Language and meaning from Goddard (2011)

• Semantics: The study of meaning

• Expressing meanings is what languages are all about. This
happens through
– words
– grammatical constructions
– intonation patterns
– etc.

Language and meaning from Goddard (2011)

• To understand how any language works we need to study how its
structure (words, grammar, constructions, etc.) works to fulfill its
function as a communication device.
• The study of semantics is crucial to the goal of describing linguistic
competence – that is to say, semantic competence is a crucial part
of overall linguistic competence.
• The study of semantics also sheds light on the relationship
between language and culture.
– much of the vocabulary of any language, and even parts of the
grammar, will reflect the culture of its speakers.
– culture-specific concepts and ways of understanding embedded
in a language are an important part of what constitutes a culture.
– language is one of the main instruments by which children are
socialized into the values, belief systems, and practices of their
culture.
• The study of semantics also sheds light on the relationship
between language and culture. – Consider:
• Masha’Allah, Insha’Allah, 3aib!
• Yarħamuka Allah (see responses to sneezing in other languages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responses_to_sneezing)
• Jesus Chris! (as an exclamation)

Meaning variation across languages

• Can you think of examples from Arabic and English (or any other
language you know)?
– Body part terms
– Kinship terms
– Animal names

Meaning variation across languages from Goddard (2011)

• Head-hair vs. body-hair – In English
• hair – In Yankunytjatjara (Central Australia)
• mangka ‘head-hair’
• yuru ‘body-hair’
• BREAK
– In English:
• break
– In Malay:
• putus (entity completely broken/severed, like a pencil broken in
half)
• patah (break isn’t complete, like a broken branch that is not
entirely broken)
• pecah (smash, like in smashing glass)

Meaning variation across languages

“Perhaps you can see why linguists sometimes say that every
language represents a unique way of seeing and thinking about the
world.” Goddard (2011)

The role of meaning in grammar from Goddard (2011)

• Languages differ to a great extent in their grammatical rules
• This is not arbitrary!
• For a long time semantics was not considered to be related to
syntax or morphology, it was studied as a separate level of linguistic
analysis.
• Langacker (2010: 94) points out that this view depended in part on
a particular attitude to meaning:
– “How linguists think about grammar is greatly influenced by how
they think about meaning. Approaches to meaning that bypass the
role of human conception— treating it in terms of formal logic, truth
conditions, or correspondences to the world—resonate with the
view of grammar as an autonomous formal system.

Consider
– Active sentences:
• The network cancelled the show.
– Passive sentences :
• The show got cancelled.
Consider
– The dative alternation in English:
(A) • Martha gave Dave a pen
• Martha gave a pen to Dave
(B) • The noise gave Dave a headache.
• *The noise gave a headache to Dave.
The nature of meaning from Goddard (2011)
• Meaning is not reference (i.e. real-world reference)
– The University of Bahrain, mug, Kim Kardashian
vs.
– no one, unicorns, what, seriously
– Latifa Shamsan
vs.
ENGL 444 prof vs. ENGL 308 instructor
– here, that, yesterday

The nature of meaning from Goddard (2011)

Knowledge of everyday word meanings is part of people’s linguistic
competence, but scientific knowledge is not.
• People in Bahrain can say things like:
‫طاح في جبدي‬
‫العت جبدي‬
‫قاعد على جبدي‬
– Without necessarily knowing what 'liver' does in the body or where
it is located.
The nature of meaning from Goddard (2011)
• Meaning is not scientific knowledge
– Bloomfield (1933: 139) wrote: “we can define the meaning of a
speech-form accurately when this meaning has to do with some
matter of which we possess scientific knowledge. We can define the
names of minerals, for example, in terms of chemistry and
mineralogy, as when we say that the ordinary meaning of the English
word salt is ‘sodium chloride (NaCl)’, and we can define the names
of plants and animals by means of the technical terms of botany
and zoology, but we have no precise way of defining words like love
and hate, which concern situations that have not been accurately
classified.”

Sense and reference

(Goddard, 2011)
• “Of course, just because meaning is distinct from reference
doesn’t mean that the two are unrelated. Obviously, they are
related: the REFERENCE made by the use of a particular expression
on a particular occasion depends, at least in part, on the meaning of
the expression. Linguists sometimes speak of the SENSE of a word,
when they want to make it clear that they are interested in meaning
as opposed to reference.” (Goddard, 2011)
Sense and reference (Reimer, 2010)
The SENSE of a lexeme may be defined as the general meaning or
the concept underlying the word. As a first approximation, we can
describe this as what we usually think of as contained in a
dictionary entry for the word in question. A word’s REFERENT is the
object which it stands for on a specific occasion of use.

Levels of meaning
The distinction between word meaning and sentence meaning,
then, defines a basic contrast between lexical and phrasal
semantics. Another important contrast is the one between sentence
meaning as just described and utterance meaning. We can define
sentence meaning as the compositional meaning of the sentence as
constructed out of the meanings of its individual component
lexemes. But the meaning of a sentence as built up out of its
component parts is often quite different from the meaning it actually
has in a particular context. In everyday talk we regularly use words
and expressions ironically, metaphorically, insincerely, and in other
‘nonliteral’ ways. Whether there is any principled theoretical
difference between these non-literal ways of talking and the literal
ones, and, if so, what it is, is an important question which we will
discuss in Chapter 7; for the moment, we can simply recognize that
there are many uses in which words seem to acquire a strongly
different meaning from the one they normally have. Suppose that
while cooking Peter has just spilled a large quantity of spaghetti
carbonara all over the kitchen floor. Hearing the commotion, Brenda
comes into the kitchen, sees what has happened, and utters (33)
(33) You’re a very tidy cook, I see.
It is clear that Brenda doesn’t literally mean that Peter is a tidy cook,
but that she is speaking ironically. What she actually means is the
opposite of (33): Brenda is drawing attention to the fact that Peter
has precisely not been a tidy cook. In cases like this, we say that
there is a difference between sentence meaning and utterance
meaning. The sentence meaning of (33) is the literal, compositional
meaning as built up from the meanings of the individual words of the
sentence. If we did not speak English, we could discover the
sentence meaning of (33) by finding out what its translation was in
our own language. The utterance meaning, by contrast, is the
meaning which the words have on a particular occasion of use in the
particular context in which they occur. (Utterance meaning is
sometimes referred to in other books as speaker meaning. But since
the role of the hearer is just as important as that of the speaker, the
more neutral term utterance meaning is preferred here.) The
utterance meaning is the one which is picked up in the
conversation. In reply to (33), Peter might well say (34):
(34) I’m sorry. I don’t know how I could have been so clumsy.
But if Brenda’s comment in (33) was meant literally, the reply in (34)
would be very strange: people do not usually have to apologise for
being tidy. What (34) shows is that it is the utterance meaning, not
the sentence meaning of (33) to which Peter is reacting: given the
situation, Brenda is clearly not congratulating him on his tidiness as
a cook, and it is the utterance meaning which forms the basis for the
continuation of the conversation.
The distinction between sentence meaning and utterance meaning
is also linked to the difference between semantics and pragmatics.
For those linguists who accept such a division, semantics is taken to
study sentence meaning, whereas pragmatics studies utterance
meaning and other principles of language use. The job of semantics
is to study the basic, literal meanings of words as considered
principally as parts of a language system, whereas pragmatics
concentrates on the ways in which these basic meanings are used in
practice, including such topics as the ways in which different
expressions are assigned referents in different contexts, and the
differing (ironic, metaphorical, etc.) uses to which language is put.
As we have already seen, a division between semantics and
pragmatics is by no means universally accepted in linguistics. Many
‘pragmatic’ topics are of central importance to the study of
meaning, and in this book we will not recognize any absolute
distinction between the two domains.

Contextual Normality:
• Cruse introduces the idea of contextual normality.
• all meaning is potentially reflected in fitness for communicative
intent.
• It will be assumed that a way of tapping into this is in terms of
contextual normality:
• every difference of meaning between two expressions will show up
as a difference of normality in some context.
• Thus, we know that illness and disease do not mean the same,
because:
• during his illness is normal,
• but during his disease is not;
• almost and nearly do not have precisely the same meaning,
because:
• very nearly is normal
• but very almost is not (Cruse, 2004).

How meaning varies with context

• The meanings of all linguistic expressions vary with the context in
which they occur. For instance, the periods of time denoted by
month in (1) and (2) are quite likely to be different:
(1) He’s here for a month. (how many days?)
(2) He’s here for the month. (how many days?

How meaning varies with context:

• The meanings of all linguistic expressions vary with the context in
which they occur. For instance, the periods of time denoted by
month in (1) and (2) are quite likely to be different:
(1) He’s here for a month. (could be four weeks; not dependent on
the time of utterance)
(2) He’s here for the month. (will depend on the time of utterance,
but could be 31 days).

Kinds of meaning:
• There are different sorts of meaning, each with different
properties.
• For instance, whatever the difference in meaning between (3) and
(4), it does not affect the truth or falsity of the statement:
(3) The old man popped his clogs last week. (British English)
(4) The old man passed away last week.

What happens when meanings combine:

• Another vital aspect of semantics is how simple(r) meanings
combine to form more complex meanings.
• To some extent this is a function of grammatical structure.
• For instance, the way red and hat combine in a red hat is not the
same as the way turn and red combine in to turn red.
• But differences occur even within the same grammatical
construction: the mode of combination of red and hat in a red hat is
different from that of long and eyelash in long eyelashes (compare
long eyelashes and a long river)
New meanings from old:
• A striking feature of linguistic expressions is their semantic
flexibility
• Beyond their normal contextual variability, they can be bent to
semantic ends far removed from their conventional value:
• e.g. You'll find her in the telephone book
• e.g. I got 500 likes on this particular post
• The study of such extensions of meaning is an important task for
semantics.

Some initial concepts:

• Lexeme
• Sense / reference
• Denotation / connotation
• Compositionality
• Levels of meaning

Initial concepts: Lexeme

• For many linguists: the word is the most basic and obvious unit of
language.
• In many languages, a single word can appear in many different
morphological forms
• English: go – goes – going – gone – went .etc
In arabic: ‫تذهبن‬-‫ذهبتما‬-‫اذهب‬-‫ذهبنا‬-‫ذهبوا‬-‫ذهب‬
• what information do these verb forms carry other than the verb in
these two languages??

Initial concepts: Lexeme

• In Ancient Greek single verb, tithemi, which means ‘put’, has
several hundred different forms which convey differences of person,
number, tense and mood
• as e-the- -ka ‘I put’
• tithei-eten ‘you two might put’
• tho- -men ‘let us put’, etc
• Lexeme: the abstract unit which unites all the morphological
variants of a single form. This means that go, goes, went, going, etc
are instantiations of the same lexeme go.
• A lexeme is usually referred to using the ‘citation form’ of the
lexical item, which is one of these morphological variants and it
differs from a language to another. For example:
- English lexeme form is the infinitive form (without any inflection
morphology)
-Arabic?
• The citation form, for some languages, can be the form of the
lexical item which is represented in a dictionary entry
Initial concepts: Sense / reference
• The sense of a lexeme is the general meaning or the concept
underlying the word. This can be what is contained in the dictionary
entry of a particular lexical item.
• The word’s referent is the object which it stands for on a specific
occasion of use.
• Senses of the word ‘queen’:
• female reigning monarch
• second highest ranking piece in a game of chess
• third highest card in a suit, behind ace and king
• Referents of the word ‘queen’:
• The Queen fell off the table.
• United Kingdom >> Queen Elizabeth II
• Denmark >> Queen Margrethe

• Example 1:
‫بدفع لك اخر الشهر‬
‫هل علينا الشهر‬
Identify the sense / referent of the word ‫ شهر‬in the previous
sentences.
• Example 2:
• I spoke to the Prof of Semantics about my research topic.
-Identify the sense / referent of ‘Prof of Semantics’ in the following:
-BA program at the UOB in Sems I, 2023-2024
-BA program at the UOB in Sems II, 2023-2024

Initial concepts: Sense / reference / denotation

• We can see that a word’s referent is the particular thing, person,
place, etc. which an expression stands for on a particular occasion
of use, and it changes each time the word is applied to a different
object or situation in the world.
• By contrast, a word’s sense does not change every time the word
takes on a new referent.
• The entire class of objects, etc., to which an expression correctly
refers is called the expression’s denotation.
• Words have the referents they have by virtue of a certain act on the
part of the speaker: the act of reference.
• We will use this term to describe what the speaker does in
applying a particular language expression to a particular referent in
the world.
• Example:
Josh adopted his first cat in the summer of 1995.
Recovering the referent intended: it is only in virtue of an act of
reference, undertaken by the speaker, that the words ‘Josh’, ‘first
cat’, and ‘the summer of 1995’, have the referents they do.
• I saw that dog again.
In order to recover the referent that dog, you (the hearer) are going to
need to know which dog I (the speaker) am talking about.

Initial concepts: Sense / reference / denotation / connotation

• Connotation:
• It names those aspects of meaning which do not affect a word’s
sense, reference or denotation, but which have to do with secondary
factors such as its emotional force, its level of formality, its
character as a euphemism, etc.

• Examples:
• Police officer and cop (similar denotations but different
connotations)
• brat and child
• toilet and restroom
• Single and spinster
• Other examples?

Initial concepts: Compositionality

• What does the term productivity mean in linguistics?
• the fact that the vocabulary of any given language can be used to
construct a theoretically infinite number of sentences (not all of
which will be meaningful), by varying the ways in which the words
are combined.
• How many sentences can you form using the following words?
• speeding, cat, car, a, hit, my
• think of grammatical sentences that do not make sense.
• My laptop flew out the window and landed on the back of the
moon

Initial concepts: Compositionality

• The fact that we can still make some sense of the previous
sentence (even though it’s meaningless, based on our world
knowledge) is due to meaning being compositional
• What does that mean?
• What happens when you hear an utterance that contains a word
whose meaning you don’t recognize?
• Is all meaning compositional?

Initial concepts: Compositionality

• Meaning in idioms is non-compositional.
• Think of examples of idioms in English and Arabic.
Initial concepts: Compositionality
• Idioms are all over the language, which means that it’s difficult to
rely on the concept of compositionality to decode language,
especially in the case of second language learners.
• Discuss how non-compositionality can influence the process of
translating from one language to the other.

Levels of meaning
• Lexical meaning vs phrasal meaning (discussed earlier regarding
compositionality)
• Sentence meaning vs utterance/speaker meaning i.e. semantics
and pragmatics (read the handout)

Semantic Phenomena :
• Homonymy
• Synonymy
• Antonymy
• Taxonomy
• Polysemy
• Entailment, contradiction, and paraphrase
Some problems in meaning interpretation:
Ambiguity: (more than one possible meaning):
e.g., bank
1. side of the river
2. financial institution
)Lexical ambiguity(

e.g., Visiting relatives can be boring

)syntactic/structural ambiguity(

• Examples of structurally ambiguous sentences:

– STOLEN PAINTINGS FOUND BY TREE.
– Wanted: a nurse for a baby about twenty years old.
• Examples of lexically ambiguous statements:
– There are two bats in the closet.
– "You know, somebody actually complimented me on my driving
today. They left a little note on the windscreen; it said, 'Parking Fine.'
So that was nice."(English comedian Tim Vine)
Homonymy:
• Homonymy is NOT a meaning relation because it is related to
form.
• Homonymous words are words that share the same form, but
have different meanings
• Form:
– phonological (sound)
– orthographic (spelling)

Homonyms:
- homophones (sound the same)
- homographs (have the same spelling)

Examples of homophones:
– bear – bare – cite – site – sight – male – mail

Examples of homophones that are also homographs:

– bank (of a river) and bank (financial institution)
– can (of coke) and can (the modal verb)
– rose (kind of flower) and rose (past tense of ‘rise’) consider live and
live / lead and lead / wind and wind
Lexeme vs. word form:
Lexeme:
is considered the basic unit of meaning in language. Headwords in a
dictionary are lexemes.
Word form:
on the other hand, refers to the inflected forms of a lexeme
depending on the grammatical rules (morphosyntactic or
phonological) of the language. For instance in English, the
lexeme RUN has the different forms run, ran, running, runs.
Partial homonymy
• homonymy can sometimes exist between word forms of different
lexemes – found (V. past tense of FIND) – found (V. present tense
meaning ‘to establish’, past tense of which is founded)
• Partial homonymy: a situation in which some word forms of two
different lexemes are identical, but others are not

Polysemy:
• Polysemy designates a situation in which a single word has a set
of distinct but related meanings.
• Many words are polysemous
. • Consider the word ‘chip’ in the following phrases:
i. a chip of wood
ii. . Can I try one of your chips?
iii. . My new computer has got a faster chip than the old one.
• How are the meanings above different but related?
• Polysemy designates a situation in which a single word has a set
of distinct but related meanings.
• Many words are polysemous.
• Consider the word ‘chip’ in the following phrases:
-A chip of wood (a small piece of some hard substance which
has been broken off from sth larger)
-Can I try one of your chips? (a small cut piece of potato
which is fired for eating) iii. -My new computer has got a faster
chip than the old one (a small but vital piece of computer)

• Consider the polysemy of the word ‘Head’ in the following

sentences:
– My head hurts!
– He has a good head on his shoulders
– Did you read the headlines?
– The head of the department
– He headed a meeting
– I’m going to head out now
Polysemy vs. semantic generality:
• Polysemy must be distinguished from semantic generality.
• This designates a situation in which a word has a single general
meaning which can be used in different contexts.
• Consider, e.g. The word ‘wrong’ as used in these two sentences:
-We thought that the war was wrong.
- It was wrong not to thank your host.

• Polysemy must be distinguished from semantic generality.

• This designates a situation in which a word has a single general
meaning which can be used in different contexts.
• Consider, e.g. The word ‘wrong’ as used in these two sentences:
i. We thought that the war was wrong.
ii. It was wrong not to thank your host.
Wrong means in both contexts the following: It is wrong to do such
and such which can be interpreted as ‘if one thinks about it well, one
can know that it is bad’.
• Whereas in polysemy the senses of a lexical item are, as
mentioned above, distinct but are related in essence.
– My head hurts! (body part on top of the human body)
– He has a good head on his shoulders (brain)
– Did you read the headlines? (titles on top of the news piece)
– The head of the department (top person in charge)
– He headed a meeting (to lead)
– I’m going to head out now (leave)

How to differentiate between polysemy and generality?

(1)A useful indicator showing that we are dealing with polysemy is
the presence of different grammatical properties associated
with the proposed different meanings. E.g.:
• The children skipped happily down the street.
• We skipped the first chapter.
– Two distinct meanings are involved because skip is an
intransitive verb in (a), but a transitive verb in (b).
(2) Other diagnostics of polysemy are the existence of different
derived forms or different meaning relations.
• For example, one piece of evidence that the word faithful is
polysemous is the existence of two corresponding nouns,
faithfulness and fidelity.
A faithful friend>> faithfulness
A faithful husband>> fidelity
• Another example is the adjective interested, the negative form
of the adjective can be either uninterested or disinterested.
 (2)Another phenomenon which is often called polysemy
concerns examples like:
– table 1 (noun, as in on the table) and
– table 2 (verb, as in don’t table that document)
• Most linguists would say that even though table 1 and table 2
are identical in form and closely related in meaning, they must
be different words as they belong to different part-ofspeech
categories.
• Some linguists use the term ‘heterosemy’ instead.

Heterosemy:
• Can be considered as a special case of polysemy
• A word is heterosemous if it has two or more semantically
related meanings, each of which is associated with a different
type of morphosyntactic category (i.e. part of speech)
• See for example
– Put the computer on the table.
– Don’t table that document.
– He was standing behind you.
– He kicked me in the behind.
How do I distinguish between homonymy and polysemy?
• Two separate lexical items (homonymy) or a single item with
several related meanings (polysemy)?
• some criteria you could use:
-1are the spellings different?
different --- homophony;
similar --- doesn’t help (could be polysemy or homonymy)
2- are the meanings related?
yes --- polysemy
no ---homonymy
3. Dictionaries usually list homonyms in separate entries;
there would be a single entry corresponding to a polysemic word,
with its several related meanings listed in this entry.
4. The origin of a word (its etymology) may help:
different origins --- homonymy; single source--- polysemy
4. continued e.g., bank ‘financial institution’ borrowed from French
banque related to Old French banc ‘bench’
bank ‘side of the river’ borrowed from Icelandic bakki ‘ridge of a river’
or Danish bakke ‘hill’

Polysemy or Homonymy?
• steal ~ steel
• grass ~ grass (for grazing vs. marijuana)
• leech ~ leech (blood-sucking worm vs. advantage seeker)
• steak ~ stake
• bear ~ bear (verb, e.g. carry vs. animal)
• key ~ key (instrument for unlocking doors vs. answer sheet)
Meaning relations
Synonymy and paraphrase (same meaning expressed by different
words or sentences): e.g., throw also, hurl, toss
e.g. Bahraini words for fall
e.g., Jack built this house. – This house was built by Jack.

Meaning relations: Synonyms

• words which have (roughly) the same meanings
• e.g., little - small; teacher – instructor

Types of Synonymy:
• Absolute synonymy
• Near synonymy
• Absolute synonymy refers to complete identity of meaning.
• Absolute synonyms can be defined as items that are equinormal
(equally normal) in all contexts: that is to say, for two lexical items x
and y, if they are to be recognized as absolute synonyms, in any
context in which x is fully normal, y is, too.
• Big/large:
– She lives in a big house
– She lives in a large house
• big vs. large
• ‘Absolute synonyms’ are rare, or even nonexistent
• It’s better to talk about ‘Near synonyms’, instead!
• why?
– Think more about how we use near synonymous words in real
language usage
– e.g. in Modern Standard Arabic‫قدم‬,‫حضر‬,‫جاء‬,‫أتى‬

Meaning relations: Synonyms:

• Therefore, we normally talk about nearsynonyms rather than
absolute synonyms. A language does not need two lexical items (i.e.
words) to express the exact same meaning and function.
• Think again of the two words ‘big’ and ‘large’. Do we use them the
exact same way in English?
– We can check a corpus of English to find out.
Meaning relations: Antonyms:
• words that have ‘opposite’ meanings:
• good and bad
• dead and alive
• father and son
• words that have ‘opposite’ meanings
• good and bad--- gradable antonyms :
– there is a large amount of gradations in between these words –
may be placed on a scale – hot vs. cold – beautiful vs. ugly
• dead and alive--- complementary antonyms :
– ‘either, or’ relation, mutually exclusive
– difference is absolute
– white vs. black
• father and son---converses:
– Converses (relational antonyms) can be understood as a pair of
words where one word implies a relationship between two objects,
while the other implies the existence of the same relationship when
the objects are reversed
– Own and belong are relational opposites i.e. "A owns B" is the
same as "B belongs to A."
– buy vs. sell
– teacher vs. student
– give vs. take

Meaning relations: Partonymy (or Meronymy):

• Meronymy, which is the lexical reflex of the partwhole relation.
examples of meronymy are:
– hand: finger – teapot: spout – car: engine – telescope: lens –
tree: branch
• John has a burn on his elbow
unilaterally entails
John has a burn on his arm.
• However, there are too many exceptions for it to be possible to
frame a straightforward definition on this basis: for instance,
• The wasp is on the steering wheel does not entail
the wasp is on the car,
but rather,
the wasp is in the car.

One important feature of meronymy is necessity:

Q: think of the relationship between (1) beard/face, and (2)
fingers/hands
– Some parts are necessary to their wholes, whereas others are
optional. For instance, although a beard is part of a face, beards are
not necessary to faces.
– On the other hand, fingers are necessary to hands. (We are not
talking here of logical necessity, of course. This is what in Cruse
(1986) was called canonical necessity: that is, a well-formed hand
must have fingers.)
Meaning relations: Taxonomy:
• ‘kind of’ relationship
– cat is kind of animal

Taxonomic superordinates vs. Collective superordinates:

• Taxonomy is based on the ‘kind of relationship’.
– E.g. ‘magpies’, ‘robins’, and ‘falcon’ are birds of different kinds.
• Putting it in another way, the word ‘bird’ (or more precisely, the
meaning of the word ‘bird’ is included in the meaning of ‘magpie’,
‘robin’, and ‘falcon’.
– A good definition of each word would begin: ‘a bird of one kind’.
• Words like ‘bird’ can be termed taxonomic superordinates.
• Many superordinate terms are collective superordinates: – for
example, furniture, vegetables. Such words do not represent higher-
level ‘kinds’.
• Rather they are grouping words that bring together things of
different kinds that share a common function and origin.
• Thus, taxonomic superordinates are different from collective
superordinates. – You can for example call a ‘falcon’ a bird, but not
call a ‘chair’ furniture (you may call it a piece of furniture)
Sentential Semantic Relations:
The term ‘meaning relations’ is reserved for relations between
individual words, but speakers also have intuitive knowledge of
certain relationships between single words and word combinations
(phrases or sentences).
1. Paraphrase
2. Entailment
3. Contradiction

Sentential Semantic Relations

1. PARAPHRASE: two or more ways of saying (roughly) the same
thing For example:
a. John gave Sue a flower. John gave a flower to Sue. Sue was given a
flower by John. A flower was given to Sue by John.
b. Jane called off the wedding. Jane called the wedding off

– The most important relationship for the whole enterprise of

linguistic semantics is paraphrase – the relationship between a word
and a combination of other words with the same meaning. The
whole project of describing or explaining word meanings depends
on paraphrase because we must use words – or other equivalent
symbols – to explain other words.
2. ENTAILMENT: “follows from” relationship
S1 entails S2: S1 => S2
– It is a relationship that applies between two sentences, where the
truth of one implies the truth of the other because of the meanings
of the words involved.
e.g., John killed the fly entails The fly is dead
NOTE: entailment is asymmetric:
The fly is dead. does not entail John killed the fly.
e.g., Helen has 3 nice grandchildren
entails Helen had children
does not entail ………….

3. CONTRADICTION: two sentences cannot both be true at the

same time.
– It is where a sentence must be false because of the meanings
involved. E.g.: People are butterflies.
e.g., John is happy contradicts John is sad
John killed the fly contradicts The fly is not dead