics

 Semantics is the study of what meaning is and how it

operates and pragmatics is a study of how during a
social interaction people experience, make sense of,
and react to the way meaning is communicated.

 They are two distinct disciplines with a considerable

area of overlap.
 One of the very important assumptions in semantics is
that meaning is essentially a matter of usage.

 The meaning of a word becomes operative only when

that word is used in a certain context.

 Attributes like height, width, length, weight have no

separate and independent existence. They can only be
understood as attributes of objects at a certain time
and place.
 Topics included in this course under
semantics are:
1. Lexical semantics
 collocation
 Semantic fields, e.g. colour systems.
 Sense relations, e.g. hyponymy, synonymy, antonymy,
polysemy, etc.
2. Structural Semantics
3. Componential analysis
4. Language universals
 Semantics and Meaning
The term semantics :
The term semantics is a recent addition to the English language.
 It was introduced in a paper read to the American Philological
Association in 1894 entitled “Reflected meanings: a point in
semantics”.
 The French term sémantique had been coined from the Greek
in the previous year by M. Bréal.
In both cases the term was not used to refer to
meaning, but to its development-with what is
called now “historical semantics”
 In 1900 there appeared Bréal’ s book Semantics: studies in the
science of meaning. It treated semantics as the “science” of
meaning
The term meaning:
The term meaning is much more familiar
to us all. But the dictionary will suggest a
number of different meanings of
meaning, or, more correctly, of the verb
mean.
Some of the common uses of the term mean:

In the sense of “intend”, e.g. I mean to be there tomorrow.

Used of signs, both natural and conventional, e.g. That

cloud means thunder or A red light means “Stop”, where
“clouds” do not communicate while “traffic lights” do.
 Provide definitions by suggesting words or phrases that have
the “same” meaning, which is characteristic of dictionaries, e.g.
What does “calligraphy” mean? “Calligraphy” means “beautiful
handwriting”. In stating meaning, we produce a term that is
more familiar than the one whose meaning is being questioned.

 The use of “mean” found in such sentence as “It wasn’t what he

said, but what he meant.” Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland. This is the case when words fail to mean what they
mean, that is, there is some other meaning beside the “literal”
meaning of the words, which can be achieved in a number of
ways, e.g. intonation and presupposition.
 Semantics and Linguistics
Semantics is a component or level of
linguistics of the same kind as phonetics or
grammar. Nearly all linguists have accepted a
linguistic model in which semantics is at one
“end” and phonetics at the other, with
grammar somewhere in the middle.
To explain this further, if language is regarded
as an information system, or as a
communication system, it will associate a
message (the meaning) with a set of signs (the
sounds of the language or the symbols of the
written text).
The Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure
(1916:99) referred to these as the SIGNIFIER
(signs) and the SIGNIFIED (meaning).
 Does language always
communicate a message?
1) Language doesn’t always have a
message in any real sense, certainly
not in the sense of a piece of
information. Part of its function is
concerned with social relationships.
2) Meanings do not seem to be stable but to depend upon
speakers, hearers and context. Yet if linguistics is
scientific, it must be concerned not with specific
instances, but with generalizations. For this reason, it is
generally assumed that a distinction can be made
between the linguistic system and the use made of that
system by speakers and hearers. This point was made by
de Saussure (1961:30-2) in his distinction between
LANGUAGE (langue) and SPEAKING (parole). This
distinction reappeared in Chomsky (1965:4) as
COMPETENCE and PERFORMANCE.
Both are concerned with excluding what is
purely individual and accidental (speaking or
performance), and to insist that the proper
study of linguistics is language or
competence, which is some kind of idealized
system.
It goes without saying that we cannot be concerned with
purely individual, idiosyncratic, acts.
“When I use a word”, Humpty Dumpty said in a rather
scornful tone, “it means what I choose it to mean-neither
more nor less” Lewis Caroll (Through the Looking-Glass).
An individual’s meaning is not part of the general study of
semantics. Of course, it is interesting or important for some
purposes to see how and why an individual diverges from the
normal pattern, e.g. in literature, but it is important to
realize that the literary studies would not be possible
without the generalized ‘normal’ patterns to make
comparisons with.
 ‘Meaning’ versus ‘Use’
We need to make a distinction, then, between what would seem
to be the usual meaning of a word or a sentence and the
meaning it has in certain specific circumstances.
This may be a matter of ‘meaning’ versus ‘use’, or as some
philosophers and linguists have suggested, between
SEMANTICS and PRAGMATICS.
The most useful distinction, perhaps, is made by Lyons
(1977:643) in terms of SENTENCE MEANING, which is directly
related to the grammatical and lexical features of a sentence,
and UTTERANCE MEANING, which includes all ‘secondary’
aspects of meanings, especially those related to context.
 It is this distinction that allows us to ‘SAY’ one thing and
‘MEAN’ another.
 Semantics in other
disciplines
1. Semantics and Pragmatics
2. Semantics and Lexicography
3. Semantics and Discourse Analysis
4. Semantics and Psycholinguistics
5. Semantics and Translation