9

Semantics
◈

This one time I was flying out of SFO (San Francisco) and I happened to
have a jar of home-made quince preserves in my carry-on. A TSA
(Transportation Security Administration) agent stopped me, saying that the
quince preserves couldn’t come aboard because no gels, liquids, or aerosols
were allowed past the checkpoint. I asked him politely which of those quince
 preserves were: gel, liquid, or aerosol, because they seemed a lot like fruit.
His response, and I kid you not, was “Sir, I’m not going to argue semantics
with you.”
Bergen (2012)

Semantics is the study of the meaning of words, phrases and sentences. In

semantic analysis, there is always an attempt to focus on what the words
conventionally mean, rather than on what an individual speaker might think
they mean, or want them to mean, on a particular occasion. This approach is
concerned with linguistic meaning that is shared by all competent users of
the language. Doing semantics is attempting to spell out what it is we all
know when we behave as if we share knowledge of the meaning of a word, a
phrase, or a sentence in a language.

Meaning
While semantics is the study of meaning in language, there is more interest in
certain aspects of meaning than in others. We have already ruled out special
meanings that one individual might attach to words or what TSA agents believe
words mean, as in Ben Bergen’s story quoted earlier. That is, our main interest is
in what we might describe as the widely accepted objective or factual meaning
of words and not their subjective or personal meaning. This distinction is
generally presented in terms of referential meaning as opposed to associative
or emotive meaning, such as feelings or reactions to words that may be found
among some individuals or groups but not others.
Referential meaning covers those basic, essential components of meaning
that are conveyed by the literal use of a word. It is the type of meaning that
dictionaries are designed to describe. Some of the basic components of a word
like needle in English might include “thin, sharp, steel instrument.” These
components would be part of the referential meaning of needle. However,
different people might have different associations or connotations attached to a
word like needle. They might associate it with “pain,” or “illness,” or “blood,” or
“drugs,” or “thread,” or “knitting,” or “hard to find” (especially in a haystack),
and these associations may differ from one person to the next. These associations
can’t be part of the word’s referential meaning.
One way in which the study of basic referential meaning might be helpful
would be as a means of accounting for the “oddness” we experience when we
read sentences such as the following:

The hamburger ate the boy.

The table listens to the radio.
The horse is reading the newspaper.

We should first note that the oddness of these sentences does not derive from
their syntactic structure. According to the basic syntactic rules for forming
English sentences (presented in Chapter 8), we have well-formed structures.

NP V NP

The hamburger ate the boy

This sentence is syntactically good, but semantically odd. Since the sentence
The boy ate the hamburger is perfectly acceptable, we may be able to identify
the source of the problem. The components of the referential meaning of the
noun hamburger must be significantly different from those of the noun boy,
allowing one, not the other, to “make sense” with the verb ate. Quite simply, the
kind of noun used with ate must denote an entity that is capable of “eating.” The
noun hamburger doesn’t have this property and the noun boy does.

Semantic Features
We can make this observation more generally applicable by trying to determine
the crucial element or feature of meaning that any noun must have in order to be
used as the subject of the verb ate. Such an element may be as general as
“animate being.” We can then use this idea to describe part of the meaning of
words as having either plus (+) or minus (–) that particular feature. So, the
feature that the noun boy has is “+animate” (= denotes an animate being) and the
feature that the noun hamburger has is “–animate” (= does not denote an animate
being).
This simple example is an illustration of a procedure for analyzing meaning
in terms of semantic features. Features such as “+animate / –animate,”
“+human / –human,” “+female / –female,” for example, can be treated as the
basic elements involved in differentiating the meaning of each word in a
language from every other word. If we had to provide the crucial distinguishing
features of the meanings of a set of English words such as table, horse, boy,
man, girl, woman, we could begin with the chart in Table 9.1.

Table 9.1
table horse boy man girl woman

animate − + + + + +

human − − + + + +

female − − − − + +

adult − + − + − +
 From a feature analysis like this, we can say that at least part of the meaning
of the word girl in English involves the elements [+human, +female, –adult]. We
can also characterize the feature that is crucially required in a noun in order for it
to appear as the subject of a particular verb, supplementing the syntactic analysis
with semantic features. We can then predict which nouns (e.g. hamburger, horse,
table) would make the sentence semantically odd. Some verbs may simply
require subjects that have the feature [+animate], while others will be more
specific and need [+human], as in these two examples.
N [+animate]

The ____________________ ate all the food.

N [+human]

The _____________________ is reading the newspaper.

Words as Containers of Meaning

The approach just outlined is a start on analyzing the basic components of word
meaning, but it is not without problems. For many words in a language it may
not be as easy to come up with neat components of meaning. If we try to think of
the components or features we would use to differentiate the nouns advice,
threat and warning, for example, we may not be very successful. Part of the
problem seems to be that the approach involves a view of words in a language as
some sort of “containers” that carry meaning components. This approach seems
to be too restrictive and very limited in terms of practical use. There is more to
the meaning of words than these basic types of features.

Semantic Roles
Instead of thinking of words as containers of meaning, we can look at the “roles”
they fulfill within the situation described by a sentence. If the situation is a
simple event, as in The boy kicked the ball, then the verb describes an action
(kick). The noun phrases in the sentence describe the roles of entities, such as
people and things, involved in the action. We can identify a small number of
semantic roles (also called “thematic roles” or “case roles”) for these noun
phrases.

Agent and Theme

In our example sentence, one role is taken by the noun phrase The boy as “the
entity that performs the action,” technically known as the agent. Another role is
taken by the ball as “the entity that is involved in or affected by the action,”
which is called the theme (or sometimes the “patient”). The theme can also be
an entity (The ball) that is simply being described (i.e. not performing an action),
as in The ball was red.
Agents and themes are the most common semantic roles. Although agents
are typically human (The boy), as in (1) below, they can also be non-human
entities that cause actions, as in noun phrases denoting a natural force (The
wind), a machine (A car), or a creature (The dog), all of which affect the ball as
theme in examples (2)–(4). The theme is typically non-human, but can be human
(the boy), as in the last sentence (5).

(1) The boy kicked the ball.

(2) The wind blew the ball away.

(3) A car ran over the ball.

(4) The dog caught the ball.

(5) The dog chased the boy.

 Instrument and Experiencer
If an agent uses another entity in order to perform an action, that other entity fills
the role of instrument. In the sentences The boy cut the rope with an old razor
and He drew the picture with a crayon, the noun phrases an old razor and a
crayon are being used in the semantic role of instrument. Note that the
preposition with is often a clue that the following noun phrase has the role of
instrument in English. A related use of with is explored in Task G, and noun
phrases marked as instruments in another language (Lakhota) can be found in
Task H, both on page 137.
When a noun phrase is used to designate an entity as the person who has a
feeling, perception or state, it fills the semantic role of experiencer. If we feel,
know, hear or enjoy something, we are not really performing an action (hence we
are not agents). We are in the role of experiencer. In the first sentence below, the
experiencer (The woman) is the only semantic role. In the second example, the
question is asking if (you) had the experience of hearing the theme (that noise).

The woman feels sad.

Did you hear that noise?

Location, Source and Goal

A number of other semantic roles designate where an entity is in the description
of an event. Where an entity is (on the table, in the room) fills the role of
location. Where the entity moves from is the source (from Chicago) and where
it moves to is the goal (to New Orleans), as in We drove from Chicago to New
Orleans. When we talk about transferring money from savings to checking, the
source is savings and the goal is checking. (Other examples are presented in Task
I, page 138.)
 All these semantic roles are illustrated in the following scenario. Note that a
single entity (e.g. George) can appear in several different semantic roles.

Mary saw a fly on the wall.

EXPERIENCER THEME LOCATION

She borrowed a magazine from George.

AGENT THEME SOURCE

She squashed the bug with the

magazine.

AGENT THEME INSTRUMENT.

She handed the magazine back to George.

AGENT THEME GOAL

“Gee thanks,” said George.

AGENT

Lexical Relations
Not only can words be treated as containers of meaning, or as fulfilling roles in
events, they can also have “relationships” with each other. In everyday talk, we
often explain the meanings of words in terms of their relationships. If we are
asked the meaning of the word conceal, for example, we might simply say, “It’s
the same as hide,” or give the meaning of shallow as “the opposite of deep,” or
the meaning of pine as “a kind of tree.” In doing so, we are characterizing the
meaning of each word, not in terms of its component features, but in terms of its
relationship to other words. This approach is used in the semantic description of
language and treated as the analysis of lexical relations. The lexical relations we
have just exemplified are synonymy (conceal/hide), antonymy (shallow/deep)
and hyponymy (pine/tree).

Synonymy
Two or more words with very closely related meanings are called synonyms.
They can often, though not always, be substituted for each other in sentences. In
the appropriate circumstances, we can say, What was his answer? or What was
his reply? with much the same meaning. Other common examples of synonyms
are the following pairs:

almost/nearly big/large broad/wide buy/purchase

cab/taxi car/automobile couch/sofa doctor/physician

freedom/liberty handbag/purse hard/difficult sweat/perspire

We should keep in mind that the idea of “sameness” of meaning used in

discussing synonymy is not necessarily “total sameness,” and it is best to think
of these pairs as “close synonyms.” There are many occasions when one word is
appropriate in a sentence, but its synonym would be odd. For example, whereas
the word answer fits in the sentence Sandy had only one answer correct on the
test, the word reply would sound odd. Although broad and wide can both be used
to describe a street in a similar way, we only talk about being in broad
agreement (not wide) and in the whole wide world (not broad). There are also
regional differences in the use of synonymous pairs, with candy, chips, diaper
and gasoline in American English being equivalents of sweets, crisps, nappy and
petrol in British English.
 Synonymous forms may also differ in terms of formal versus informal uses.
The sentence My father purchased a large automobile has virtually the same
meaning as My dad bought a big car, with four synonymous replacements, but
the second version sounds much more casual or informal than the first.

Antonymy
Two forms with opposite meanings are called antonyms. Some common
examples are the pairs:

alive/dead big/small buy/sell enter/exit fast/slow

happy/sad hot/cold long/short male/female married/single

old/new raise/lower rich/poor smart/stupid true/false

Antonyms are usually divided into three main types, “gradable” (opposites
along a scale), “non-gradable” (direct opposites) and “reversives” (one is the
reverse action of the other). We can use gradable antonyms in comparative
constructions involving adjectives, as in these underlined examples: I’m smaller
than you and slower, sadder, colder, shorter and older, but luckily quite a bit
richer. Also, the negative of one member of a gradable pair does not necessarily
imply the other. For example, the sentence My car isn’t old doesn’t have to mean
My car is new.
With non-gradable antonyms (also called “complementary pairs”),
comparative constructions are not normally used. We don’t typically describe
someone as deader or more dead than another. Also, using the “negative test,”
we can see that the negative of one member of a non-gradable pair does imply
the other member. That is, My grandparents aren’t alive does indeed mean My
grandparents are dead. Other non-gradable antonyms are the pairs: male/female,
married/single and true/false.
Although we can use the “negative test” to identify non-gradable antonyms
in a language, we usually avoid describing one member of an antonymous pair
as the negative of the other. For example, while undress can be treated as the
opposite of dress, it does not mean “not dress.” It actually means “do the reverse
of dress.” Antonyms of this type are called reversives. Other examples are
enter/exit, pack/unpack, lengthen/shorten, raise/lower, tie/untie. (See Tasks C
and D, page 136.)

Hyponymy
When the meaning of one form is included in the meaning of another, the
relationship is described as hyponymy. Examples are the pairs: animal/horse,
insect/ant, flower/rose. The concept of “inclusion” involved in this relationship
is the idea that if an object is a rose, then it is necessarily a flower, so the
meaning of flower is included in the meaning of rose. Or, rose is a hyponym of
flower.
When we investigate connections based on hyponymy, we are essentially
looking at the meaning of words in some type of hierarchical relationship. Try to
think quickly of a basic meaning for each of these words: banyan, parakeet,
terrier, turnip. You can check Figure 9.1 to see if your meaning included
hyponymy.
 Figure 9.1

Looking at the examples in Figure 9.1, we can say that “horse is a hyponym
of animal,” “ant is a hyponym of insect” and “turnip is a hyponym of
vegetable.” In these three examples, animal, insect and vegetable are called the
superordinate (= higher level) terms. We can also say that two or more words
that share the same superordinate term are co-hyponyms. So, dog and horse are
co-hyponyms and the superordinate term is animal, while ant and cockroach are
co-hyponyms with insect as the superordinate. Or schnauzer and yorkie are co-
hyponyms, with terrier as one superordinate and dog as another at a more
general level.
The relation of hyponymy captures the concept of “is a kind of,” as when we
give the meaning of a word by saying, “a schnauzer is a kind of dog.”
Sometimes the only thing we know about the meaning of a word is that it is a
hyponym of another term. That is, we may know nothing more about the
meaning of the word yorkie other than that it is a kind of dog (also known as a
Yorkshire terrier) or that banyan is a kind of tree.
 Of course, it is not only words for “things” that are hyponyms. Words such
as punch, shoot and stab, as verbs describing “actions,” can all be treated as co-
hyponyms of the superordinate term injure and the verbs bake, boil, fry and grill
as co-hyponyms of the superordinate cook. For a lot of people, microwave has
become another one.

Prototypes
While the words canary, cormorant, dove, duck, flamingo, parrot, pelican and
robin are all equally co-hyponyms of the superordinate bird, they are not all
considered to be equally good examples of the category “bird.” According to
some researchers, the most characteristic instance of the category “bird” is robin.
The idea of “the characteristic instance” of a category is known as the
prototype. The concept of a prototype helps explain the meaning of certain
words, like bird, not in terms of component features (e.g. “has feathers,” “has
wings”), but in terms of resemblance to the clearest example. Thus, we might
wonder if ostrich or penguin should be hyponyms of bird (technically they are),
but we have no trouble deciding about sparrow or pigeon. These last two are
much closer to the prototype.
Given the category label furniture, we are quick to recognize chair as a better
example than bench or stool. Given clothing, people recognize shirts quicker
than shoes, and given vegetable, they accept carrot before potato or turnip. It is
clear that there is some general pattern to the categorization process involved in
prototypes and that it determines our interpretation of word meaning. However,
this is one area where individual experience can lead to substantial variation in
interpretation. People may disagree over the categorization of words like
avocado or tomato and treat them as co-hyponyms of both fruit and vegetable in
different contexts.
 Homophones and homonyms
When two or more different (written) forms have the same pronunciation, they
are described as homophones. Common English examples are:

bare/bear flour/flower meat/meet pail/pale

pair/pear right/write sew/so to/too/two

We use the term homonyms when one form (written or spoken) has two or
more unrelated meanings, as in these examples:

bat (flying creature) – bat (used in sports)

mole (on skin) – mole (small animal)

pen (writing instrument) – pen (enclosed space)

race (contest of speed) – race (ethnic group)

sole (single) – sole (part of foot or shoe)

The temptation is to think that the two types of bat must be related in
meaning. They are not. Homonyms are words that have separate histories and
meanings, but have accidentally come to have exactly the same form.

Polysemy
When we encounter two or more words with the same form and related
meanings, we have what is technically known as polysemy. Polysemy (from
Greek poly “many” and semy “meanings”) can be defined as one form (written
or spoken) having multiple meanings that are all related by extension. Examples
are the word head, used to refer to the object on top of your body, froth on top of
a glass of beer, person at the top of a company or department or school and many
other things. Other examples of polysemy are foot (of a person, of a bed, of a
mountain), mouth (part of a face, a cave, a river) or run (person does, water does,
colors do).
If we are not sure whether different uses of a single word are examples of
homonymy or polsemy, we can check in a dictionary. If the word has multiple
meanings (i.e. it is polysemous), there will be a single entry, with a numbered list
of the different meanings. If two words are homonyms, they will have two
separate entries. In most dictionaries, bat, mail, mole, and sole are treated as
homonyms whereas face, foot, get, head and run are treated as examples of
polysemy.
Of course, it is possible for two forms to be distinguished via homonymy and
for one of the forms also to have various uses via polysemy. The words date (= a
thing we can eat) and date (= a point in time) are homonyms. However, the
“point in time” kind of date is polysemous in terms of a particular day and
month (= on a letter), an arranged meeting time (= an appointment), a social
meeting (= with someone we like) and even a person (= that person we like). So
the question How was your date? could have a number of different
interpretations.

Word Play
These last three lexical relations are the basis of a lot of word play, usually for
humorous effect. In the nursery rhyme Mary had a little lamb, we think of a
small animal, but in the comic version Mary had a little lamb, some rice and
vegetables, we think of a small amount of meat. The polysemy of lamb allows
the two interpretations. It is recognizing the polysemy of leg and foot in the
riddle What has four legs, but only one foot? that leads to a solution (a bed).
 We can make sense of another riddle Why are trees often mistaken for dogs?
by recognizing the homonymy in the answer: Because of their bark. Shakespeare
used homophones (sun/son) for word play in the first lines of the play Richard
III:

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York.

And if you are asked the following question: Why is 6 afraid of 7?, you can
understand why the answer is funny (Because 789) by identifying the
homophones.

Metonymy
The relatedness of meaning found in polysemy is essentially based on similarity.
The head of a company is similar to the head of a person on top of and
controlling the body. There is another type of relationship between words, based
simply on a close connection in everyday experience. That close connection can
be based on a container–contents relation (bottle/water, can/juice), a whole–part
relation (car/wheels, house/roof) or a representative–symbol relationship
(king/crown, the President/the White House). Using one of these words to refer
to the other is an example of metonymy.
It is our familiarity with metonymy that makes it possible for us to
understand He drank the whole bottle, although it sounds absurd literally (i.e. he
drank the liquid, not the glass object). We also accept The White House has
announced … or Downing Street protested … without being puzzled that
buildings appear to be talking. We use metonymy when we talk about filling up
the car, answering the door, boiling a kettle, giving someone a hand, or needing
some wheels. (See Task F, page 136, for more.)