Semantic vs. Pragmatic Level

Semantic vs. Pragmatic Level

by Philipp Bär -
Number of replies: 2

Hello everyone,

I surely just did not correctly get it in the lecture, but I am unsure about understanding on the semantic and pragmatic level.

Am I right assuming the following explanations for these levels:

Semantic: Does there exist any meaning of the sentence without checking it to our world's knowledge? But then why does 'The mouse lost a feather as it took off.' not make sense on the semantic level (if we disregard the world's context)?

Pragmatic: Is the meaning of the sentence compatible regarding our common knowledge of the world? But why does 'Some sentences is hard understand to.' not allow for a pragmatic interpretation?

Moreover, in an NLP context, the processing levels are interdependent. But for sentence interpretation, do we require that a sentence makes sense on lower levels to even be considered on a higher one?

Thanks in advance!

Best,

Philipp

In reply to Philipp Bär

Re: Semantic vs. Pragmatic Level

by Jean-Cédric Chappelier -
  1. First of all, the levels are NOT independent, but "increasing" or "included" in some sense: there is no way to have a sentence to be valid at the syntactic level if its words are already wrong (= wrong at the lexical level); there is no way to have a sentence to have some sense (= correct at semantic level) if it is grammatically incorrect (= wrong at the syntactic level).

    BTW, this is why we tried to improved since 2019 and would now word such a question more like: "UP TO what level is it correct".

  2. Semantic is about general common sense. It's common sense that mice don't fly and don't have feathers. Thus that sentence is wrong at the semantic level (although grammatically correct, thus correct at the syntactic level).
    Pragmatic is about more specific ad-hoc ("local" if you want or "cultural") knowledge. For instance: "Joe Biden is the President of the Swiss Confederation"; semantically this could be true: Joe Biden is a human, Swiss Confederation has indeed a President; but from a pragmatical point of view, it's incorrect. (Ok maybe you could argue that it is general knowledge that Joe Biden is US President ;-) the boundary between "general" and "local"/"cultural" is always fuzzy... ...especially for the "local" people (the ones for whom it's true) who often believe that their culture is universal and "general" ;-) ;-) )

  3. "Some sentences is hard understand to." is simply wrong at the syntactic level, thus I don't see how you can make any sense out of if (unless you consider you fixed it, e.g. into  "Some sentences are hard to understand."; but this is NOT the same sentence! ;-) )
Did I address you questions?
In reply to Jean-Cédric Chappelier

Re: Semantic vs. Pragmatic Level

by Philipp Bär -
Alright, thank you very much for your detailed answer!

First of all, the 'up-to' seems to be a helpful addition. This also makes it reasonable to me why 3. holds.
For 2. I guess I got it indeed wrong and thought that since we do not use context for interpretation, no knowledge like "Joe Biden" \mapsto "human" would be given. Now, I see the meta-level difference to the pragmatic level!

Best,

Philipp