[文学]05Chapterfive_semantics.ppt

Lecture Seven Chapter Five Meaning Semantics― the study of meaning In the late 19th century, seen by Breal as an emerging science opposed to phonetics as a science of sounds. In the 1930s seen by Bloomfield as a field covering both grammar, as one account of meaningful forms, and the lexicon. In the 1960s, seen as the study of meaning in the lexicon alone, including changes in word meaning. At the end of the 20th century, semantics will include, in particular, both word meaning (lexical semantics) and the meaning of utterances as studied in pragmatics. There are several schools of semantics. Formal semantics, Lexical semantics, Linguistic semantics, Logical semantics, Philosophical semantics, Pragmatics. 5.1 Meanings of Meaning Meaning has been studied for thousands of years by philosophers, logicians and linguists. E.g. Plato Aristotle. Logicians and philosophers have tended to concentrate on a restricted range of sentences (typically, statements, or ‘propositions’) within a single language. The linguistic approach is broader in scope, aiming to study the properties of meaning in a systematic and objective way, with reference to as wide a range of utterances and languages as possible. Meaning: traditionally of something said to be ‘expressed by’ a sentence. E.g. I hate him would express the thought, judgment, or proposition ‘I hate him’. Forms that express something are meaningful, ones that do not are meaningless. Modern theories are often elaborations of this. (a) There is a distinction between the meaning of a sentence, independent of any context, and the meaning that it will have as an utterance on a particular occasion. (b) Sentence meanings are part of the language system, and form a level of semantic representation independent of other levels. (c) representations of that level are derivable from representations at the level of syntax, given a lexicon which specifies the meanings of words and a set of r