Semantic vs pragmatic levels

Semantic vs pragmatic levels

by Joshua Stanford Swanson -
Number of replies: 2

I have some confusion distinguishing sentences which are correct at the semantic vs. pragmatic levels. I was hoping someone could verify whether my understanding is correct. My understanding is as follows:

Sentences which state implausible outcomes like "the car walked away" or "the mouse lost a feather" are incorrect at the semantic level because even without context, they don't make sense given our general knowledge of the world.

Sentences which are plausible but blatantly false are semantically correct but pragmatically incorrect, because without context or a knowledge of the world, they could be considered correct. And these would be sentences like "Judo is a ball sport" or "Pablo Picasso is a Brazilian football player."

Is this right? If so, Is there a threshold for what constitutes "general" knowledge? It feels like determining the level here could be very subjective because there might be a big gray area.

In reply to Joshua Stanford Swanson

Re: Semantic vs pragmatic levels

by Deniz Bayazit -

That's correct! I think the fine line to distinguish here is between general/commonsense knowledge of the world, which can fall into semantics, vs. specific factual knowledge, which is is highly dependent on who the speaker and the listener are. One way to distinguish them is to consider speakers of English from different countries and their utterances, which often have shared (conventional) semantic meanings, but different pragmatic meanings depending on the context. 

For example if I said "Who is the president?" in Australia and you are also in Australia, you can assume through pragmatics that I am talking about the president of Australia.

But if I say "Who is the president?" in the USA and you are also in the USA, you can assume through pragmatics that I am talking about the president of the USA.

I agree that it's quite gray, and exact definitions of the levels of processing are still debated, but overall pragmatics really takes into account who/where the speaker and the listener are, which ends up defining the specific type of factual knowledge the speaker and the listener would know.

In reply to Joshua Stanford Swanson

Re: Semantic vs pragmatic levels

by Martin Rajman -

Hello,

Yes, what you are writing is right.

Concerning your additional question "Is there a threshold for what constitutes "general" knowledge? It feels like determining the level here could be very subjective because there might be a big gray area.":

1. in almost any NLP task, there always is some inherent subjectivity; indeed, the fact that speakers can have the feeling to understand each other strongly relies on the fact that they share a large amount of common knowledge, which allows them to properly contextualize the linguistic entities they are faced with;

2. Deciding what, in this shared knowledge, is of semantic nature, and what is of pragmatic nature is indeed a hard question that linguists have been debating for decades; I usually suggest to rely on a very pragmatic rule of thumb:

- any knowledge that can be reasonably derived from the word definitions one can find in a decent monolingual dictionary is of semantic nature;

- any other knowledge is of pragmatic nature (and, may be described in an encyclopedia).

Best,
Martin.