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.
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