 This first e-lecture of the VLC Semantics and Pragmatics class discusses the contribution of semantics to the study of language and provides an overview of other academic disciplines with an interest in the subject. Furthermore, it outlines several issues related to the description of meaning. In particular, we will look at the role of semantics within linguistics as well as the role of semantics in other disciplines. And we will discuss the central goals and objectives of semantics. Now the term semantics, originally a Greek term, is a recent addition to the English language. However, in its early use in the 19th century, the term was not used simply to refer to meaning but to its development, what we today call historical semantics. Despite additional attempts around 1900, the term did not catch on until Ogden and Richards published their now famous book, The Meaning of Meaning in 1923. Today, semantics is one of the central areas within linguistics with ambitious goals and numerous applications and influences, but also one of the most problematic ones. Linguists working within semantics study the ways in which words or sentences acquire meaning and the processes by which native speakers of a language can assign stable interpretations to word strings. Since meaning can be influenced by various linguistic factors, semantics plays an important role in most branches of linguistics with the exception of phonetics and of course, semantics itself. This is why we erased it over here. Let us look at some examples. Let's start with phonology. In phonology, the study of the sound systems of particular languages, semantics is related to meaning studies in several ways. Phonemes can distinguish meanings. By means of establishing so-called minimal pairs such as bin and pen, we can show that the exchange of one phone by another one, so per and per over here, that the exchange of one phone by another one leads to a difference in meaning. Thus, the two items must be two different phonemes. The sound system also carries meaning through the patterns of stress that we adopt in speaking. Cases of lexical stress in present-day English, where we have examples such as contrast and contrast, export versus export. Now cases like these where the placement of stress within a word changes the word class are well known. Or take a simple sentence such as, Jim enjoys playing country songs in bars. Now here the choice of the nucleus influences the meaning of the sentence. Jim enjoys playing country songs versus hip-hop songs in bars. Or Jim enjoys playing country songs in bars versus in concert halls. Well, and finally, variations of pitch may lead to different tonal effects. And by means of tonal effects, we can influence the meaning of several chunks of speech. We can create different sentence types such as Mary passed her exams yesterday, which is a declarative sentence. But with a rising tone on yesterday, Mary passed her exams yesterday, we can easily create an intonation question. Or we can indicate the end of a list by means of a falling intonation, milk, water, juice, and wine. Sorry, by means of a falling tone. So, tonal differences may lead to the change of the meaning of words and sentences. Let's look at morphology next. Now morphology studies the internal structure of words and how words are built out of smaller components. There are three central processes, but they differ with the respect to the degree of semantic transparency of the word forms they produce. Infliction is semantically fully transparent. So let's mark this with a plus symbol. Infliction doesn't involve a change of the basic forms meaning. And the affix, if there is one, can clearly be associated with a fixed meaning. Take the present-day English affix ed, here represented orthographically, which clearly means past-time reference. In derivational processes, the meaning of the affixes involved is in many cases not clearly definable. So we should add a minus here. That is, the affixes cannot be straightforwardly associated with a fixed meaning. Unlike inflectional affixes, they are semantically non-transparent. An example is the affix ION in items such as destruction, election, qualification. And then there are compounds. They can be fully transparent as in endocentric compounds such as schoolboy or schoolgirl, a schoolboy is a boy, a schoolgirl is a girl, or totally intransparent as in exocentric compounds such as pickpocket, which is not a type of pocket, or redskin, which is not a type of skin. Let's continue with syntax. Syntax investigates how words combine into successively larger structures to form phrases and sentences. Semantics deals with the way the resulting syntactic structures are interpreted, and the syntactic structure of a sentence determines its semantic interpretation to a considerable extent. For example, if we swap around the elements in the present-day English, the lion chases the mouse, we can create a totally different meaning by changing the word order. So let's create a new sentence like this. Well, and here you clearly see we have a different meaning. This is because the parts of the sentence are structurally related to each other. And in present-day English, this structure is reflected in the word order. The exact division of labor between syntax and semantics and the way they interact, that is their interface, are among the most interesting and central, but also the most controversially discussed issues in linguistics. Let's look at pragmatics next. Now, drawing the line between semantics and pragmatics is difficult and controversial, since both fields are concerned with the transmission of meaning through language. However, we might say that whereas semantic studies' meanings abstracted away from language users and situations, pragmatics is concerned with the meanings that linguistic expressions have in particular contexts, in which they are uttered, and with various functions that speakers assign or choose to perform with them. In trying to determine what someone actually wants to say, people regularly go beyond the conventional meanings of the words spoken by taking into account contextual aspects. Now, to understand the girl's answer in this dialogue, what time is it? The milkman has just arrived. You have to interpret the situation, the participants, the history of the interaction, and so on. And beyond your world knowledge, you have to have the ability to draw inferences, conclusions, for example, that it is 8 o'clock because the milkman generally arrives at around 8. Let's now look at the contribution of semantics in other disciplines. Linguists are not the only scholars with an interest in semantics. In fact, meaning is studied in various other academic disciplines, some of which are represented on this flip chart behind me. While there is a significant degree of overlap among these disciplines, as well as with linguistic semantics, they all have something idiosyncratic and unique in their approach. Let us look at them in more detail and I'd start with philosophy. While linguists take the notion of meaning as given and start working from there, the philosopher takes one step back and asks questions like, how is it possible for anything to mean anything? Or what sort of relation must hold between X and Y for it to be the case that X means Y? And so on and so forth. Highly philosophical issues. Researchers working in the area of psychology of language or psycholinguistics are concerned with a number of fundamental questions related to the mental processing of meaning. How is meaning represented in the human mind is such a question. Or what mechanisms are involved in encoding and decoding linguistic messages? And last but not least, how do children acquire meaning? Psychological and psycholinguistic frameworks commonly take an experimental approach to find answers to these questions. In semiotics, the study of signs, language is viewed as one symbolic system among many. Linguistic meaning is regarded as a special subset of the more general human capacity to make one thing stand for another, that is to identify and create signs. Symioticists are interested in the types of relationship that may hold between a sign and the entity it represents, which include the following. Iconic relationships, arbitrary relations, and conventional and discrete relations between sign and symbol. Cognitive science, the next discipline I would like to mention, is an interdisciplinary approach bringing together what is known about the human mind from linguistics, psychology, computer science, and philosophy. It seeks to answer the following central questions. What sources of knowledge do humans utilize in speaking, hearing, and thinking? Or how is knowledge organized and represented in the human mind? And how is this knowledge put to use and what cognitive processes underlie the application of this knowledge? Symioticists, inspired by the ideas of cognitive science, see language as part of our general cognitive ability. They argue that we have no access to a reality which is independent of human categorization. From their point of view, the structure of reality is a product of the human mind created with language. This school of thought, which is in sharp opposition to traditional approaches to semantics, is called cognitive semantics. Here is the last field I would like to discuss, artificial intelligence. Now, artificial intelligence has been defined as the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by humans. This includes the ability to handle language in applications such as the following. Machine translation, information extraction and retrieval, man-machine interfaces, and intelligent tutoring. In order to succeed in any of these machines require knowledge about the meanings of words and how word meanings combine to form sentences. Besides such linguistic knowledge, they also need encyclopedic knowledge about the way the world works. Now, what is semantic analysis trying to achieve? A number of fundamental goals can be identified. For example, the goal of description. Semanticists have to find ways to describe the meaning of isolated words, words in context, sentences, and utterances. Now, these items may vary. They may vary in contexts. So, semantics seeks to define the principles that underlie these phenomena of variation. And often meaning is complex or multidimensional to describe this composite effect of meaning is among the goals of modern semantics. And what happens if simple meanings combine into compounds, phrases, sentences, and beyond? To answer this question is another major goal of semantics. And all this has to be highly systematic. Because semanticists want to describe meaning in a maximally economic way. Thus, the use of mathematical formalisms as descriptive devices is very common within semantics. So, what do semanticists actually do? A very simple yet intuitively appealing approach to linguistic meaning is to suppose that all we need to interpret linguistic expressions is to know the definitions of the meanings of the words. The meanings of phrases and sentences would then simply be the result of combining the appropriate definitions. However, there are several problems with such a definition-based theory of linguistic meaning. But these will be discussed in further e-lectures about semantics and pragmatics. See you again there.