chapter 5 Semantics英语专业语言学.pptVIP

5 Semantics Semantics is the study of meaning in language. (p.104) It stands at the very center of the linguistic quest to understand the nature of language and human language ability because expressing meanings is what languages are all about. Meaning in Communication Linguistic meaning Sentence meaning Lexical meaning Grammatical meaning Speaker’s meaning Paralinguistic meaning Non-linguistic meaning Approaches to meaning 104 1.The Naming Theory/referential theory—Plato命名说 Definition: the meaning of an expression is what it refers to, or names. Problems with naming as meaning conj., prep, adv, imaginary objects or abstract notions such as “but, for, slowly, ghost, sadness”? Lexical and structural meaning Grammatical meaning (syntactic and morphological) Functional words Lexical meaning Content words It is arguable that the ‘functional words’ have any referent in the physical world. The conceptualist view 2. The conceptualist view illustrated by the semantic triangle/triangle of significance. Definition: The interpretation of meaning is linked through the mediation of concepts in the mind. Problem: What is the link? Triangle of Reference by Ogden Richards Contextualism 3. Contextualism: Meaning should be studied in terms of situation, use, context. Wittgenstein: …the meaning of a word is its use in the language. J.R. Firth: “We shall know a word by the company it keeps.” Context Linguistic context: co-text, word’s collocation. Eg. Black coffee, black tea, black people Situational context Participants( Personalities,Verbal action,Nonverbal action etc. ) Actions Objects and events Deictic features Behaviorism 107 4.Behaviorism—Bloomfield “situation in which the speaker utters it and the response it calls forth in the hearer.” S Jill r……s Jack R truth-conditional theory 109 5. Meaning as truth conditions: truth-conditional theory/semantics 真值理论draws on formal logic 形式逻辑. Knowing the meaning of a sentence means knowing th