LINGUISTICS SIMPLIFIED: SEMANTICS
8. Paraphrase
A sentence which expresses the same proposition as another
sentence is known as the paraphrase of that sentence.
For example:
(a) A: John sold that car to Mary.
B: Mary bought that car from John.
(b) A: My father owns all these four apartments.
B: All these four apartments belong to my father.
(c) A: Peter is the parent of Hamilton.
B: Hamilton is the child of Peter.
(d) A: Shakespeare wrote the Macbeth.
B: Macbeth was written by Shakespeare.
LINGUISTICS SIMPLIFIED: SEMANTICS
In these four pairs of sentences A is the paraphrase of B just as B
is the paraphrase of A.
9. Sense and reference
The understanding of both sense and reference is essential to a
proper understanding of the meaning of meaning. In non-
technical language the two are sometimes used interchangeably
but the difference between the two is considered crucial in
semantics.
- The word reference, as it is used in its technical sense in
semantics, tells us about the relationship between language and
outside world. The word sense tells us about relationships inside
language, i.e., relationships between words, phrases and
sentences in a language.
LINGUISTICS SIMPLIFIED: SEMANTICS
For example:
- The phrase Eiffel Tower refers to a tower in Paris, the phrase
Taj Mahal refers to a beautiful marble building at Agra in
India and the Leaning Tower of Pisa refers to a certain tower
in Italy. This is true not only about proper nouns but also
about countable nouns.
- The word lion refers to all those large, strong, flesh-eating
animals found in Asia and Africa are known as lions and,
similarly, the word crocodile refers to the large, ferocious,
man-eating reptiles found in rivers.
- The referent of a word is the person, place or thing for which
that word is [Link] lions in the world are the referents of the
word lion and, similarly, all the crocodiles in the world are
LINGUISTICS SIMPLIFIED: SEMANTICS
The referents of the word crocodile.
- There are words in every language, however, which do not
refer to anything in the world outside that language.
- For example, words like and, or, if, therefore, because,
perhaps, almost, and certainly, do not refer to any person,
place or thing in the outside world. These words have sense
but no reference.
- We say that the word likely and the word probable mean the
same thing because though these two words have no referents
in the world outside language, they have the same sense.
- But when we say that the Morning Star and the Evening Star
mean the same thing, we say that because both these
expressions refer to the same planet Venus.
LINGUISTICS SIMPLIFIED: SEMANTICS
10. Denotation and connotation
-The denotation of a word is the object or the objects that it
refers to in the world outside language,
For example: The denotation of the word elephant is actual
elephants all over the world. The denotation of the word whale is
the whales found in sea all over the globe.
- The denotation of a word is, thus, the same thing as the
referent of that word. But just as the meaning of reference needs
to be understood in relation to the meaning of sense, the
meaning of denotation needs to be understood in relation to the
meaning of connotation. The connotation of a word is the
incidental meaning that we associate with a word from time to
time.
LINGUISTICS SIMPLIFIED: SEMANTICS
- Putative qualities (i.e., qualities which are often supposed to
be there) expressed by adjectives like “frail”, “sentimental”,
“tender”, “likely to shed tears”, “kind” and “compassionate”
can, for example, be mentioned as some of the connotations of
the word woman.
- It may be pointed out here that though the denotation of a
word usually remains more or less the same, the connotation
of a word changes with the passage of time. In many cases it
changes from one culture to another and in some cases it
changes from one individual to another.
- Thus, the connotation of a word is unstable and, compared to
its denotation, it is peripheral to its meaning.
(* Practice: Doing exercises 1-3 in the course book)
LINGUISTICS SIMPLIFIED: SEMANTICS
UNIT TWO: THE SEMANTICS OF WORDS (1)
1. Antonyms
- Words having opposite meanings are called antonyms.
- There are four main types of antonyms:
(i) Binary opposites
(ii) Gradable opposites
(iii) Converse terms
(iv) Multiple incompatibles
LINGUISTICS SIMPLIFIED: SEMANTICS
(i) Binary opposites
There are pairs of antonyms in the case of which the truth of one
word in the pair implies the falsity of the other and similarly the
falsity of one implies the truth of the other.
For example:
- single - married
- employed - unemployed
- Europeans - non-Europeans
- male - female
- animate - inanimate
- alive - dead
LINGUISTICSSIMPLIFIED: SEMANTICS
- One of the important features of such antonyms is that they are
not gradable.
- Another important thing about such pairs of antonyms is that
they are exhaustive and mutually exclusive.
• Such antonyms are what traditional logicians described as
contradictory terms. Lyons (1968:467) and Palmer (1981:8)
call them complementary terms. Following Hurford and
Heasley (1983), such antonyms have been labelled as binary
opposites.