Semantics

semantics
The meaning of language

lexical semantics
concerned with the meanings of words
phrasal or sentential semantics
concerned with the meaning of syntactic units larger than
the word
•Semantic
The study of the linguistic meaning of morphemes, words,
phrases, and sentences

to determine whether a sentence true or false ,whether
Sentence has multiple meanings. One way to account for
this knowledge is by formulating semantic rules that
build the meaning of a sentence from the meaning of its
words and the way the words combine syntactically. This
is often called truth-conditional semantic (compositional
semantics)
What Speakers Know about Sentence Meaning

Truth
ss are true or false in a given situation (jack swims) is true for you
know he can swim, and is false for you know he never learned to
swim
tautologies (analytic)
ss are always true regardless of circumstances, their truth is
guaranted solely by meaning of parts and ways they are parts
together
ex: circles are round.
Person who is single is not married
Contradictions:ss are always false .
Circle are square
A bachelor is married

One sentence entails another if whenever 1st sentence is
true 2nd is also true in all conceivable circumstances, jack
swims beautifully entails Jack swims
entailment goes only in one direction, Jack swims doesn’t
entail jack swims beautifully
On the other hand, negating sentences reverses the
entailment.
Jack doesn’t swim entails Jack doesn’t swim
beautifully
Entailment and Related Notions

A synonymous (or paraphrases)
two sentences are synonymous (or paraphrases) if they are both true or
both false with respect to the same situations. Sentences like Jack put off
the meeting, and Jack postponed the meeting are synonymous
2-
Two sentences are synonymous if they entail each other
.
.
Two sentences are contradictory if one entails the negation of
the other. For instance, Jack is alive entails the negation of
Jack is dead, namely Jack is not dead. Similarly, Jack is dead
entails the negation of Jack is alive, namely Jack is not alive.

In (1) the PP with a telescope modifies the VP, and the interpretation is that
the action of seeing occurred by use of a telescope. In (2) the PP with a telescope
modifies the NP the man, and the interpretation is that the man has the
Telescope.
.
Lexical ambiguity arises when at least one word in a phrase has more than
one meaning. For instance the sentence This will make you smart is ambiguous
Because of the two meanings of the word smart: “clever” or “burning
sensation.”
Our knowledge of lexical and structural ambiguities reveals that the
meaning of a linguistic expression is built both on the words it
contains and its syntactic structure. The notion that the meaning
of an expression is composed of the meanings of its parts and how
they are combined structurally is referred to as the principle of
compositionality.

The phrase structure tree for our sentence is
as follows
The tree tells us that syntactically the NP Jack and the VP swims combine to
form a sentence. We want to mirror that combination at the semantic level: in
other words, we want to combine the meaning of the NP Jack (an individual)
and the meaning of the VP swims (a set of individuals) to obtain the meaning of
the S Jack swims. This is done by means of Semantic Rule I.

Semantic Rule I
The meaning of [S NP VP] is the following truth condition:
If the meaning of NP (an individual) is a member of the meaning of VP (a set
of individuals), then S is TRUE, otherwise it is FALSE.
Rule I states that a sentence composed of a subject NP and a predicate VP is
true if the subject NP refers to an individual who is among the members of the
set that constitute the meaning of the VP. This rule is entirely general; it does not
refer to any particular sentence, individuals, or verbs. It works equally well for
sentences like Ellen sings or Max barks. Thus the meaning of Max barks is the
truth condition (i.e., the “if-sentence”) that states that the sentence is true if the
individual denoted by Max is among the set of barking individuals.
Let us now try a slightly more complex case: the sentence Jack kissed Laura.
The main syntactic difference between this example and the previous one is that
we now have a transitive verb that requires an extra NP in object position; otherwise
our semantic rules will derive the meaning using the same mechanical
procedure as in the first example. We again start with the word meaning and
syntactic structure:

Word Meanings
Jack refers to (or means) the individual Jack
Laura refers to (or means) the individual Laura
kissed refers to (or means) the set of pairs of
individuals X and Y such that X kissed Y.
Here is the phrase structure tree
The meaning of the transitive verb kiss is still a set, but
this time a set of pairs of individuals..

Semantic Rule II
The meaning of [VP V NP] is the set of individuals X such that X is the first member
of any pair in the meaning of V whose second member is the meaning of NP.
The meaning of the sentence is derived by first applying Semantic Rule II, which
establishes the meaning of the VP as a certain set of individuals, namely those who
kissed Laura.
Semantic Rule I applies the meaning of the sentence as the truth condition that
determines S to be true whenever the meaning of Jack is a member of the set that
is the meaning of the VP kissed Laura. In other words, S is true if Jack kissed Laura
and false otherwise. These two semantic rules handle an essentially infinite number
of intransitive and transitive sentences. These rules account for our knowledge about
the truth value of sentences by taking the meanings of words and combining them
according to the syntactic structure of the sentence.

When Compositionality Goes Awry
. If one or more words in a sentence do not have a meaning, then
obviously we will not be able to compute a meaning for the entire
sentence. Moreover, even if the individual words have meaning but
cannot be combined together as required by the syntactic structure
and related semantic rules, we will also not get to a meaning. We
refer to these situations as semantic anomaly. It might require a lot of
creativity and imagination to derive a meaning. This is what happens
in metaphors. Finally, some expressions—called idioms—have a fixed
meaning, that is, a meaning that is not compositional. Applying
compositional rules to idioms gives rise to funny or inappropriate
meanings

Anomaly
The semantic properties of words determine what other words they can be
combined
with. A sentence widely used by linguists that we encountered in chapter
4 illustrates this fact:
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
The sentence obeys all the syntactic rules of English. The subject is colorless
green ideas and the predicate is sleep furiously. It has the same syntactic
structure
as the sentence
Dark green leaves rustle furiously

but there is obviously something semantically wrong with
the sentence. The
meaning of colorless includes the semantic feature
“without color,” but it is
combined with the adjective green, which has the
feature “green in color.” How
can something be both “without color” and “green in
color”? Other semantic
violations occur in the sentence. Such sentences are
semantically anomalous.

Other English “sentences” make no sense at all because they
include “words”
that have no meaning; they are uninterruptable. They can be
interpreted only if
some meaning for each nonsense word can be dreamt up. Lewis
Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”
is probably the most famous poem in which most of the content
words have no meaning—they do not exist in the lexicon of the
grammar.
Still,all the sentences sound as if they should be or could be
English sentences:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought
Without knowing what vorpal means, you
nevertheless know that
He took his vorpal sword in hand means the same
thing as
He took his sword, which was vorpal, in hand.
It was in his hand that he took his vorpal sword

Knowing the language, and assuming that vorpal means the same thing in the three
sentences (because the same sounds are used), you can decide that the sense—the
truth conditions—of the three sentences are identical. In other words, you are able to
decide that two things mean the same thing even though you do not know what
either one means.
Semantic violations in poetry may form strange but interesting aesthetic images, as
in the phrase “a grief ago”. Ago is ordinarily used with words specified by some
temporal semantic feature:

a week ago *a table ago
an hour ago but not *a dream ago a
month ago *a mother ago
a century ago
When the poet used the word grief with ago, he was adding a durational feature
to grief for poetic effect, so while the noun phrase is anomalous, it evokes certain
feelings.
Though some phrases violate some semantic rules, we can understand them;
breaking the rules creates the imagery desired. The fact that we are able to
understand, or at least interpret, anomalous expressions, and at the same time
recognize their anomalous nature, demonstrates our knowledge of the semantic
system and semantic properties of the language.

Metaphor
Metaphors may have a literal meaning as well as their metaphorical
meaning,so in some sense they are ambiguous. However, when the
semantic rules are applied to Walls have ears, for example, the literal
meaning is so unlikely that
listeners use their imagination for another interpretation.
To interpret a metaphor we need to understand the individual
words, the literalmeaning of the whole expression, and facts about
the world. To understand the metaphor

Time is money
it is necessary to know that in our society we are often paid
according to the number of hours or days worked.
In fact, “time,” which is an abstract concept,
is the subject of multiple metaphors. We “save time,” “waste
time,” “manage
time,” push things “back in time,” live on “borrowed time,” and
suffer the “ravages
of time” as the “sands of time” drift away. In effect, the
metaphors take the
abstract concept of time and treat it as a concrete object of
value.

Metaphor has a strong cultural component. Shakespeare uses
metaphors that
are lost on many of today’s playgoers. “I am a man whom Fortune
hath cruelly scratched,” is most effective as a metaphor in a
society like Shakespeare’s that
commonly depicts “Fortune” as a woman
On the other hand There’s a bug in my program would make
little sense in a culture without computers, even if the
idea of having bugs in something indicates a problem. Many
expressions now taken literally may have originated as
metaphors, such
as “the fall of the dollar,” meaning its decline in value on the
world market.

Idioms
• not predictable
• given in the lexicon
Such expressions are called
idioms, or idiomatic phrases.
Idioms are similar in structure
to ordinary phrases except that
they tend to be frozen in form
(fixed) , must be entered into
the lexicon or mental dictionary
as single items with their
meanings specified
sell down the river
rake over the coals

let their hair
down(stay calm)
put his foot in his mouth bite your tongue
Avoid talking

some idioms whose parts can be moved without affecting
the idiomatic sense:
The FBI kept tabs on radicals.
Tabs were kept on radicals by the FBI.
Radicals were kept tabs on by the FBI.
Like metaphors, idioms can break the rules on combining semantic properties.
The object of eat must usually be something with the semantic feature
“edible,” but in
He ate his hat.
Eat your heart outhits restriction is violated.
Idioms often lead to humor:
What did the doctor tell the vegetarian about his surgically implanted heart
valve from a pig?
That it was okay as long as he didn’t “eat his heart out.”
.

All languages have idioms, but idioms rarely if ever translate word for word
from one language to another. Most speakers of American English understand
the idiom to kick the bucket as meaning “to die.” The same combination of
words in Spanish (patear el cubo) has only the literal meaning of striking a
specific
bucket with a foot.

Lexical Semantics
((Word Meanings

In this section we will talk about word meaning and the semantic
relationships that exist between words and morphemes. Although
the meaning of a word may shift over time
Each of us knows the meanings of thousands of words. This knowledge
permits us to use words to express our thoughts and to understand the
thoughts of others. The meaning of words is part of linguistic knowledge. Your
mental storehouse of information about words and morphemes is what we
have been calling the lexicon.

Theories of Word Meaning
If the meaning of a word is not like a dictionary
entry, what is it? This question has been debated by
philosophers and linguists for centuries. One proposal
is that the meaning of a word or expression is its
reference, its association with the object it refers to.
This real world object is called the referent.

We have already determined that the meaning of proper names like Jack is
its reference, that link between the word Jack and the person named Jack,
which is its referent. Proper names are noun phrases (NPs); you can
substitute a proper name in any NP position in a sentence and preserve
grammaticality. There are other NPs that refer to individuals as well. For
instance, NPs like the happy swimmer, my friend, and that guy can all be
used to refer to Jack in the situation where you’ve observed Jack
swimming. The same is true for pronouns such as I, you, and him, which
also function as NPs. In all these cases, the reference of the NP—which
singles out the individual referred to under the circumstances—is part of
the meaning of the NP. On the other hand, not every NP refers to an
individual. For instance, the sentence No baby swims contains the NP no
baby, but your linguistic knowledge tells you that this NP does not refer to
any specific individual. If no baby has no reference, but is not meaningless,
then something about meaning beyond reference must be present

Sense
If meaning were reference alone, then the meaning of words
and expressions would be entirely dependent on the objects
pointed out in the real world. For example, the meaning of
This theory of word meaning is attractive because it
underscores the idea that meaning is a connection between
language on the one hand, and objects and events in the
world on the other. An obvious problem for such a theory,
however, is that speakers know many words that have no
real-world referents (e.g., hobbits, unicorns, and Harry
Potter). dog would be tied to the set of canine objects.

Yet speakers do know the meanings of these expressions. Similarly, what real-
world entities would function words like of and by, or modal verbs such as will or
may refer to? This element of meaning is often termed sense. It is the extra
something referred to earlier. Unicorns, hobbits, and Harry Potter have sense but
no reference (with regard to objects in the real world). Conversely, proper names
typically have only reference.
A name like Chris Jones may point out a certain person, its referent, but has
little linguistic meaning beyond that.
Sometimes two different proper names have the same referent, such as Mark
Twain and Samuel Langhorne Clemens, or Unabomber and Theodore Kaczynski.
Such pairs of noun phrases are coreferential. It is a hotly debated question
in the philosophy of language as to whether coreferential expressions have the
same or different senses.

. However, many meaningful expressions are not associated with any clear, unique
image agreed on by most speakers of the language. For example, what image is
evoked by the expressions very, if, and every? It’s difficult to say, yet these
expressions are certainly meaningful. What is the image of oxygen as distinct from
nitrogen—both are clear gases, yet they mean very different things. The reference
part of a word’s meaning, if it has reference at all, is the association with its
referent; and the sense part of a word’s meaning contains the information needed
to complete the association, and to suggest properties that the referent may have,
whether it exists in the real world or in the world of imagination.

Lexical Relations
Synonyms antonyms homonyms

Synonyms such as
apathetic/phlegmatic/passive/sluggish/indifferent
pedigree/ancestry/genealogy/descent/lineage
the following two sentences have very similar meanings:
He’s sitting on the sofa. / He’s sitting on the couch
English contains many synonymous pairs consisting of a word with an English
(or Germanic) root, and another with a Latin root, such as:English Latin
Manly- virile
Heal- recuperate
send -transmit
go down -descend

antonyms. There are several kinds ofantonymy. There are complementary pairs:
alive/dead present/absent awake/asleep
They are complementary in that alive = not dead and dead = not alive, and so
on.
There are gradable pairs of antonyms:
big/small hot/cold fast/slow happy/sad
The meaning of adjectives in gradable pairs is related to the object they modify.
The words do not provide an absolute scale. For example, we know that “a
small elephant” is much bigger than “a large mouse.” Fast is faster when
applied
to an airplane than to a car

Another characteristic of certain pairs of gradable antonyms is that one is
marked and the other unmarked. The unmarked member is the one used in
questions of degree. We ask, ordinarily, “How high is the mountain?” (not “How
low is it?”). We answer “Ten thousand feet high” but never “Ten thousand feet
low,” except humorously or ironically. Thus high is the unmarked member of
high/low. Similarly, tall is the unmarked member of tall/short, fast the
unmarked member of fast/slow, and so on.
Another kind of opposite involves pairs like
give/receive buy/sell teacher/pupil
They are called relational opposites, Pairs of words ending in -er and -ee are
usually relational opposites.
If Mary is Bill’s employer, then Bill is Mary’s employee

In English there are several ways to form antonyms. You can add the
prefix
un-:
likely/unlikely able/unable fortunate/unfortunate
or you can add non-:
entity/nonentity conformist/nonconformist
Some words are their own antonyms. These “autoantonyms” or
“contranyms”
are words such as cleave “to split apart” or “to cling together” and dust
“to remove something” or “to spread something,” as in dusting
furniture or dusting crops.
Antonymic pairs that are pronounced the same but spelled differently
are similar to autoantonyms: raise and raze are one such pair

Words like bear and bare are homonyms (also called homophones). Homonyms
are words that have different meanings but are pronounced the same,
and may or may not be spelled the same. (They’re homographs when spelled
the same, but when homographs are pronounced differently like pussy
meaning
“infected” or pussy meaning “kitten,” they are called heteronyms rather
than homonyms.) Near nonsense sentences like Entre nous, the new gnu
knew nu is a Greek letter tease us with homonyms. The humor in the cartoon
above is based on the homonyms walk and wok.
Homonyms can create ambiguity. The sentence:
I’ll meet you by the bank.
may mean “I’ll meet you by the financial institution” or “I’ll
meet you by the riverside.”

Homonyms are good candidates for confusion as well as humor, as
illustrated
in the following passage from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
“How is bread made?”
“I know that!” Alice cried eagerly.
“You take some flour—”
“Where do you pick the flower?” the White Queen asked. “In a
garden, or in the hedges?”

Other lexical relations include: polysemy, and hyponyms
For example, the word diamond
referring to a geometric shape and also to a baseball field that has
that shape is polysemous.

hyponyms. The relationship of hyponymy is between the more
general term such as color and the more specific instances of
it,such as
and lion is a hyponym of feline

Semantic Features
properties that are part of word meanings
and that reflect our knowledge about what
words mean

For example, the basic property of an tonyms
is that they share all but one semantic feature. We know that big
and red are not antonyms because they have too few semantic
features in common. They are
both adjectives, but big has a semantic feature “about size,”
whereas red has a
semantic feature “about color.” On the other hand, buy/sell are
relational opposites because both contain a semantic feature like
“change in possession,” differing only in the direction of the change.

Semantic features are among the conceptual elements that are part of the
meanings of words and sentence. Consider, for example, the sentence:
The assassin killed Thwacklehurst
If the word assassin is in your mental dictionary, you know that it was some
person who murdered some important person named Thwacklehurst. Your
knowledge of the meaning of assassin tells you that an animal did not do the
killing, and that Thwacklehurst was not an average citizen. Knowledge of
assassin
includes knowing that the individual to whom that word refers is human, is a
murderer, and is a killer of important people.

Evidence for Semantic Features
Consider the following unintentional word substitutions that some speakers have actually
spoken
Actual Utterance (Error)Intended Utterance
bridge of the neckbridge of the nose
when my tongues bledwhen my gums bled
he came too earlyhe came too late

These errors, and thousands of others that have been collected and
catalogued, reveal that the incorrectly substituted words are not
random but share some semantic feature with the intended words.
Nose, neck, gums, and tongues are all “body parts” or “parts of the
head.” Young, early, and late are related to “time.”

Semantic Features and Grammar
Further evidence that words are composed of smaller bits of meaning is that
semantic features interact with different aspects of the grammar such as morphology
or syntax. These effects show up in both nouns and verbs.

Semantic Features of Nouns
The same semantic feature may be shared by many words
+femaletigress -aunt maiden
widow
+humandoctor dean professor
teenager
bachelor
+human
+young
baby and child
+male
+adult
Father, uncle, bachelor

Semantic properties may have syntactic and semantic effects, too. For example,
the kinds of determiners that a noun may occur with are controlled by whether
it is a “count” noun or a “mass” noun. Consider these data:
I have two dogs. / *I have two rice(s). / I have a dog. / *I have a rice. / *I have
dog. / I have rice.
Count nouns can be enumerated and pluralized—one potato, two potatoes. They
may be preceded by the indefinite determiner a, and by the quantifier many as
in many potatoes. Nouns such as rice, water, and milk, which cannot be
enumerated or pluralized, are mass nouns. They cannot be preceded by a or
many, and they can occur with the quantifier much or without any determiner
at all. Even within a particular language we can have different words—count
and mass—to describe the same object or substance. For example, in English we
have shoes (count) and footwear (mass), coins (count) and change (mass).

Semantic Features of Verbs
Verbs also have semantic features as part of their meaning. For example, “cause”
is a feature of verbs such as darken, kill, uglify, and so on.
darken cause to become dark
kill cause to die
uglify cause to become ugly
“Go” is a feature of verbs that mean a change in location or possession, such as
swim, crawl, throw, fly, give, or buy:
Jack swims.
The baby crawled under the table.
The boy threw the ball over the fence.
John gave Mary a beautiful engagement ring.

Words like swim have an additional feature like “in liquid,” while crawl is “close
to a surface.”
“Become” is a feature expressing the end state of the action of certain verbs.
For example, the verb break can be broken down into the following components
of meaning: “cause” to “become” broken.
Eventive sentences still sound natural when passivized, when expressed progressively,
when used imperatively, and with certain adverbs:
Eventives
Mary was kissed by John. Oysters were eaten by John.
John is kissing Mary. John is eating oysters.
The stative sentences seem peculiar, if not ungrammatical or anomalous, when cast in the
same form. (The preceding “?” indicates the strangeness.)
Statives
?Mary is known by John. ?Oysters are liked by John.
?John is knowing Mary. ?John is liking oysters.

Negation is a particularly interesting component of the meaning of some verbs. Expressions
such as ever, anymore, have a red cent, and many more are ungrammatical in certain
simple affirmative sentences, but grammatical in corresponding negative ones.
*Mary will ever smile. (Cf. Mary will not ever smile.)
*I can visit you anymore. (Cf. I cannot visit you anymore.)
Such expressions are called negative polarity items because a negative element such as
“not” elsewhere in the sentence allows them to appear. Consider these data:
*John thinks that he’ll ever fly a plane again. *John hopes that he’ll ever fly a plane
again.
John doubts that he’ll ever fly a plane again. John despairs that he’ll ever fly a plane
again.This suggests that verbs such as doubt and despair, but not think and hope, have
“negative” as a component of their meaning. Doubt may be analyzed as “think that not,”
and despair as “has no hope.” The negative feature in the verb allows the negative polarity
item ever to occur grammatically without the overt presence of not.

Argument Structure
Verbs differ in terms of the number and types of NPs they can take as complements.
Transitive verbs such as find, hit, chase, and so on take a direct object complement.
Intransitive verbs like arrive or sleep do not take a direct object complement.
Ditransitive verbs such as give or throw take two object complements as in John threw Mary a
ball.
The NPs that occur with a verb are its arguments. Thus intransitive verbs have one argument:
the subject; transitive verbs have two arguments: the subject and direct object; ditransitive
verbs have three arguments: the subject, direct object, and indirect object.
The argument structure of a verb is part of its meaning and is included in its lexical
entry. The verb not only determines the number of arguments in a sentence, but it also limits
the semantic properties of both its subject and its complements. For example, find and sleep
require animate subjects. The well-known colorless green ideas sleep furiously is semantically
anomalous because ideas (colorless or not) are not animate.

Components of a verb’s meaning can also be relevant to the choice of
complements it can take. For example, the verbs in (1) and (3) can
take two objects—they’re ditransitive—while those in (2) and (4)
cannot.
1-John threw/tossed/kicked/flung the boy the ball.
2- *John pushed/pulled/lifted/hauled the boy the ball.
3-Mary faxed/radioed/e-mailed/phoned Helen the news.
4-*Mary murmured/mumbled/muttered/shrieked Helen the news.

Thematic Roles
called the agentthe “doer” of the rolling
action,
themethe “undergoer” of the rolling
action
goalthe endpoint of a change in
location or possession.
Sourceaction originates
instrument, themeans used to accomplish the
action;
experienceone receiving sensory

1. The boy rolled a red ball.
Agent theme
2. The boy threw the red ball to the girl.
Agent theme goal
3-Professor Snape awakened Harry Potter with his wand.
source experiencer instrument
Thematic role assignment, or theta assignment, is also connected to syntactic
structure. In the sentence in (2) the role of theme is assigned to the direct object
the ball and the role of goal to the indirect object the girl. Verb pairs such as
sell and buy both involve the feature “go.” They are therefore linked to a thematic
role of theme, which is assigned to the direct object, as in the following
sentences:

3. John sold the book to Mary.
agent theme goal
4. Mary bought the book from John.
agent theme source
Thematic roles are not
assigned to arguments randomly. There is a connection between the meaning of
a verb and the syntactic structure of sentences containing the verb.
Our knowledge of verbs includes their syntactic category, which arguments
they select, and the thematic roles they assign to their arguments.
Thematic roles are the same in sentences that are paraphrases.
1. The dog bit the stick. / The stick was bitten by the dog.
2. The trainer gave the dog a treat. / The trainer gave a treat to the dog.

In (1) the dog is the agent and the stick is the theme. In (2) the treat is the
theme
and the dog is the goal. This is because certain thematic roles must be assigned
to
the same deep structure position, for example, theme is assigned to the object
of
bit/bitten. This uniformity of theta assignment, a principle of Universal
Grammar,
dictates that the various thematic roles are always in their proper structural
place in deep structure. Thus the stick in the passive sentence the stick was
bitten by the dog must have originated in object position and moved to subject
position by transformational rule:
__ was bitten the stick by the dog → the stick was bitten __ by the dog
d-structure s-structure

Pragmatics
concerned with our understanding of
language in context

Two kinds of contexts
The first is linguistic context—the discourse that precedes the phrase or sentence to be
interpreted; the second is situational context—virtually everything nonlinguistic in the
environment of the speaker.
Discourse analysis is concerned with the broad speech units comprising multiple sentences.
It involves questions of style, appropriateness, cohesiveness, rhetorical force, topic/subtopic
structure, differences between written and spoken discourse, as well as grammatical
properties. Within a discourse, preceding sentences affect the meaning of sentences that
follow them in various ways. For example, the reference or meaning of pronouns often
depends on prior discourse. Prior discourse can also disambiguate words like bank in that
the discussion may be about rafting on a river or interest rates.

Situational context, is the nonlinguistic environment in which a sentence or discourse
happens. It is the context that allows speakers to seamlessly, even unknowingly,
interpret questions like Can you pass the salt? as requests to carry out a certain
action and not a simple question. Situational context includes the speaker, hearer,
and any third parties present, along with their beliefs and their beliefs about what
the others believe. It includes the physical environment, the subject of conversation,
the time of day, and so on. Almost any imaginable extralinguistic factor may, under
appropriate circumstances, influence the way language is interpreted. Pronouns
provide a good way to illustrate the two kinds of contexts—linguistic and
situational—that affect meaning.

Pronouns
Pronouns are lexical items that can get their meaning from other NPs in the
sentence or in the larger discourse. Any NP that a pronoun depends on for its
meaning is called its antecedent.
Pronouns are sensitive to syntax, discourse, and situational context for their
interpretation. We’ll take up syntactic matters first.
Pronouns and Syntax
There are different types of pronouns. Reflexive pronouns are pronouns such as
himself and themselves. In English, reflexive pronouns always depend on an NP
antecedent for their meaning and the antecedent must be in the same clause, as
illustrated in the following examples:
1.Jane bit herself.
2. *Jane said that the boy bit herself. 3. *Herself left.

In (1) the NP Jane and the reflexive pronoun herself are in the same S; in (2)
herself is in the embedded sentence and is structurally too far from the
antecedent Jane, resulting in the ungrammaticality. In (3) herself has no
antecedent at all, hence nothing to get its meaning from. Languages also have
pronouns that are not reflexive, such as he, she, it, us, him, her, you, and so on,
which we will simply refer to as pronouns. Pronouns also depend on other
elements for their meaning, but the syntactic conditions on pronouns are
different from those on reflexives. Pronouns cannot refer to an antecedent in the
same clause, but they are free to refer to an NP outside this clause, as illustrated
in the following sentences :
4. *John knows him.
5. John knows that he is a genius.
The sentence in (4) is ungrammatical relative to the interpretation because him
cannot mean John

Pronouns and Discourse
Pronouns may be used to refer to entities previously mentioned in discourse
or to entities that are presumably known to the participants of a discourse. When
that presumption fails, miscommunication may result. In a discourse, prior linguistic
context plays a primary role in pronoun interpretation. In the following discourse, It
seems that the man loves the woman. Many people think he loves her.
The most natural interpretation of her is “the woman” referred to in the first
sentence, whoever she happens to be. But it is also possible for her to refer to a
different person, perhaps one indicated with a pointing gesture. In such a case her
would be spoken with added emphasis: Many people think he loves her!
Similar remarks apply to the reference of he, which most naturally refers to the
man, but not necessarily so. Again, intonation and emphasis would provide clues.
Referring to the previous discourse, strictly speaking, it would not be
ungrammatical if the discourse went this way: It seems that the man loves the
woman. Many people think the man loves the woman

Pronouns and Situational Context
When a pronoun gets its reference from an NP antecedent in the same sentence, we
say that the pronoun is bound to that noun phrase antecedent. If her in
1. Mary thinks he loves her
refers to “Mary,” it would be a bound pronoun. Pronouns can also be bound to quantifier
antecedents such as “every N'” as in the sentence:
2. Every girl in the class hopes John will ask her out on a date.
In this case her refers to each one of the girls in the class and is said to be bound to every
girl. Reflexive pronouns are always bound. The reference of a free pronoun must ultimately
be determined by the situational context.
First- and second- person nonreflexive (I/we, you) pronouns are bound to the speaker and
hearer, respectively. They therefore depend on the situational context, namely, who is
talking and who is listening. With third-person pronouns, semantic rules permit them
either to be bound or free. The ultimate interpretation in any event is context-dependent.

Deixis
In all languages, the reference of certain words and expressions relies
entirely on the situational context of the utterance, and can only be
understood in light of these circumstances. This aspect of pragmatics is called
deixis (pronounced “dike-sis”). Pronouns are deictic. Their reference (or lack
of same) is ultimately context dependent.
Expressions such as
this person that man these women those children
are also deictic, because they require situational information for the listener
to make a referential connection and understand what is meant. These
examples illustrate person deixis. They also show that the demonstrative
articles like this and that are deictic.
We also have time deixis and place deixis.

More on Situational Context
Much discourse is telegraphic. Verb phrases are not specifically mentioned,
entire clauses are left out, direct objects vanish, pronouns roam freely. Yet people still
understand one another, and part of the reason is that rules of grammar and rules
of discourse combine with contextual knowledge to fill in what’s missing and make
the discourse cohere. Much of the contextual knowledge is knowledge of who is
speaking, who is listening, what objects are being discussed, and general facts about
the world we live in—what we have been calling situational context. Often what we
say is not literally what we mean. When we ask at the dinner table if someone “can
pass the salt” we are not querying their ability to do so, we are requesting that they
do so. If I say “You’re standing on my foot,” I am not making idle conversation; I am
asking you to stand elsewhere. We say “It’s cold in here” to convey “Shut the
window,” or “Turn up the heat,” or “Let’s leave,” or a dozen other things that
depend on the real-world situation at the time of speaking.

Maxims of Conversation
Here is a summary of the four conversational maxims.
Name of Maxim Description of Maxim
Quantity Say neither more nor less than the discourse
requires.
Relevance Be relevant.
Manner Be brief and orderly; avoid ambiguity and
obscurity.
Quality Do not lie; do not make unsupported claims.
The maxim of relevance explains how saying “It’s cold in here” to a person
standing by an open window might be interpreted as a request to close it, or else
why make the remark to that particular person in the first place? For sentences
like I am sorry that the team lost to be relevant, it must be true that “the team
lost.” Else why say it?

Implicatures
Implicatures are deductions that are not made strictly on the basis of the
content expressed in the discourse. Rather, they are made in accordance with the
conversational maxims, taking into account both the linguistic meaning of the
utterance as well as the particular circumstances in which the utterance is made.
Consider the following conversation:
speaker a: Smith doesn’t have any girlfriends these days.
speaker b: He’s been driving over to the West End a lot lately.
The implicature is that Smith has a girlfriend in the West End. The reasoning is
that B’s answer would be irrelevant unless it contributed information related to A’s
question. We assume speakers try to be cooperative. So it is fair to conclude that B
uttered the second sentence because the reason that Smith drives to the West End
is that he has a girlfriend there.
Because implicatures are derived on the basis of assumptions about the
speaker that might turn out to be wrong, they can be easily cancelled. For this
reason A could have responded as follows:
speaker a: He goes to the West End to visit his mother who is ill.
Although B’s utterance implies that the reason Smith goes to the West End is to
visit his girlfriend, A’s response cancels this implicature

Because implicatures are derived on the basis of assumptions about the
speaker that might turn out to be wrong, they can be easily cancelled.
For this reason A could have responded as follows:
Although B’s utterance implies that the reason Smith goes to the West
End is to visit his girlfriend, A’s response cancels this implicature
Because implicatures are derived on the basis of assumptions about the speaker that
might turn out to be wrong, they can be easily cancelled. For this reason A could have
responded as follows:
Although B’s utterance implies that the reason Smith goes to the West End is to visit
his girlfriend, A’s response cancels this implicature.

Speech Acts
The theory of speech acts describes how this
is done. Verbs like bet, promise, warn, and so on are performative
verbs. Using them in a sentence (in the first person, present tense) adds
something extra over and above the statement
There are hundreds of performative verbs in every language. The following
sentences illustrate their usage:
I bet you five dollars the Yankees win.
I challenge you to a match.
I dare you to step over this line
(fine,move,nominate,promise,resign,pronounce)

An informal test to see whether a sentence contains a
performative verb is to
begin it with the words I hereby. . . . Only performative
sentences sound right
when begun this way. Compare I hereby apologize to you with
the somewhat
strange I hereby know you

Semantics

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