SYMBOL and REFERENT IN SEMANTICS

Good day readers!! Welcome to my blog again! Now, I wanna explain to you about symbol and referent in Semantics. 

Lets, check it out!!

Semantics, also called semiotics, semology, or semasiology,  the philosophical and scientific study of meaning in natural and artificial language.In addition to compositionality, semantic theories must also account for the phenomenon of reference. 

Reference is a characteristic of many expressions whereby they seem to “reach out” into the world to pick out, name, designate, apply to, or denote different things. Although this appearance of connection between words and the world is familiar to anyone who speaks a language, it is also quite mysterious. The following survey will evaluate various semantic theories according to how well they explain compositionality, reference, and other important characteristics of natural languages.

According to a referential semantics, all that one learns when one learns the meaning of tomato is that it applies to tomatoes and to nothing else. One advantage of a referential semantics is that it respects compositionality: the meaning of red tomato is a function of the meanings of red and tomato, because red tomato will apply to anything that is both red and a tomato.

But what about expressions that apparently refer to nothing at all, such as unicorn? A referential semantics would appear to be committed to the view that expressions such as unicorn, Santa Claus, and Sherlock Holmes are meaningless.  

Symbol is an arbitrary pattern (usually a sound pattern in a language) that gets its meaning primarily from its mental association with other symbols and only secondarily from its correlation with environmentally relevant properties.

Now, what about a noun word in a human language? Let's say English `KITTY'? Isn't this just a kind of arbitrary index? Isn't KITTY just an index for the presence of a cat (just for English speakers of course)? In support, one might note that a small child and its mother would be likely to say KITTY in the presence of a cat (so there should be some correlation between the cat and the word KITTY). The sounds [kIDi] correlate partially with the presence of cat (so A predicts B). Doesn't that show that this is just an indexical sign like those above? Unfortunately no - even if its true that most early words for children are learned indexically (that is, by pointing to what they refer to). In general, however, it is very rare for the utterance of a word to correlate with the thing it refers to. Sometimes such a correlation exists, of course, buta word in any language is vastly more complex and sophisticated even for language-learning infants. Notice that:

1. You and your baby will also freely use the word KITTY when a cat is NOT around (so the correlation between KITTY and the cat is a very weak). [If your dog knows the `word' TAKE-A-WALK, try just discussing taking a walk in earshot of the dog and see what happens! Dogs have no grasp of `Talking about taking-a-walk'. That's because take-a-walk is only an indexical sign for your dog, not a symbol as it is for you and your baby.]
2. Many words in every language describe objects that noone has ever seen, like MONSTER, UNICORN, GHOST, DEVIL, etc. (so the possibility of a ny correlation is ruled out completely)! What percent of the time that you utter the word ROCKET or TRAIN, do you suppose there is a physical rocket or train present? My guess is 0% for ROCKET and about 1-3% train. If there is no correlation or an extremely weak one, then these words cannot be indices.
3. On the other hand, any word has strong associations with other words that are `activated' whenever a word is heard or read. Thus KITTY activates words like CAT, FUR, BABY, PURR, PUPPY, PLAY, SAUCER, MILK, YARNBALL, CATFOOD, etc.
   By `activate', I mean that you are more likely to think of or utter these other words after hearing or saying KITTY. (There are many kinds of experimental evidence for this, plus intuition.) This suggests that KITTY may be somehow physically linked to these other words in the brain. It suggests that KITTY gets some of its meaning from the selective activation of just these particular words (and their associated emotional content) when the word KITTY is spoken.
   • Furthermore, many word meanings have associates that are component parts which are also words. Thus a KITTY has FEET, PAWS, WHISKERS, EARS, CLAWS, TONGUE, TEETH, TAIL, etc. A TREE has BRANCH, LEAF, PINECONE, FLOWER, ACORN, BARK, BIRDNEST, etc.
   • Many words are situated in a hierarchy of superordinate category words (that is, larger, inclusive categories) like CAT, PET, MAMMAL, ANIMAL, FELINE, FAMILY MEMBER, etc.
   • Many words have a hierarchy of subordinate category subtype words: MY KITTY, YOUR KITTY, STRIPED KITTY, TABBY, etc.

These word-word relationships (sometimes called word-associates) are critical for anchoring the meaning of a word without requiring any correlation in space and time between the signal (the sound of the word) and its meaning. Indices do not require any such set of relationships to work as signs. In summary, symbols like most words in a human language are (a) easily removable from their context, and (b) are closely associated with large sets of other words. 

 

Thanks to:
http://www.britannica.com/science/semantics 
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~port/teach/103/sign.symbol.html