Semantics of Words and Sentences (ENG)

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Vidya-mitra

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@adawiajabar3499 4 жыл бұрын

May I ask you a question? Why is meaning a problematic area in linguistics?

@deadman746 2 жыл бұрын

I don't know if anybody is paying attention, but I never know that in general, and it hasn't stopped me yet. It's been a year, and nobody has answered, so I will. It's problematic because meaning is hugely complex. So the models of meaning that have been proposed tend to miss a lot and be wildly wrong. But it's also problematic because Chomsky's classical ideas did huge damage to linguistics, and we're trying to recover. The first part of the video has bits about the predicate of sentences and their truth value. This kind of thing appeals to classical logicians such as Descartes, whom Chomsky idolized. In particular, Chomsky's hard separation of syntax from meaning, that is, semantics and pragmatics, requires an idea of meaning that cannot work. Modern cognitive linguistics emerged as a reaction against Chomsky, and we're still working on it. I myself have discovered some ideas from the past that are incredibly useful but which almost all cognitive linguists today ignore. But even if predicate calculus is sometimes useful, it is at best incomplete and also wrong. Putnam's Theorem, from 1980, proves that no classical concept of meaning can be right. But even if classical concepts are mostly OK, there is a lot they do not cover. Consider negation, which in terms of predicate logic is the negation of the predicate. But this is not what happens in language. Consider the six utterances: 1. John isn't frugal; he's profligate. 2. John isn't stingy; he's generous. 3. John isn't frugal; he's stingy. 4. John isn't profligate; he's generous. 5. John isn't frugal; he's generous. 6. John isn't stingy; he's profligate. Only utterances 1 and 2 negate the predicate. Utterances 3 and 4 do not negate the predicate at all; they negate the frame or Idealized Cognitive Model (ICM) in which the meaning is understood. Utterances 5 and 6 negate both, and are thus somewhat difficult to understand. Note that just the word "stingy" or "generous" or "frugal" or "profligate" evoke the ICM. This is important, because according to classical theories, that cannot happen.