Semantic

2.3	Word senses and taxonomies

Word senses

As cultures develop, they create or learn about new categories of things, for example, tools, and they then have the need to refer to these new things. Where might the words for the new categories come from?

We have seen that words — common nouns — are associated with categories of things. I will refer to those categories that make up the meanings of words as semantic categories. As already noted, people also have plenty of categories that have no words associated with them. In fact which categories have labels varies from person to person and from language to language, as we will see soon. One way to summarize what we've discussed so far is shown in the figure below. So far the situation I've described looks like the following:

In the figure the word form is connected to the word's meaning, a semantic category, by an arrow that I will use to indicate a meaning relation. The arrow has two heads because a Speaker can get from a semantic category to a word form, and a Hearer can get from a word form to the word's meaning. You should already know that the figure does not correspond to everyone's view of what word meaning is because what I'm calling the "semantic category" could be distributed in various ways rather than localized as it appears here.

How words change

What happens when there is a new category that we need a word for? One possibility is to invent an entirely new word, but this apparently doesn't happen so often. More often the meaning of an existing word is extended to include the new category. When meaning is extended, this is done on the basis of some kind of relationship between the old meaning and the new. I will refer to this as a conceptual relation. The general situation involved in extending the meaning of a word, semantic extension, is shown in the figure below.

Let's see how semantic extension might work for our Lexies. Say they are familiar with domestic cats and have a word for them; for simplicity, let's say it's pronounced like the English word cat. Now they discover tigers and leopards. Each of these new categories gets its own noun, but in becoming familiar with these new animals, the Lexies see their similarities with domestic cats and develop a new category that encompasses all three categories of animals. How do they refer to this new category, that is, to the more general category of cats, what zoologists refer to as members of the family Felidae? (For simplicity, I'll call this category general-cat.) One possibility, which is the one used by many English speakers, is to refer to this category using the same word that is used for its most familiar sub-category, that is, cat. Note that the word cat now has two related meanings. I will refer to related meanings of a single word as word senses. For a word that has more than one sense, it is up to the Hearer to figure out when the word is used which of the senses is intended by the Speaker.

Here is another English example of a word with multiple senses. The noun chicken can refer both to a particular kind of bird (an object) and to a kind of meat made from this bird (a mass). Notice the two senses in the following sentences.

1. There's a chicken walking around in the back yard.
2. There's some chicken in the freezer.

The discussion so far might make it seem that language users, or entire language communities, extend the meanings of words consciously, but this rarely happens. Instead there seems to be a natural process by which the meanings of words change over time. As with other kinds of language change, the details of the process are not well understood. Somehow a change that starts with a small number of Speakers has to spread throughout the community and become conventional.

Generalization, specialization, and taxonomies

A baby uses the word truck for cars and buses as well as trucks. How would you describe this error? How is it like a semantic extension? He also uses the word train only for the toy train he plays with. How is this kind of error different from the first?

The extension of cat to include a new sense seems reasonable because the two senses are closely related. In this subsection, we'll examine this particular conceptual relation in more detail.

Every domestic cat is a member of the cat family (Felidae), that is, an instance of the category general-cat. Every tiger and every leopard is also an instance of this category. All of the properties that characterize the category general-cat, in particular, a characteristic body shape and way of moving, characterize domestic cats, tigers, and leopards. I will refer to the conceptual relation between the categories domestic-cat and general-cat as specialization-generalization. General-cat generalizes domestic-cat; domestic-cat specializes general-cat.

One way knowledge of objects is organized in long-term memory

There is evidence from cognitive science that much of what we know about objects is organized in terms of the specialization-generalization relation. This is especially true for living things, for which we seem to represent the categories in the world in taxonomies with multiple levels for different degrees of generality. Here is a possible portion of a taxonomy representing knowledge of animals. There are three points to be mentioned about the figure, and about conceptual taxonomies in general.

• As indicated by the small capitals, this is meant to represent a taxonomy of concepts, potential meanings of words, not a taxonomy of words.
• Such a taxonomy is a psychological entity; it represents the way some person might organize their knowledge about the world, not a scientific account of what is actually in the world. As you may know, zoologists would include several more levels in their scientific taxonomy for animals.
• As before, we need to be careful about taking the boxes too seriously since there are theories of categories that get by without anything so localized.

As we go higher in the figure, the categories become more general; there are fewer and fewer features that characterize their instances. Thus we can say a great deal about the characteristic sounds made by domestic cats, much less about the characteristic sounds made by members of the cat family, even less about the characteristic sounds made by mammals.

Here is another example, representing how someone might organize their knowledge about fruits.

Again there are fewer and fewer characteristic properties of the categories as we go higher in the taxonomy. Apples have a characteristic smell that resembles the smell of pears but is not characteristic of the smell of fruits in general.

If you're familiar with an object-oriented programming language such as Java, Python, or C++, this should all appear familiar to you. Taxonomies like those illustrated in the two figures are inheritance hierarchies, with the nodes in the trees corresponding to the classes of object-oriented programming. This relationship brings up the question of how we should implement knowledge of this sort in a program that's designed to simulate human processing of words or to be a component of a practical system that interacts with users. There are two possibilities. We can use object orientation to directly implement the taxonomy, creating explicit classes for Food, Fruit, Berry, etc., and using the inheritance mechanisms that are built into the language itself to make use of the knowledge that is shared. Or we can treat each category in the taxonomy as an object, an instance of a class like Concept and write procedures to implement inheritance bewteen these objects. Most researchers have followed the second path, in part because it gives them control over how inheritance works, how and when new categories are created and associated with the existing taxonomy. But further consideration of these implementation issues is beyond the scope of this book.

What does all of this have to do with words? First, as we have seen from the example of cat, words may extend their meanings on the basis of the generalization relation. The noun cat came to mean not only domestic-cat, but also general-cat. The figure below illustrates this process.

The opposite is also possible; a word may take on a sense that is more specific than its original sense. Consider the following example from the history of English. In Middle English the world gerol meant 'young person'. Over time the meaning of the word shifted to 'young female person', which is the sense it has in in its present form, girl. This is shown in the figure below, which illustrates the situation after the meaning had changed. The new sense was a specialization of the original sense. Notice that in this case, unlike what happened with cat in our first example, the original sense was lost after the word took on the new sense.

Generalization and specialization in the borrowing of words

A similar process may occur when a word is borrowed from one language into another; the sense of the word in the source language may be generalized or specialized after the word enters the target language. The usual Tzeltal word for 'person' is kirsiano (the exact pronunciation depending on the dialect), borrowed from the Spanish word cristiano meaning 'Christian'. For whatever reason, in the borrowing process the meaning was generalized from 'Christian person' to (any) 'person'. The Swahili word safari means 'trip', but when this word was borrowed into English from Swahili, it took on the special sense of a 'trip in search of game animals'. In this case, the meaning was specialized when the word was borrowed.

There are also many examples of generalization and specialization in the speech of young children. In this case we can think of the adult sense of the word as basic and the children's extension of this as a second sense, though it may not be clear that the child has learned the adult sense. Because these uses are seen as errors from the perspective of the adult model, they are referred to as over-generalization and under-generalization. An example of over-generalization is the use of dog to refer to other mammals roughly the size of dogs such as goats in addition to dogs. Examples of under-generalization are harder to observe because they require noticing that the child fails to use a word for a referent where an adult would use the word. An example would be the use of dog to refer only to a particular dog.

These errors made by children are interesting because they point up the possible similarity between the mechanism of language change and the mechanisms of language learning. What we see in the history of a language, the result of changes across an entire community, possibly over the course of multiple generations, resembles what we see in the development of a single child's linguistic system. We'll see more such examples in the book later on. The similarity implies that we might be able to understand language change as a process of learning taking place in the minds of many different language users, children and adults.

Concepts without words (again)

Finally, notice that there may be categories in a person's taxonomy that the person has no words for. Look at how the fruit taxonomy in the figure above corresponds to words for a particular English speaker (me).

While I have a category for things that are either apples or pears, that is, I recognize the similarities between apples and pears, I don't have a word for this category. Note that this does not imply that there is no word in the language for this category; botanists call the family that includes pears and apples Pomoideae. But I had never heard this word before I looked it up in order to mention it here, so it is (or was) not a part of my mental lexicon. Because I have words for all or most of the other categories in this taxonomy, we can consider the apple/pear category to constitute a lexical gap for me. We will see other examples of lexical gaps

Meaning I: Semantics

Semantics vs. Pragmatics

Semantics can be defined as "the study of the meaning of morphemes, words, phrases and sentences."
You will sometimes see definitions for semantics like "the analysis of meaning," To see why this is too broad, consider the following. Kim, returning home after a long day, discovers that the new puppy has crapped on the rug, and says "Oh, lovely."
We don't normally take this to mean that Kim believes that dog feces has pleasing or attractive qualities, or is delightful. Someone who doesn't know English will search the dictionary in vain for what Kim means by saying "lovely":

(ADJECTIVE): [love-li-er, love-li-est].

    1. Full of love; loving.

    2. Inspiring love or affection.

    3. Having pleasing or attractive qualities.

    4. Enjoyable; delightful.

Obviously this is because Kim is being ironic, in the sense of "using words to convey the opposite of their literal meaning". Kim might have said "great," or "wonderful," or "beautiful", or "how exquisite", and none of the dictionary entries for these words will help us understand that Kim means to express disgust and annoyance. That's because a word's meaning is one thing, and Kim's meaning -- what Kim means by using the word -- is something else.
There are lots of other ways besides irony to use words to mean something different from what you get by putting their dictionary entries together. Yogi Berra was famous for this: "if you can't imitate him, don't copy him;" and "you can observe a lot just by watching" and dozens of others.
In fact, even when we mean what we literally say, we often -- maybe always -- mean something more as well. The study of "speaker meaning" -- the meaning of language in its context of use -- is called pragmatics, and will be the subject of the next lecture.
Philosophers have argued about "the meaning of meaning," and especially about whether this distinction between what words mean and what people mean is fundamentally sound, or is just a convenient way of talking. Most linguists find the distinction useful, and we will follow general practice in maintaining it. However, as we will see, it is not always easy to draw the line.

Word meaning and processes for extending it

Word meanings are somewhat like game trails. Some can easily be mapped because they are used enough that a clear path has been worn. Unused trails may become overgrown and disappear. And one is always free to strike out across virgin territory; if enough other animals follow, a new trail is gradually created.
Since word meanings are not useful unless they are shared, how does this creation of new meanings work? There are a variety of common processes by which existing conventional word meanings are creatively extended or modified. When one of processes is applied commonly enough in a particular case, a new convention is created; a new "path" is worn.

Metaphor

Consider the difference in meaning between "He's a leech" and. "he's a louse." Both leech and louse are parasites that suck blood through the skin of their host, and we -- being among their hosts -- dislike them for it. Both words have developed extended meanings in application to humans who are portrayed as like a leech or like a louse -- but the extensions are quite different.
According to the American Heritage Dictionary, a leech is "one who preys on or clings to another", whereas a louse is "a mean or despicable person." These extended meanings have an element of arbitrariness. Most of us regard leeches as "despicable," and lice certainly "prey on" and "cling to" their hosts. Nevertheless, a human "leech" must be needy or exploitative, whereas a human "louse" is just an object of distaste.
Therefore it's appropriate for the dictionary to include these extended meanings as part of the meaning of the word. All the same, we can see that these words originally acquired their extended meanings by the completely general process of metaphor. A metaphor is "a figure of speech in which a term is transferred from the object it ordinarily designates to an object it may designate only by implicit comparison or analogy." For instance, if we speak of "the evening of her life", we're making an analogy between the time span of a day and the time span of a life, and naming part of life by reference to a part of the day.
In calling someone a leech, we're making an implicit analogy between interpersonal relationships and a particular kind of parasite/host relationship.
This kind of naming -- and thinking -- by analogy is ubiquitous. Sometimes the metaphoric relationship is a completely new one, and then the process is arguably part of pragmatics -- the way speakers use language to express themselves. However, these metaphors often become fossilized or frozen, and new word senses are created. Consider what it means to call someone a chicken, or a goose, or a cow, or a dog, or a cat, or a crab, or a bitch. For many common animal names, English usage a conventionalized metaphor for application to humans. Some more exotic animals also have conventional use as epithets ("you baboon!" "what a hyena!") No such commonplace metaphors exist for some common or barnyard animals ("what a duck she is"?), or for most rarer or more exotic animals, such as wildebeest or emus. Therefore, these are available for more creative use. The infamous 'water buffalo incident' of a few years ago was apparently a case where what was began as a fossilized metaphor coming from a language other than English was interpreted as a much more offensive novel usage.
Sometimes the metaphoric sense is retained and the original meaning disappears, as in the case of muscle, which comes from Latin musculus "small mouse".

Metonymy and synecdoche

Metonymy is "a figure of speech in which an attribute or commonly associated feature is used to name or designate something."
Synecdoche is "a figure of speech by which a more inclusive term is used for a less inclusive one, or vice versa."
Like metaphors, many examples of metonymy and synecdoche become fossilized: gumshoe, hand (as in "all hands on deck"), "the law" referring to a policeman. However, the processes can be applied in a creative way: "the amputation in room 23".
It often requires some creativity to figure out what level of specificity, or what associated object or attribute, is designated by a particular expression. "I bought the Inquirer" (a copy of the newspaper); "Knight-Ridder bought the Inquirer" (the newspaper-publishing company); "The Inquirer endorsed Rendell" (the newspaper's editorial staff); etc. "Lee is parked on 33rd St." (i.e. Lee's car, perhaps said at a point when Lee in person is far away from 33rd St.).
For more examples, consider the guidelines for annotating "geographical/social/political entities" in the ACE project (extract from this longer document).

Connotation/denotation

The word "sea" denotes a large body of water, but its connotative meaning includes the sense of overwhelming space, danger, instability; whereas "earth" connotes safety, fertility and stability. Of many potential connotations, the particular ones evoked depend upon the context in which words are used. Specific kinds of language (such as archaisms) also have special connotations, carrying a sense of the context in which those words are usually found.
Over time, connotation can become denotation. Thus trivial subjects were originally the subjects in the trivium, consisting of grammar, rhetoric and logic. These were the first subjects taught to younger students; therefore the connotation arises that the trivium is relatively easy, since it is taught to mere kiddies; therefore something easy is trivial.

Other terminology in lexical semantics

In discussing semantics, linguists sometimes use the term lexeme (as opposed to word), so that word can be retained for the inflected variants. Thus one can say that the words walk, walks, walked, and walking are different forms of the same lexeme.
There are several kinds of sense relations among lexemes. First is the opposition between syntagmatic relations (the way lexemes are related in sentences) and paradigmatic relations (the way words can substitute for each other in the same sentence context).
Important paradigmatic relations include:

1. synonymy - "sameness of meaning" (pavement is a synonym of sidewalk)
2. hyponymy - "inclusion of meaning" (cat is a hyponym of animal)
3. antonymy - "oppositeness of meaning" (big is an antonym of small)
4. incompatibility - "mutual exclusiveness within the same superordinate category" (e.g. red and green)

We also need to distinguish homonymy from polysemy: two words are homonyms if they are (accidentally) pronounced the same (e.g. "too" and "two"); a single word is polysemous if it has several meanings (e.g. "louse" the bug and "louse" the despicable person).

Lexical Semantics vs. Compositional Semantics

In the syntax lectures, we used the example of a desk calculator, where the semantics of complex expressions can be calculated recursively from the semantics of simpler ones. In the world of the desk calculator, all meanings are numbers, and the process of recursive combination is defined in terms of the operations on numbers such as addition, multiplication, etc.
The same problem of compositional semantics arises in the case of natural language meaning. How do we determine the meaning of complex phrases from the meaning of simpler one?
There have been many systematic efforts to address this problem, going back to the work of Frege and Russell before the turn of the 20th century. Many aspects of the problem have been solved. Here is a simple sketch of one approach. Suppose we take the meaning of "red" to be associated with the set of red things, and the meaning of "cow" to be associated with the set of things that are cows. Then the meaning of "red cow" is the intersection of the first set (the set of red things) with the second set (the set of things that are cows). Proceeding along these lines, we can reconstruct in terms of set theory an account of the meaning of predicates ("eat"), quantifiers ("all"), and so forth, and eventually give a set-theoretic account of "all cows eat grass" analogous to the account we might give for "((3 + 4) * 6)".
This sort of analysis -- which can become very complex and sophisticated -- does not tell us anything about the meanings of the words involved, but only about how to calculate the denotation of complex expressions from the denotation of simple ones. The denotation of the primitive elements -- the lexemes -- is simply stipulated (as in "the set of all red things").
Since this account of meaning expressed denotations in terms of sets of things in the word -- known as "extensions" -- it is called "extensional".

Sense and Reference

One trouble with this line of inquiry was raised more than 100 years ago by Frege. There is a difference between the reference (or extension) of a concept -- what it corresponds to in the world -- and the sense (or intension) of a concept -- what we know about its meaning, whether or not we know anything about its extension, and indeed whether or not it has an extension.
We know something about the meaning of the word "dog" that is not captured by making a big pile of all the dogs in the world. There were other dogs in the past, there will be other dogs in the future, there are dogs in fiction, etc. One technique that has been used to generalize "extensional" accounts of meaning is known as possible worlds semantics. In this approach, we imagine that there are indefinitely many possible worlds in addition to the actual one, and now a concept -- such as dog -- is no longer just a set, but rather is a function from worlds to sets. This function says, "Give me a possible world, and I'll give you the set of dogs in that world."
Like many mathematical constructs, this is not a very practical arrangement, but it permits interesting and general mathematics to continue to be used in modeling natural language meaning in a wider variety of cases, including counterfactual sentences ("If you had paid me yesterday, I would not be broke today").

Semantic

2.3	Word senses and taxonomies

Word senses

As cultures develop, they create or learn about new categories of things, for example, tools, and they then have the need to refer to these new things. Where might the words for the new categories come from?

We have seen that words — common nouns — are associated with categories of things. I will refer to those categories that make up the meanings of words as semantic categories. As already noted, people also have plenty of categories that have no words associated with them. In fact which categories have labels varies from person to person and from language to language, as we will see soon. One way to summarize what we've discussed so far is shown in the figure below. So far the situation I've described looks like the following:

In the figure the word form is connected to the word's meaning, a semantic category, by an arrow that I will use to indicate a meaning relation. The arrow has two heads because a Speaker can get from a semantic category to a word form, and a Hearer can get from a word form to the word's meaning. You should already know that the figure does not correspond to everyone's view of what word meaning is because what I'm calling the "semantic category" could be distributed in various ways rather than localized as it appears here.

How words change

What happens when there is a new category that we need a word for? One possibility is to invent an entirely new word, but this apparently doesn't happen so often. More often the meaning of an existing word is extended to include the new category. When meaning is extended, this is done on the basis of some kind of relationship between the old meaning and the new. I will refer to this as a conceptual relation. The general situation involved in extending the meaning of a word, semantic extension, is shown in the figure below.

Let's see how semantic extension might work for our Lexies. Say they are familiar with domestic cats and have a word for them; for simplicity, let's say it's pronounced like the English word cat. Now they discover tigers and leopards. Each of these new categories gets its own noun, but in becoming familiar with these new animals, the Lexies see their similarities with domestic cats and develop a new category that encompasses all three categories of animals. How do they refer to this new category, that is, to the more general category of cats, what zoologists refer to as members of the family Felidae? (For simplicity, I'll call this category general-cat.) One possibility, which is the one used by many English speakers, is to refer to this category using the same word that is used for its most familiar sub-category, that is, cat. Note that the word cat now has two related meanings. I will refer to related meanings of a single word as word senses. For a word that has more than one sense, it is up to the Hearer to figure out when the word is used which of the senses is intended by the Speaker.

Here is another English example of a word with multiple senses. The noun chicken can refer both to a particular kind of bird (an object) and to a kind of meat made from this bird (a mass). Notice the two senses in the following sentences.

1. There's a chicken walking around in the back yard.
2. There's some chicken in the freezer.

The discussion so far might make it seem that language users, or entire language communities, extend the meanings of words consciously, but this rarely happens. Instead there seems to be a natural process by which the meanings of words change over time. As with other kinds of language change, the details of the process are not well understood. Somehow a change that starts with a small number of Speakers has to spread throughout the community and become conventional.

Generalization, specialization, and taxonomies

A baby uses the word truck for cars and buses as well as trucks. How would you describe this error? How is it like a semantic extension? He also uses the word train only for the toy train he plays with. How is this kind of error different from the first?

The extension of cat to include a new sense seems reasonable because the two senses are closely related. In this subsection, we'll examine this particular conceptual relation in more detail.

Every domestic cat is a member of the cat family (Felidae), that is, an instance of the category general-cat. Every tiger and every leopard is also an instance of this category. All of the properties that characterize the category general-cat, in particular, a characteristic body shape and way of moving, characterize domestic cats, tigers, and leopards. I will refer to the conceptual relation between the categories domestic-cat and general-cat as specialization-generalization. General-cat generalizes domestic-cat; domestic-cat specializes general-cat.

One way knowledge of objects is organized in long-term memory

There is evidence from cognitive science that much of what we know about objects is organized in terms of the specialization-generalization relation. This is especially true for living things, for which we seem to represent the categories in the world in taxonomies with multiple levels for different degrees of generality. Here is a possible portion of a taxonomy representing knowledge of animals. There are three points to be mentioned about the figure, and about conceptual taxonomies in general.

• As indicated by the small capitals, this is meant to represent a taxonomy of concepts, potential meanings of words, not a taxonomy of words.
• Such a taxonomy is a psychological entity; it represents the way some person might organize their knowledge about the world, not a scientific account of what is actually in the world. As you may know, zoologists would include several more levels in their scientific taxonomy for animals.
• As before, we need to be careful about taking the boxes too seriously since there are theories of categories that get by without anything so localized.

As we go higher in the figure, the categories become more general; there are fewer and fewer features that characterize their instances. Thus we can say a great deal about the characteristic sounds made by domestic cats, much less about the characteristic sounds made by members of the cat family, even less about the characteristic sounds made by mammals.

Here is another example, representing how someone might organize their knowledge about fruits.

Again there are fewer and fewer characteristic properties of the categories as we go higher in the taxonomy. Apples have a characteristic smell that resembles the smell of pears but is not characteristic of the smell of fruits in general.

If you're familiar with an object-oriented programming language such as Java, Python, or C++, this should all appear familiar to you. Taxonomies like those illustrated in the two figures are inheritance hierarchies, with the nodes in the trees corresponding to the classes of object-oriented programming. This relationship brings up the question of how we should implement knowledge of this sort in a program that's designed to simulate human processing of words or to be a component of a practical system that interacts with users. There are two possibilities. We can use object orientation to directly implement the taxonomy, creating explicit classes for Food, Fruit, Berry, etc., and using the inheritance mechanisms that are built into the language itself to make use of the knowledge that is shared. Or we can treat each category in the taxonomy as an object, an instance of a class like Concept and write procedures to implement inheritance bewteen these objects. Most researchers have followed the second path, in part because it gives them control over how inheritance works, how and when new categories are created and associated with the existing taxonomy. But further consideration of these implementation issues is beyond the scope of this book.

What does all of this have to do with words? First, as we have seen from the example of cat, words may extend their meanings on the basis of the generalization relation. The noun cat came to mean not only domestic-cat, but also general-cat. The figure below illustrates this process.

The opposite is also possible; a word may take on a sense that is more specific than its original sense. Consider the following example from the history of English. In Middle English the world gerol meant 'young person'. Over time the meaning of the word shifted to 'young female person', which is the sense it has in in its present form, girl. This is shown in the figure below, which illustrates the situation after the meaning had changed. The new sense was a specialization of the original sense. Notice that in this case, unlike what happened with cat in our first example, the original sense was lost after the word took on the new sense.

Generalization and specialization in the borrowing of words

A similar process may occur when a word is borrowed from one language into another; the sense of the word in the source language may be generalized or specialized after the word enters the target language. The usual Tzeltal word for 'person' is kirsiano (the exact pronunciation depending on the dialect), borrowed from the Spanish word cristiano meaning 'Christian'. For whatever reason, in the borrowing process the meaning was generalized from 'Christian person' to (any) 'person'. The Swahili word safari means 'trip', but when this word was borrowed into English from Swahili, it took on the special sense of a 'trip in search of game animals'. In this case, the meaning was specialized when the word was borrowed.

There are also many examples of generalization and specialization in the speech of young children. In this case we can think of the adult sense of the word as basic and the children's extension of this as a second sense, though it may not be clear that the child has learned the adult sense. Because these uses are seen as errors from the perspective of the adult model, they are referred to as over-generalization and under-generalization. An example of over-generalization is the use of dog to refer to other mammals roughly the size of dogs such as goats in addition to dogs. Examples of under-generalization are harder to observe because they require noticing that the child fails to use a word for a referent where an adult would use the word. An example would be the use of dog to refer only to a particular dog.

These errors made by children are interesting because they point up the possible similarity between the mechanism of language change and the mechanisms of language learning. What we see in the history of a language, the result of changes across an entire community, possibly over the course of multiple generations, resembles what we see in the development of a single child's linguistic system. We'll see more such examples in the book later on. The similarity implies that we might be able to understand language change as a process of learning taking place in the minds of many different language users, children and adults.

Concepts without words (again)

Finally, notice that there may be categories in a person's taxonomy that the person has no words for. Look at how the fruit taxonomy in the figure above corresponds to words for a particular English speaker (me).

While I have a category for things that are either apples or pears, that is, I recognize the similarities between apples and pears, I don't have a word for this category. Note that this does not imply that there is no word in the language for this category; botanists call the family that includes pears and apples Pomoideae. But I had never heard this word before I looked it up in order to mention it here, so it is (or was) not a part of my mental lexicon. Because I have words for all or most of the other categories in this taxonomy, we can consider the apple/pear category to constitute a lexical gap for me. We will see other examples of lexical gaps

Meaning I: Semantics

Semantics vs. Pragmatics

Semantics can be defined as "the study of the meaning of morphemes, words, phrases and sentences."
You will sometimes see definitions for semantics like "the analysis of meaning," To see why this is too broad, consider the following. Kim, returning home after a long day, discovers that the new puppy has crapped on the rug, and says "Oh, lovely."
We don't normally take this to mean that Kim believes that dog feces has pleasing or attractive qualities, or is delightful. Someone who doesn't know English will search the dictionary in vain for what Kim means by saying "lovely":

(ADJECTIVE): [love-li-er, love-li-est].

    1. Full of love; loving.

    2. Inspiring love or affection.

    3. Having pleasing or attractive qualities.

    4. Enjoyable; delightful.

Obviously this is because Kim is being ironic, in the sense of "using words to convey the opposite of their literal meaning". Kim might have said "great," or "wonderful," or "beautiful", or "how exquisite", and none of the dictionary entries for these words will help us understand that Kim means to express disgust and annoyance. That's because a word's meaning is one thing, and Kim's meaning -- what Kim means by using the word -- is something else.
There are lots of other ways besides irony to use words to mean something different from what you get by putting their dictionary entries together. Yogi Berra was famous for this: "if you can't imitate him, don't copy him;" and "you can observe a lot just by watching" and dozens of others.
In fact, even when we mean what we literally say, we often -- maybe always -- mean something more as well. The study of "speaker meaning" -- the meaning of language in its context of use -- is called pragmatics, and will be the subject of the next lecture.
Philosophers have argued about "the meaning of meaning," and especially about whether this distinction between what words mean and what people mean is fundamentally sound, or is just a convenient way of talking. Most linguists find the distinction useful, and we will follow general practice in maintaining it. However, as we will see, it is not always easy to draw the line.

Word meaning and processes for extending it

Word meanings are somewhat like game trails. Some can easily be mapped because they are used enough that a clear path has been worn. Unused trails may become overgrown and disappear. And one is always free to strike out across virgin territory; if enough other animals follow, a new trail is gradually created.
Since word meanings are not useful unless they are shared, how does this creation of new meanings work? There are a variety of common processes by which existing conventional word meanings are creatively extended or modified. When one of processes is applied commonly enough in a particular case, a new convention is created; a new "path" is worn.

Metaphor

Consider the difference in meaning between "He's a leech" and. "he's a louse." Both leech and louse are parasites that suck blood through the skin of their host, and we -- being among their hosts -- dislike them for it. Both words have developed extended meanings in application to humans who are portrayed as like a leech or like a louse -- but the extensions are quite different.
According to the American Heritage Dictionary, a leech is "one who preys on or clings to another", whereas a louse is "a mean or despicable person." These extended meanings have an element of arbitrariness. Most of us regard leeches as "despicable," and lice certainly "prey on" and "cling to" their hosts. Nevertheless, a human "leech" must be needy or exploitative, whereas a human "louse" is just an object of distaste.
Therefore it's appropriate for the dictionary to include these extended meanings as part of the meaning of the word. All the same, we can see that these words originally acquired their extended meanings by the completely general process of metaphor. A metaphor is "a figure of speech in which a term is transferred from the object it ordinarily designates to an object it may designate only by implicit comparison or analogy." For instance, if we speak of "the evening of her life", we're making an analogy between the time span of a day and the time span of a life, and naming part of life by reference to a part of the day.
In calling someone a leech, we're making an implicit analogy between interpersonal relationships and a particular kind of parasite/host relationship.
This kind of naming -- and thinking -- by analogy is ubiquitous. Sometimes the metaphoric relationship is a completely new one, and then the process is arguably part of pragmatics -- the way speakers use language to express themselves. However, these metaphors often become fossilized or frozen, and new word senses are created. Consider what it means to call someone a chicken, or a goose, or a cow, or a dog, or a cat, or a crab, or a bitch. For many common animal names, English usage a conventionalized metaphor for application to humans. Some more exotic animals also have conventional use as epithets ("you baboon!" "what a hyena!") No such commonplace metaphors exist for some common or barnyard animals ("what a duck she is"?), or for most rarer or more exotic animals, such as wildebeest or emus. Therefore, these are available for more creative use. The infamous 'water buffalo incident' of a few years ago was apparently a case where what was began as a fossilized metaphor coming from a language other than English was interpreted as a much more offensive novel usage.
Sometimes the metaphoric sense is retained and the original meaning disappears, as in the case of muscle, which comes from Latin musculus "small mouse".

Metonymy and synecdoche

Metonymy is "a figure of speech in which an attribute or commonly associated feature is used to name or designate something."
Synecdoche is "a figure of speech by which a more inclusive term is used for a less inclusive one, or vice versa."
Like metaphors, many examples of metonymy and synecdoche become fossilized: gumshoe, hand (as in "all hands on deck"), "the law" referring to a policeman. However, the processes can be applied in a creative way: "the amputation in room 23".
It often requires some creativity to figure out what level of specificity, or what associated object or attribute, is designated by a particular expression. "I bought the Inquirer" (a copy of the newspaper); "Knight-Ridder bought the Inquirer" (the newspaper-publishing company); "The Inquirer endorsed Rendell" (the newspaper's editorial staff); etc. "Lee is parked on 33rd St." (i.e. Lee's car, perhaps said at a point when Lee in person is far away from 33rd St.).
For more examples, consider the guidelines for annotating "geographical/social/political entities" in the ACE project (extract from this longer document).

Connotation/denotation

The word "sea" denotes a large body of water, but its connotative meaning includes the sense of overwhelming space, danger, instability; whereas "earth" connotes safety, fertility and stability. Of many potential connotations, the particular ones evoked depend upon the context in which words are used. Specific kinds of language (such as archaisms) also have special connotations, carrying a sense of the context in which those words are usually found.
Over time, connotation can become denotation. Thus trivial subjects were originally the subjects in the trivium, consisting of grammar, rhetoric and logic. These were the first subjects taught to younger students; therefore the connotation arises that the trivium is relatively easy, since it is taught to mere kiddies; therefore something easy is trivial.

Other terminology in lexical semantics

In discussing semantics, linguists sometimes use the term lexeme (as opposed to word), so that word can be retained for the inflected variants. Thus one can say that the words walk, walks, walked, and walking are different forms of the same lexeme.
There are several kinds of sense relations among lexemes. First is the opposition between syntagmatic relations (the way lexemes are related in sentences) and paradigmatic relations (the way words can substitute for each other in the same sentence context).
Important paradigmatic relations include:

1. synonymy - "sameness of meaning" (pavement is a synonym of sidewalk)
2. hyponymy - "inclusion of meaning" (cat is a hyponym of animal)
3. antonymy - "oppositeness of meaning" (big is an antonym of small)
4. incompatibility - "mutual exclusiveness within the same superordinate category" (e.g. red and green)

We also need to distinguish homonymy from polysemy: two words are homonyms if they are (accidentally) pronounced the same (e.g. "too" and "two"); a single word is polysemous if it has several meanings (e.g. "louse" the bug and "louse" the despicable person).

Lexical Semantics vs. Compositional Semantics

In the syntax lectures, we used the example of a desk calculator, where the semantics of complex expressions can be calculated recursively from the semantics of simpler ones. In the world of the desk calculator, all meanings are numbers, and the process of recursive combination is defined in terms of the operations on numbers such as addition, multiplication, etc.
The same problem of compositional semantics arises in the case of natural language meaning. How do we determine the meaning of complex phrases from the meaning of simpler one?
There have been many systematic efforts to address this problem, going back to the work of Frege and Russell before the turn of the 20th century. Many aspects of the problem have been solved. Here is a simple sketch of one approach. Suppose we take the meaning of "red" to be associated with the set of red things, and the meaning of "cow" to be associated with the set of things that are cows. Then the meaning of "red cow" is the intersection of the first set (the set of red things) with the second set (the set of things that are cows). Proceeding along these lines, we can reconstruct in terms of set theory an account of the meaning of predicates ("eat"), quantifiers ("all"), and so forth, and eventually give a set-theoretic account of "all cows eat grass" analogous to the account we might give for "((3 + 4) * 6)".
This sort of analysis -- which can become very complex and sophisticated -- does not tell us anything about the meanings of the words involved, but only about how to calculate the denotation of complex expressions from the denotation of simple ones. The denotation of the primitive elements -- the lexemes -- is simply stipulated (as in "the set of all red things").
Since this account of meaning expressed denotations in terms of sets of things in the word -- known as "extensions" -- it is called "extensional".

Sense and Reference

One trouble with this line of inquiry was raised more than 100 years ago by Frege. There is a difference between the reference (or extension) of a concept -- what it corresponds to in the world -- and the sense (or intension) of a concept -- what we know about its meaning, whether or not we know anything about its extension, and indeed whether or not it has an extension.
We know something about the meaning of the word "dog" that is not captured by making a big pile of all the dogs in the world. There were other dogs in the past, there will be other dogs in the future, there are dogs in fiction, etc. One technique that has been used to generalize "extensional" accounts of meaning is known as possible worlds semantics. In this approach, we imagine that there are indefinitely many possible worlds in addition to the actual one, and now a concept -- such as dog -- is no longer just a set, but rather is a function from worlds to sets. This function says, "Give me a possible world, and I'll give you the set of dogs in that world."
Like many mathematical constructs, this is not a very practical arrangement, but it permits interesting and general mathematics to continue to be used in modeling natural language meaning in a wider variety of cases, including counterfactual sentences ("If you had paid me yesterday, I would not be broke today").