Semantics: Crash Course Linguistics #5

Summary

This Crash Course Linguistics episode delves into the complexities of word meanings, exploring how definitions can be both insightful and limited. It highlights the role of lexicographers and the challenges they face in capturing the essence of words. The episode introduces semantic relationships such as synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms, and hypernyms, and discusses the evolution of word meanings over time, influenced by factors like taboo and euphemism. It also touches on the difficulties of defining abstract concepts and the use of prototype theory to understand categories. The video concludes by examining formal semantics and predicate calculus to analyze the functions of words in sentences, emphasizing the multifaceted nature of semantics.

Takeaways

• 📚 Dictionaries are created by lexicographers who determine word meanings, but this process isn't straightforward due to the complexities of language.
• 🔍 Semantics is the branch of linguistics that explores the study of meaning and its various descriptions.
• 📝 Definitions in dictionaries are useful but have limitations, as they are a simplified attempt to capture the nuanced use of words.
• 🔁 Words can have synonyms, antonyms, and be part of hierarchical relationships as hyponyms and hypernyms, reflecting different semantic relationships.
• 🌐 Semantic lines drawn by languages can vary, leading to different word usage and meaning across languages, affecting translation accuracy.
• ⏳ Words can shift in meaning over time, becoming broader, narrower, or changing entirely, influenced by factors like taboo and euphemism.
• 🤔 Polysemy occurs when a single word has multiple meanings, complicating the task of defining it with a single definition.
• 🥪 The 'sandwich' example illustrates the difficulty of defining concepts with exceptions and variations, challenging the idea of a one-size-fits-all definition.
• 🧠 Eleanor Rosch's prototype theory suggests that we categorize things based on prototypes or exemplars, rather than strict definitions, allowing for flexibility in understanding.
• 📈 Predicate calculus is a formal method used to express the relationships between words in mathematical terms, particularly useful for function words.
• 🌐 Different semantic approaches, such as Binary Feature Analysis, Natural Semantic Metalanguage, and Cognitive Semantics, cater to various types of meaning and linguistic phenomena.

Q & A

What is the main issue with relying on a dictionary to define the meaning of a word?

The main issue is that dictionaries are made by people, and lexicographers need some other way to figure out what words mean. Additionally, writing a definition isn't always the most effective way of pinning down the meaning of a word.

What is semantics and why is it important in linguistics?

Semantics is the area of linguistics interested in meaning and the many ways that meaning can be described. It's important because it helps us understand the complexities of meaning in language.

What is the relationship between synonyms and antonyms in language?

Synonyms are words that have about the same definition, like 'happy', 'glad', and 'joyful'. Antonyms have opposite definitions, such as 'inside' and 'outside'.

What are hyponyms and hypernyms, and how do they relate to each other?

Hyponyms are words that refer to a specific member of a broader category, like 'red' being a type of 'color'. Hypernyms are the broader words, like 'color' and 'animal'. A word that is a hyponym of one word can be a hypernym of another.

How do different languages handle semantic relationships differently?

Different languages may not draw semantic lines in the same place. For example, English has the word 'know', while Polish splits this into 'wiem' for knowing a fact and 'znam' for knowing a person.

What is the impact of context on word translation in bilingual dictionaries?

In bilingual dictionaries, a word may have more than one possible translation. The correct translation depends on the context and how a language divides semantic space.

How can words change their meanings over time?

Words can become broader, narrower, or change meaning altogether. For example, 'nice' evolved from meaning 'ignorant' to its current positive connotation.

What is the role of taboo in language change and the development of euphemisms?

Taboo drives language change as people use euphemisms to avoid rude words. Over time, these euphemisms become associated with the original meaning, necessitating new euphemisms.

What is polysemy and how does it complicate the definition of a word?

Polysemy is when the same sequence of sounds has multiple meanings, like 'bank' which can refer to the side of a river or a financial institution. This makes it difficult to define a word with a single meaning.

What is Eleanor Rosch's prototype theory and how does it differ from traditional definitions?

Prototype theory suggests that instead of having clear-cut definitions, we have prototypes or exemplars that are the most typical representatives of a category. This allows for a range of category members that are more or less central depending on their similarity to the exemplar.

How do function words differ from content words in terms of meaning?

Function words, like 'the', 'of', and 'is', are described based on their relationship to other words and their function in a sentence, rather than having a specific meaning like content words.

What is predicate calculus and how does it help in understanding the meanings of function words?

Predicate calculus is a branch of formal semantics that uses mathematical, symbolic terms to express relationships between words. It helps to find the meanings of function words in true sentences by analyzing when those sentences are true.

What are some other approaches to semantics besides prototype theory and predicate calculus?

Other approaches include Binary Feature Analysis for describing words in a taxonomy, Natural Semantic Metalanguage for breaking down words into basic units of meaning, and Cognitive Semantics for understanding metaphorical connections between abstract and concrete concepts.

Outlines

00:00

📚 Understanding Word Meanings and Semantics

This paragraph introduces the complexities of determining word meanings and the role of dictionaries in this process. It explains that lexicographers, who compile dictionaries, must also find ways to understand word meanings. The paragraph delves into the field of semantics, which is concerned with meaning in language. It discusses the use of definitions to understand synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms, and hypernyms, and how these relationships can vary across languages. It also touches on how words can change meanings over time due to various factors, such as taboo and euphemism development.

05:06

🍰 The Challenge of Defining and the Prototype Theory

The second paragraph explores the difficulties in defining words and phrases precisely, using the example of a sandwich to illustrate how definitions can become problematic with exceptions and variations. It introduces Eleanor Rosch's prototype theory, which suggests that instead of having strict definitions, we have mental prototypes or exemplars for categories, with other members being more or less central to the category. The paragraph also discusses the limitations of definitions for function words, which are better understood through their relationships with other words in a sentence, and introduces predicate calculus as a method to express these relationships symbolically.

10:07

🌐 The Diversity of Semantic Approaches and Their Limitations

In the final paragraph, the script acknowledges the intricate nature of meaning and the various semantic tools needed to understand it fully. It mentions other semantic approaches such as Binary Feature Analysis, Natural Semantic Metalanguage, and Cognitive Semantics, each with its focus on different types of meaning. The paragraph also hints at the upcoming discussion in the series about meaning in a broader social context and ends with an invitation to support Crash Course on Patreon to keep the content free for everyone.

Keywords

💡Dictionary

A dictionary is a reference book or online resource that lists words in one or more languages, along with their meanings, pronunciation, and other relevant information. In the context of the video, dictionaries are presented as a common tool for understanding word meanings but also highlighted as being created by people, which introduces the potential for subjectivity in defining word meanings.

💡Lexicographer

A lexicographer is a person who compiles, edits, and revises dictionaries. The script points out that lexicographers, despite their expertise, still need methods to determine the meanings of words, emphasizing the complexity of the task and the human element involved in defining language.

💡Semantics

Semantics is the branch of linguistics concerned with meaning. The video discusses semantics as the field that studies the various ways to describe meaning in language, highlighting its importance in understanding the nuances of word definitions and the relationships between words.

💡Synonyms

Synonyms are words that have the same or nearly the same meaning. The script uses 'happy,' 'glad,' and 'joyful' as examples to illustrate how synonyms can provide insight into the relationships between words and their meanings.

💡Antonyms

Antonyms are words that have opposite meanings. The video uses 'inside' and 'outside' to demonstrate how antonyms represent contrasting concepts, which is a fundamental aspect of understanding word relationships in semantics.

💡Hyponym

A hyponym is a word that is a specific type of another word. For instance, 'red' is a hyponym of 'color,' and 'rabbit' is a hyponym of 'animal.' The script explains how hyponyms help to categorize and understand the hierarchical relationships between words.

💡Hypernym

A hypernym is a word that represents a broader category to which other words belong. The script uses 'color' and 'animal' as hypernyms for 'red' and 'rabbit,' respectively, to show how hypernyms provide a general term for a group of related words.

💡Polysemy

Polysemy refers to a single word having multiple meanings. The video uses 'bank' as an example, which can mean the side of a river or a financial institution, to illustrate the challenges of defining words with multiple meanings.

💡Prototype Theory

Prototype theory, introduced by Eleanor Rosch, suggests that people categorize objects based on their similarity to a prototypical example rather than strict definitions. The video explains how this theory helps to understand the flexibility and variability in how we categorize and understand concepts like 'sandwich' or 'chair.'

💡Function Words

Function words are words that serve a grammatical purpose, such as 'the,' 'of,' 'is,' and 'or.' The script explains that these words are not easily defined by prototypes or exemplars; instead, their meanings are understood through their roles in sentences and their relationships with other words.

💡Predicate Calculus

Predicate calculus, also known as first-order logic, is a formal system used to express relationships between words in a logical and symbolic way. The video uses it to explain the meanings of function words like 'all' and 'a,' demonstrating how this system can clarify the complex interactions between words in sentences.

💡Quantifier

In predicate calculus, a quantifier is a word that specifies the quantity of something in a statement. The video discusses 'all' as a universal quantifier and 'a' as an existential quantifier, showing how quantifiers help to define the scope and existence of elements in a sentence.

Highlights

Dictionaries are created by lexicographers who need methods to determine word meanings.

Writing definitions may not always effectively capture the meaning of a word.

Semantics is the linguistic field concerned with meaning and its descriptions.

Definitions help identify relationships between words, such as synonyms and antonyms.

Hyponyms and hypernyms describe specific and broader category relationships.

Semantic relationships vary across languages, affecting word translations.

Words can shift meanings over time, becoming broader, narrower, or changing entirely.

Language change can be driven by taboo and the use of euphemisms.

Polysemy refers to a single sequence of sounds having multiple meanings.

The prototype theory suggests that we categorize based on typical representatives rather than strict definitions.

Function words are grammatical and described by their relationships with other words.

Predicate calculus uses mathematical symbols to express word relationships and sentence meanings.

Quantifiers like 'all' and 'a' have specific meanings in predicate calculus.

Different languages may express similar functional meanings differently.

Other semantic methods like Binary Feature Analysis and Natural Semantic Metalanguage exist for various types of meaning.

Semantics is a complex field with various tools to understand word meanings.

Crash Course Linguistics will explore meaning in a larger social context in the next episode.

Transcripts

Hi, I'm Taylor and welcome to Crash Course Linguistics!

What is the meaning of… life?

Or of chair?

Or of rabbit?

Well, we might not know about life, but we can easily find out what a word means.

We just look it up in The Dictionary™.

Episode over!

Wait a sec...

The first problem with relying on a dictionary to give a word meaning is that dictionaries are made by people.

And the people who write dictionaries, called lexicographers, still need some other way of figuring out what words mean.

The second problem is that writing a definition isn't always the most effective way of pinning down the meaning of a word.

The area of linguistics interested in meaning, and the many ways that we can describe it, is semantics.

[THEME MUSIC ANIMATION]

To better understand the complexities of meaning, let's start with the humble definition, a clear and concise description of how people are using a word.

Definitions are what we’re used to reading in dictionaries, and help us see when one word has a certain type of relationship to another word.

For example, several words can have about the same definition.

They're synonyms, like "happy" and "glad" and "joyful."

Two words can also have the opposite definition.

They're antonyms, like "inside" and "outside."

One word can refer to a specific member of a broader category, such as "red," which is a type of "color," or "rabbit," a type of "animal".

The specific word, like red and rabbit, is a hyponym.

And the broader word, like color and animal, is a hypernym.

A word which is a hyponym of one word can be a hypernym of another:

snowshoes are one type of rabbit, and a rabbit is a type of animal.

Semantic relationships, like synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms, and hypernyms,

are found across many languages, but not all languages draw semantic lines in the same place

For example, English has the one word “know,” while Polish splits this up.

It has wiem for ‘I know a fact’ and znam for ‘I know a person’.

In contrast, Portuguese fazer is used where English has both "to do" and "to make".

If you look up a word in a bilingual dictionary, you'll often find more than one possible translation,

and you need to know further context about how a language carves up the semantic space in order to know which translation to use.

Definitions are also useful for describing how words shift their meanings over time.

For example, words can become broader in their meaning.

"Thing" used to refer to a council or assembly in English, but now it can be used to refer to any… thing.

Words can also become narrower in their meaning.

For example "girl," used to mean "child," and now it’s more specific.

And words can change meaning all together.

"Nice" used to mean "ignorant," and then “silly,” then “fussy,” and now, well, “nice.”

What a journey.

One driver of this language change is taboo.

We use words as euphemisms to avoid saying ruder words...

But then the euphemisms start getting associated with the original meaning, and so another euphemism is needed, and so on.

For example, the word "toilet" originally meant a cloth,

and then a cloth used on a dressing table.

Then it meant the items associated with a dressing table (like a mirror and hairbrush),

and then a room containing a dressing table with a lavatory attached.

Finally, people used this word to refer to the porcelain plumbing item and the room it's in, because it sounded more polite than, I dunno, craphouse? pooproom?

Now, the word “toilet” is a bit too direct in some people’s minds, and they use another euphemism for "toilet", such as a bathroom or loo.

Or maybe bathroom even feels like a little too much for you, and you use a different euphemism, like "I’m just gonna go wash my hands".

The euphemism cycle continues.

Even as words change, their definitions can still be straightforward.

But definitions don't always work so easily.

For example, the same sequence of sounds can have multiple meanings, like "bank," which can be the side of a river or a place where people store money.

This is known as polysemy.

And it only gets trickier from there.

Let’s see what the Thought Bubble is serving up.

Let’s picture the sandwich we would choose if we were going to draw an unremarkable, sandwich-y sandwich.

We might consider the type of bread -- white?

Whole wheat?

Square loaf or something more rustic?

And we’ll probably imagine a filling.

Maybe you went with a PB&J, or something with meat, cheese, and lettuce like in the emoji sandwich.

I went for a grilled cheese myself.

Now let's take the sandwiches we pictured and try to write a definition for "sandwich."

Maybe it's "a filling between two pieces of bread?"

Or wait, a sandwich can be served on a roll, and wraps and pitas are on a lot of sandwich menus,

so maybe a sandwich is "a filling between two...somewhat bread-like pieces?"

A burger works.

It’s got a filling between two halves of a roll.

But what about an ice cream sandwich?

It’s got a filling between two cookies, and it even has sandwich in the name.

And if we’re going to count wraps and rolls, does that make a burrito a sandwich?

A hot dog?

A pizza?

What if we fold the pizza?

And this doesn't even get into how sandwiches are different cross-culturally.

Maybe your sandwich involves vegemite or liver paste, or the Norwegian matpakke.

Okay, so our sandwich definition isn't really working that well, and we probably need to figure out definitions for "filling" and…"somewhat bread-like pieces."

Oh no.

We are, to use a sandwich figure of speech, in a bit of a pickle.

Thanks Thought Bubble, now I want a sandwich.

Or maybe...seventeen sandwiches of different definitions.

Anyway, any definition, if we think about it hard enough, starts to break down with exceptions and edge cases.

How do we know whether something is a cup?

Whether a dress is blue and black, or white and gold?

And that's not even getting into social constructs like genders and emotions.

Maybe nothing means anything, ever!

And yet, somehow, we do manage to go through the world and communicate with each other reasonably well, most of the time.

If I ask you to think of a sandwich, or a chair, or a bird, you do think of something.

So maybe the problem isn't with words, it's with trying to use definitions to express their meaning.

Psychology professor Eleanor Rosch came up with a different idea.

Rather than imagining we have dictionary-style, clear-cut definitions of things in our brain,

Rosch argued that instead we have prototypes or exemplars, the most typical representatives of a category.

Then we can also have other category members that are more or less central depending on how similar they are to the exemplar.

For example, an exemplar of a chair probably has four legs, a rigid back, and seats one human,

but that doesn't mean that a chair can't have three legs, or be extra tall, or be an adjustable desk chair.

And most people's exemplars of a bird are small, feathery ones like sparrows or robins,

but that doesn't mean that less-central category members like emus or penguins aren’t still birds.

Rosch’s prototype theory offers us an escape hatch from definitions.

We don't need to pin down an exact set of criteria for sandwich-hood or chair-ness.

Instead, we can recognize that some examples are really obvious, prototypical members of their category, and other examples are more loosely related.

Both kinds of meaning are totally okay.

Delicious, even.

Prototype theory works well with content words, words with meanings that we could point to, describe, or draw a picture of.

It even works okay when the ideas are abstract, like happiness and democracy.

But not every word has a prototype.

Take words like "the", "of", "is", "or", "if", and "every.”

It doesn't make much sense to ask what a “the” looks like, or to try to think of the most prototypical example of an "of".

These little words that help a sentence fit together grammatically are called function words.

They can only really be described based on their relationship to the words they're used with — their function in the sentence.

To pin down exactly what these functions are, we can express the relationships between words in mathematical, symbolic terms, using predicate calculus.

This concept also comes up in mathematics, computer science, or philosophy,

where it can also go by the names first-order logic, quantificational logic, and first-order predicate calculus.

Predicate calculus is a branch of formal semantics — that's formal as in "using formulas", not as in the semantics you do while wearing a ballgown.

At the heart of formal semantics is one assumption:

to understand what a sentence means, we have to know when that sentence is true or not.

And predicate calculus helps us find the meanings of certain words in those true sentences.

To see how predicate calculus works for two function words, "all" and "a", let’s start with the sentence:

“All Crash Course hosts like Gav.”

If it’s true, we can infer that Gav exists, and that, since I’m a Crash Course host, I like Gav.

We can’t infer how many Crash Course hosts there are, but we know this sentence applies to all of them, so "all" is known as a universal quantifier.

If the sentence was “A Crash Course host likes Gav,” then we could infer that there’s a Gav, and that there is one of the set of Crash Course hosts that likes them.

It might be me, but we can’t be certain!

We don’t know which Crash Course host it is, only that they exist, so "a" is known as an existential quantifier.

In the sentence “All Crash Course hosts like a rabbit,” we now have one universal quantifier and one existential quantifier.

This sentence actually has two different meanings:

One: There is a rabbit that all Crash Course hosts like

Or Two: Every Crash Course host each likes a different rabbit.

It would be hard to write down this kind of meaning in a definition, let alone describe this interaction between "all" and "a” in a few words.

But using symbols lets us see these relationships more clearly, and lets us see when similar functional meanings are expressed in different languages.

We’ve only explored two function words here.

There’s an extensive set of notation we can use to explore other function words, and some are still being figured out!

That said, like prototype theory, predicate calculus also doesn't work for everything — these methods are just two ways to do semantics.

Other approaches to semantics specialize in still more kinds of meanings, such as Binary Feature Analysis,

which is useful for precisely describing words that are part of a taxonomy, like words for family members.

There’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage, where words can be broken down into other, more basic units of meaning,

and Cognitive Semantics, where metaphors draw connections between abstract concepts like time and concrete concepts like physical location.

Some aspects of semantics highlight similarities between different, unrelated languages;

other aspects highlight meanings that are more specific to a particular language or language family.

There's so much more to talk about, and we would love to get into it, but we don't have time!

Trying to articulate the meaning of a word in a dictionary is an amazing skill, but meaning is complicated and nebulous and requires a range of semantic tools to pin down.

Next time on Crash Course Linguistics, we'll zoom out further and talk about meaning beyond words, in a larger social context.

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