INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS ( SEMANTICS )

A. The systematic study of meaning

We are all necessarily interested in meaning. We wonder about the meaning of a new word. Sometimes we are not sure about the message we should get from something we read or hear, and we are concerned about getting our own messages across to others. We find pleasure in jokes, which often depend for their humor on double meanings of words or ambiguities in sentences. Commercial organizations spend a lot of effort and money on naming products, devising slogans, and creating messages that will be meaningful to the buying public. Legal scholars argue about the interpretation—that is, the meaning—of a law or a judicial decision. Literary scholars quarrel similarly over the meaning of some poem or story.

Three disciplines are concerned with the systematic study of ‘meaning’ in itself: psychology, philosophy and linguistics. Their particular interests and approaches are different, yet each borrows from and contributes to the others.

Psychologists are interested in how individual humans learn, how they retain, recall, or lose information; how they classify, make judgements and solve problems—in other words, how the human mind seeks meanings and works with them.

Philosophers of language are concerned with how we know, how any particular fact that we know or accept as true is related to other possible facts—what must be antecedent (a presupposition) to that fact and what is a likely consequence, or entailment of it; what statements are mutually contradictory, which sentences express the same meaning in different words, and which are unrelated. (There is more about presupposition and entailment later in this chapter.)

Linguists want to understand how language works. Just what common knowledge do two people possess when they share a language— English, Swahili, Korean or whatever—that makes it possible for them to give and get information, to express their feelings and their intentions to one another, and to be understood with a fair degree of success? Linguistics is concerned with identifying the meaningful elements of specific languages, for example, English words like paint and happy and affixes like the -er of painter and the un- of unhappy. It is concerned with describing how such elements go together to express more complex meanings—in phrases like the unhappy painter and sentences like The painter is unhappy—and telling how these are related to each other. Linguistics also deals with the meanings expressed by modulations of a speaker’s voice and the processes by which hearers and readers relate new information to the information they already have.

Semantics is the systematic study of meaning, and linguistic semantics is the study of how languages organize and express meanings. Linguistic semantics is the topic of this book, but we need to limit ourselves to the expression of meanings in a single language, English. Here and there throughout the book we make comparisons with other languages, but these are meant to be illustrative of language differences, not full accounts of what differences exist.

B. Demonstrating semantic knowledge

How can we explain the speaker’s knowledge of meanings? Certainly we cannot expect that speakers can clearly define all the words they know. If that were our criterion, we should also expect speakers to be able to explain the meaning of every utterance they will ever produce or comprehend, which is, for all practical purposes, an infinite number. But the obvious thing is that speakers can make their thoughts and feelings and intentions known to other speakers of the language and can understand what others say. This ability requires possession of a vocabulary and for speakers to know how to pronounce every item in this vocabulary and how to recognize its pronunciation by other speakers. They know how to use the production vocabulary in meaningful sentences and to understand the sentences produced by others. And of course they know meanings—how to choose the items that express what they want to express and how to find the meanings in what other people say.

If it is hard to say what meaning is, it is fairly easy to show what knowledge speakers have about meanings in their language and therefore what things must be included in an account of semantics (Bierwisch 1970:167–75; Dillon 1977:1–6).

 The next ten paragraphs demonstrate ten aspects of any speaker’s semantic knowledge.

1. Speakers know, in a general way, whether something is or is not meaningful in their language. For example, speakers of English can tell which of the following are meaningful in English.

1a Henry drew a picture.

1b Henry laughed.

1c The picture laughed.

1d Picture a Henry drew.

It is certainly not too much to assume that 1a and 1b are meaningful to speakers of English, while 1c and 1d are anomalous (examples of anomaly). Sentence 1c has the appearance of being meaningful and it might attain meaning in some children’s story or the like, while 1d is merely a sequence of words.

2. Speakers of a language generally agree as to when two sentences have essentially the same meaning and when they do not.

2a Rebecca got home before Robert.

2b Robert got home before Rebecca.

2c Robert arrived at home after Rebecca.

2d Rebecca got home later than Robert.

Sentences that make equivalent statements about the same entities, like 2a and 2c, or 2b and 2d, are paraphrases (of each other).

3. Speakers generally agree when two words have essentially the same meaning—in a given context. In each sentence below one word is underlined. Following the sentence is a group of words, one of which can replace the underlined word without changing the meaning of the sentence.

3a Where did you purchase these tools?

     use buy release modify take

3b At the end of the street we saw two enormous statues,

     pink smooth nice huge original

Words that have the same sense in a given context are synonyms— they are instances of synonymy and are synonymous with each other.

4. Speakers recognize when the meaning of one sentence contradicts another sentence. The sentences below are all about the same person, but two of them are related in such a way that if one is true the other must be false.

4a Edgar is married.

4b Edgar is fairly rich.

4c Edgar is no longer young.

4d Edgar is a bachelor.

Sentences that make opposite statements about the same subject are contradictory.

5. Speakers generally agree when two words have opposite meanings in a given context. For example, speakers are able to choose from the group of words following 5a and 5b the word which is contrary to the underlined word in each sentence.

5a Betty cut a thick slice of cake, bright new soft thin wet

5b The train departs at 12:25, arrives leaves waits swerves

Two words that make opposite statements about the same subject are antonyms; they are antonymous, instances of antonymy.

6. Synonyms and antonyms have to have some common element of meaning in order to be, respectively, the same or different. Words can have some element of meaning without being synonymous or antonymous. For example, we should all agree that in each of the following groups of words, 6a and 6b, all but one of the words have something in common. Which is the word that doesn’t belong?

6a street lane road path house avenue

6b buy take use steal acquire inherit

The common element of meaning, shared by all but one word in 6a and by all but one item in 6b, is a semantic feature.

7. Some sentences have double meanings; they can be interpreted in two ways. Speakers are aware of this fact because they appreciate jokes which depend on two-way interpretation, like the following.

7a Marjorie doesn’t care for her parakeet.

     (doesn’t like it; doesn’t take care of it)

7b Marjorie took the sick parakeet to a small animal hospital.

     (small hospital for animals; hospital for small animals)

A sentence that has two meanings is ambiguous—an example of ambiguity.

8. Speakers know how language is used when people interact. If one person asks a question or makes a remark, there are various possible answers to the question or replies one might make to the remark. Thus for the question in 8a some answers are suggested, of which all but one might be appropriate. Similarly the statement in 8b is followed by several possible rejoinders, all but one of which could be appropriate.

8a When did you last see my brother?

     Ten minutes ago. Last Tuesday. Very nice.

     Around noon. I think it was on the first of June.

8b There’s a great new comedy at the Oldtown Playhouse.

     So I’ve heard. What’s it called? When did it open?

     So do I. Are you sure it’s a comedy?

When a question and an answer, or any two utterances, can go together in a conversation and the second is obviously related to the first, they constitute an adjacency pair. The ability to deal with adjacency pairs is part of any speaker’s implicit knowledge.

9. Speakers are aware that two statements may be related in such a way that if one is true, the other must also be true.

9a There are tulips in the garden.

9b There are flowers in the garden.

9c The ladder is too short to reach the roof.

9d The ladder isn’t long enough to reach the roof.

These pairs of sentences are examples of entailment. Assuming that 9a and 9b are about the same garden, the truth of 9a entails the truth of 9b, that is, if 9a is true, 9b must also be true. Likewise, assuming the same ladder and roof, the truth of 9c entails the truth of 9d.

10. Speakers know that the message conveyed in one sentence may presuppose other pieces of knowledge. For instance, if 10a is accepted as true, 10b–10e must also be accepted as true.

10a Andy Murfee usually drives his Datsun to work.

10b There is a person named Andy Murfee.

10c Andy Murfee works.

10d There is a Datsun that belongs to Andy Murfee.

10e Andy Murfee knows how to drive an automobile.

The meaning of sentence 10a presupposes what is expressed in 10b, c, d and e. The latter are presuppositions of 10a. Note that a presupposition does not establish the truth of anything. Sentence 10a is meaningful as it is, but it is true only if there is a person named Andy Murfee, who works and owns a Datsun, etc. The sentence is presented AS IF there is a person named Andy Murfee. (There probably is not since we created the sentence for demonstration, just as the writer of a child’s arithmetic textbook turns out problems that begin “Timmy Blake has four apples…”)

These ten terms have been introduced to show the latent knowledge that people have about their language. We are not suggesting that the points illustrated make up a test that anyone can deal with successfully. People differ considerably, and circumstances differ considerably, so that the way individuals behave in a given situation is not necessarily an indication of what their deeper competence is. Personality factors, such as willingness to cooperate, memory, attention, recent experience, can greatly affect performance. We only want to indicate the general implicit knowledge that speakers have about meaning in their language.

Summary

The study of meaning can be undertaken in various ways. Linguistic semantics is an attempt to explicate the knowledge of any speaker of a language which allows that speaker to communicate facts, feelings, intentions and products of the imagination to other speakers and to understand what they communicate to him or her. Language differs from the communication systems of other animals in being stimulus-free and creative. Early in life every human acquires the essentials of a language—a vocabulary and the pronunciation, use and meaning of each item in it. The speaker’s knowledge is largely implicit. The linguist attempts to construct a grammar, an explicit description of the language, the categories of the language and the rules by which they interact. Semantics is one part of the grammar; phonology, syntax and morphology are other parts. Speakers of a language have an implicit knowledge about what is meaningful in their language, and it is easy to show this. In our account of what that knowledge is, we introduced ten technical terms: anomaly; paraphrase; synonymy; semantic feature; antonymy; contradiction; ambiguity; adjacency pairs; entailment and presupposition.