Chapter 5 Semantics

Instructor : Yang Bingjun School of Foreign Languages, Southwest University Introduction to Linguistics Chapter 5 Semantics

Contents The definition of semantics Approaches to meaning Types of meaning Lexical field Questions to ponder

The definition of semantics What is semantics? We are all necessarily interested in meaning. We wonder about the meaning of a new word. Sometimes we are not sure about the meaning we should get from what we read or hear, and we are concerned about getting our own meanings across to others. We find pleasure in our jokes, whose humor depends on double meanings of words or ambiguities in sentences. Commercial organizations make great efforts and spend much 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, likewise, quarrel over the meaning of some poem or story. All this is related to meaning. Meaning is fundamental to human society and language is one of the primary ways of conveying meaning. However, meaning is not a simple phenomenon. For example, for the native speakers of English, the following sentence will not be acceptable: (1) Even Einstein could have solved the equation.

There is nothing grammatically wrong with the sentence. It has all its words in the right places, and its spelling and punctuation are all right. Why, then, doesn’t it make sense? The difficulty with sentence (1) is that if it is true, a number of other things must also be true, including both of the following: (2) a. The equation is fairly easy. b. Einstein wasn’t very good at solving equations.

The two statements of (2) must be true if (1) is true, but we know that in reality Einstein was a mathematical genius and that no equation that would have been a challenge for him could have been simple. What matters here is: How, just by looking at (1), do you know that the sentences of (2) are involved? The science that attempts to answer such questions is semantics.

Semantics is the branch of linguistics which studies meaning in language. It stands at the very center of the linguistic quest to understand the nature of language and human language ability because expressing meanings is what languages are all about. Any comments on the definition?

Meaning can be studied from different angles. As a result, there are different approaches to the study of meaning. For example, philosophers have investigated the relation between linguistic expressions, such as words and phrases, and things, persons, and events in the world to which these expressions refer. Linguists, however, have investigated the way in which meaning in a language is structured and have distinguished between different types of meaning, for example, its literal meaning and non-literal meaning. There are a number of more or less well-known theories of meaning. It is appropriate to discuss these approaches before we go into the details of semantics.

Approaches to meaning Let us first consider two sentences: (3)a. The word “dog” means a certain species of mammal. b. The red light means that you cannot go in.

Do you say the two means in them have the same meaning? We should like to know what exactly it means to mean something. The question of what the meaning of meaning is has been studied by philosophers as well as linguists. The words to mean or meaning occur in all kinds of natural sentences, such as the ones in (4): (4) a. Those clouds mean rain. b. The Chinese word “ai” means“love”. c. His losing his job means that he will have to look again. d. This building is meant for storage. e. What do you mean by that look? f. The opinions of critics meant little to him. g. Do you know the meaning of the word hypochondriac? h. What is the meaning of life?

Dictionaries give signify, import, denote, represent as synonyms of to mean and provide descriptions such as “to be defined or described as, to denote, to convey” for (4a), “to convey the same sense as, to refer to the same thing as” for (4b), “to imply, to result in” for (4c), “to design for a certain purpose” for (4d), “to intend to convey or indicate” for (4e), “to be of a specified importance or significance, to matter” for (4f), etc.

The noun meaning is described as “something that is signified, something that one wishes to convey, especially by language” for (4g), “something that is felt to be the inner significance of something” for (4h). C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, in their famous book The Meaning of Meaning (1923), have given a list of twenty-two definitions of the word meaning. One purpose of semantics is to distinguish these different ways in which language “means”.

Meaning as naming If we ask someone the meaning of the word cat, we are very likely to be told that it is what the word refers to in the world. This view that the meaning of an expression is what it refers to, or names, is often called referential theory or naming theory.

The word tree, for example, names the object tree in the real world. The object tree is called the referent. The word tree stands for the properties that all trees have or for the class of trees. So, nouns name objects or events and adjectives name the properties of those objects or events. Verbs name actions and adverbs name their properties. In this view, words are “names” or “labels” for things in our mind or in our experience.

Of course, there are some problems with this view. One of them is that it is not always immediately obvious what is being named. What do conjunctions like but and and refer to? What do prepositions like for and to stand for? What do we say about names for imaginary objects or actions? Even those concrete words are not always well defined. The word tree can stand for a particular tree or any tree or all trees in the world.

Meaning as concept One of the most usual ways to cope with some of the problems involved with the theory of naming has been to take the view that expressions actually mean the concept or idea associated with them. At its simplest, this view suggests that any particular sound image is psychologically associated with a particular concept.

So, when the word chair is spoken, the concept of chair is called up in the mind of the hearer. Every one of us who knows the word or expression has a concept or idea in his mind associated with it.

Ogden and Richards (1923: 11) have suggested a model—semantic triangle (Figure 1) illustrating the view of meaning as concept. Thought (concept) Symbol (the word) Referent (the object) Figure 1: Semantic triangle

Here, the “symbol” is the linguistic element, i.e. word, sentence, etc., and the “referent” is the object in the world of experience, while “thought” is concept. According to this view, there is no direct link between symbol and referent, that is, between language and the world. The link is via thought, the concept in our minds. This theory avoids many of the problems of naming—the classification of objects in the world, for example, need not be natural or universal, but only conceptual. However, to state that meaning is a concept does not overcome all the problems that naming theory has. We can still ask what are the concepts that and or but stand for?

Meaning as behaviour

Behaviorism: Watson, Skinner, Bloomfield The American linguist L. Bloomfield illustrated this view by the well-known story of Jack and Jill. Jill is hungry. She sees an apple and by saying something gets Jack to fetch it for her. If she had been alone she would have first received a STIMULUS (S) (hunger) which would have produced a RESPONSE (R)—she would have made a move to get the apple. This can be diagrammed as follows: S R

However, since Jack was with her, the stimulus produced not the response R, but a linguistic response, that of saying something to Jack, which can be symbolized by r. The sound waves resulting from this in turn created a stimulus for Jack, a linguistic stimulus (s), which results in his non-linguistic response R of getting the apple. We now have a more complicated figure. S r…………. s R

Bloomfield argued that meaning exists in the relation between speech (that is, Jill’s speech to Jack and Jack’s linguistic response, which is shown by r…s) and the practical events (Jill’s stimulus S of hunger) and (Jack’s response R of getting the apple) that precede and follow it. The meaning of a linguistic form is thus defined as observable behaviour. Such an approach to meaning is called behaviourism, or behaviourist theory, which clearly draws on psychology.

However, there are some significant practical difficulties with this viewpoint. For example, since the practical stimulus S is not always obvious, so how to identify it? Although behaviourists attempt to account for such problems, there are no satisfactory answers to them.

Meaning as context Suppose that we are standing by a river, and I say: “I was near that bank yesterday.” You certainly understand bank as “river bank”, not “financial institution”. Likewise, if we are on Wall Street, and I say “I was near that bank yesterday,” you do not think that I am referring to the edge of a river. Surely, then, the context determines the meaning.

The view that meaning is found in the context within which a particular expression is uttered suggests that we can derive meaning from, or reduce it to, the observable context. Such an approach to meaning clearly draws on sociology. Let’s look at the following examples: (5) I don’t like her. She’s tall and thin and moves like a crane. (6) I do like her. She’s tall and thin and moves like a crane.

The second parts of the two sentences are the same but in (5) we have the impression of awkwardness while in (6) we have the impression of elegance. They have taken on different meanings as a result of the different contexts supplied by the first sentence in each case.

Two kinds of context are recognized: a linguistic context and a situational context. Every utterance occurs in a particular spatial-temporal situation. Each utterance is limited by various factors of the situational context. These factors include: the setting (formal, informal, …) the speaker and hearer (relationship, position,…) the activities they are engaged in at the time the presence or absence of other participants (relationship, position,…) the presence of various external objects and events

The linguistic context alone is the weaker form of contextual views. It is principally concerned with the probability of words or expressions co-occurring or collocating with each other. This is obviously an aspect of meaning.

The British linguist J. R. Firth advanced a contextual view of meaning embodying both linguistic and situational contexts. He held the view that “we shall know a word by the company it keeps”. Like Bloomfield, he was concerned with reducing meaning to a set of observable features. Unlike Bloomfield, he chose to focus on a more sociological view rather than a psychological one. However, many difficulties remain. For example, what are we actually observing in a context? How many factors are relevant and how many of those are internal to the participants that cannot be easily observed?

Representatives: B.K. Malinowski , J.R. Firth, M.A.K. Halliday, W. Labov

Meaning as truth conditions In the history of the United States, or in the world as we know for that matter, the sentence “The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776” is true, and the sentence “The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1976” is false. We know the meaning of both sentences equally well, and knowing their meaning means knowing their sense of truth conditions.

The sense of a declarative sentence permits you to know under what circumstances that sentence is true. Those “circumstances” are called truth conditions of the sentence. The truth conditions of a declarative sentence are the same as the sense of the sentence. We compare their truth conditions with “the real world” or some historical fact, and can thus say which one is true and which one false.

Put it more simply, this means that knowing the meaning of a sentence is the same as knowing the conditions under which the sentence is true or false. And knowing the meaning of a word or expression is knowing the part that it plays in the truth or falsehood of the sentence containing it. Such an approach to meaning is called truth-conditional theory/semantics, which clearly draws on formal logic.

Statements about meaning are based on the formulation that: (7) S is true if and only if P Here, S is a sentence. P is the set of conditions which guarantees the truth of S. So, for example, if we assert that “Peter is married”, we need to recognize that for the statement to be true, there must be some individual called Peter, that there is a social institution called marriage and that this individual is involved in this state of marriage.

This view sounds reasonable, but it also has its problems. If we observe, for example, that “The temperature is below freezing”, then one of the truth conditions might be that any local body of water may have turned to ice. But this is not necessarily so. And even if this condition were true, is it necessary to include this fact that any local body of water has turned to ice in the semantic description of the expression?

If we adopt such a truth conditional approach, we limit semantics to being concerned principally about meaning in relation to truth and falsehood. Some linguists have objected that this is too narrow a view. For example, how can we discuss the meaning of interrogatives and imperatives? Put it more simply, how can we discuss the truth or falsehood of a question or a command? Truth conditions apply most obviously to declaratives or statements.

Meaningascognition Meaning is an individual’s understanding of a linguistic item. R. Langacker R. Jackendoff G. Lakoff A. Goldberg

Philosophical and psychological bases L. Wittgenstein E. Rosch Problems: How to examine meaning with specific parameters? Analysis on the textual level

Word meaning Sense and reference

There are two terms that are often used in semantics, that is, sense and reference. Sense and reference are two different, though related, aspects of meaning. The semantic links between elements within the vocabulary system is an aspect of their sense. Since sense is to be defined in terms of relationships which hold between the linguistic elements themselves (mostly words), it is concerned with intralinguistic relations.

For example, the English words bachelor and married have the sense relationship of bachelor= never married. The sense of chair in English is defined by the existence of other words like stool. Similarly, the sense of red is defined by the other terms in the color system: brown, orange, yellow, etc.

Reference or extension deals with the relationship between the linguistic elements (words, sentences, etc.,) and the non-linguistic world of experience, e.g. things, actions, events, and qualities. For example, the word tree refers to the object tree, and the word book refers to the object book. It was pointed out that, under certain circumstances, the question “What is the meaning of the word x?” can be answered by means of obvious definition—by pointing to, or otherwise indicating, the referent or referents of the word.

Of course, it is not always possible to draw a clear-cut line between sense and reference for the reason that the categories of our language correspond, to some degree at least, to real-world distinctions. Whether language determines the shape of the world or vice versa is probably a “chicken and egg” problem. The fact that we have bull/cow and ram/ewe is part of the semantic structure of English, but it also relates to the fact that there are male and female cattle and sheep. However, we have to keep in mind that not all languages will make the same distinctions, and that there is considerable indeterminacy in the categorization of the real world. It is because of this that we can distinguish sense and reference, however, we must admit that there is no absolute dividing line between them, between what is in the world and what is in language.

Seven types of meaning What is the meaning of man in the sentence He’s a real man? Maybe some of you would say a man is a “human, adult, male”. But most people would agree that more is being conveyed than simply “human, adult, male”. “Human, adult, male” is the conceptual meaning, which is only partially helpful here. We need to know what extra qualities the speaker judges a man to have; and we could probably hazard a guess at “bravery”, “resilience”, “strength”, “lack of sentiment”, and so on.

There is no absolute limit to what we might infer here because associative meaning is more open-ended than conceptual meaning. From this simple example, we can see clearly that words acquire considerable meanings from the situational, social, and cultural contexts in which they are used.

According to the British linguist G. Leech, meaning in its broadest sense can be classified into seven types: conceptual, connotative, social, affective, reflective, collocative, and thematic meanings. Among them, connotative, social, affective, reflective, and collocative meanings are called associative meaning.

1) Conceptual meaning If you had to say what the words woman and man meant, one answer would be to say that a woman was a “human, adult, female”, and a man would be a “human, adult, male”. These items of information, or semantic features, serve to categorize the terms woman and man, as well as to distinguish them from related terms.

For example, man is distinguished from bull by the feature “human”, from woman by the feature “male”, and from boy by the feature “adult”. We can set out the relationships in formal terms as below: man: [+HUMAN +ADULT +MALE] women: [+HUMAN +ADULT +FEMALE] girl : [+HUMAN −ADULT +FEMALE] boy: [+HUMAN −ADULT +MALE] bull: [−HUMAN +ADULT +MALE]

Chapter 5 Semantics