|| Previous Lecture || Next Lecture || Assignments ||

CTL3211 SEMANTICS 

Haihua PAN (Dr.), CTL, CityU., HK

Office: Rm B7610; Phone: 2788 8795; Email: cthpan@cityu.edu.hk

Meaning, Thought, and Reality

1.  Reference

• The action of picking out or identifying with words is often called referring or denoting, for examples, Paris refers to or denotes the city, John refers to the person who is named John.  The entity referred to is usually called the referent.
• John Lyons separate the terms refer from denote.  Denote is used for the relationship between a linguistic expression and the world, while refer is used for the action of a speaker in picking out the entities in the world.  Referring is what the speakers do, but denoting is a property of words.  Only some of the noun phrases can have referents, but all the non-functional words and phrases have denotations.
• Noun phrases have the following subtypes: definite noun phrase (also called definite description), indefinite noun phrase, bare noun phrases, names, and pronouns (including demonstratives)
• Types of reference:

        --- referring/non-referring expressions: nominals (noun phrases and names) are usually referring expressions,
                                                                       but words like very, so, bad, are not referring expressions.  An indefinite
                                                                       noun phrase has a referring and a non-referring use.
        --- constant/variable reference: Usually pronouns have variable reference, but definite NPs can also have variable
                                                           reference, for example, the President of the US.  Variable reference depends on
                                                           context, and pronouns with contextual dependency are called deixis.

• The term extension of an expression is the set of which could possibly be the referent of that expression. This is the same as the denotation of an expression mentioned earlier.
• Readings a noun phrase can have: referential, specific, distributive, collective, generic, etc (See more about different readings of NPs here.).

2.  Referential/Denotational vs. Representational Approaches

• Reference as a theory of meaning: Semantics is reference, the so-called referential approach

• Problems for the referential approach is (a) not all the linguistic expressions have reference; (b) nominals like a unicorn, will never have a reference; (c) no one-to-one correspondence for referring expressions: names, definite descriptions, etc.; and (d) two expressions can refer to the same individual, but with meaning differences, i.e. different senses. Big question: How can we talk about imaginary and hypothetical entities or situations? Can we differentiate x is x and x is y but x happens to be y?
• Representational approach: emphasize the link between language and conceptual structure.  See more below.

3.  Mental Representations

• Senses: place a new level between words and worlds, i.e. a level of mental representation. So a noun is said to gain its ability to denote because it is associated with something in the speaker/hearer's mind.
• The question is: what these mental representations are? Images, concepts, or something else?
• Sufficient and necessary conditions: (a) If X is a sufficient condition for Y, then X entails Y; (b) If X is a necessary condition for Y, then if not X, then not Y.
• Defining concepts with necessary and sufficient conditions, and viewing concepts as a list of bits of knowledge. Problems are: (a) if we share the same concept, then we should agree on the necessary and sufficient conditions for the concept, which is proven to be difficult to set up the conditions even for nouns which identify concrete and natural kind like dog and table; (b) identifying which are necessary and which are sufficient conditions is no easy task; (c) speakers often use words they know very little to refer to entities, so it is difficult to say that they know the necessary and sufficient conditions of the concept in question.
• Prototype theory for concepts: there are central or typical members of a concept. Advantage: allows borderline uncertainty.
• Relations between concepts, conceptual hierarchy model.

|| CTL3211 Main Page || Syllabus || Schedule ||

Comments to: cthpan@cityu.edu.hk
Last updated by Haihua Pan, 13 Jan. 2004