Introducing English Semantics

Charles Kreidler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134605804
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Introducing English Semantics, Second Edition is a practical introduction to understanding how meanings are expressed in the English language. Presenting the basic principles of the discipline of semantics, this newly revised edition explores the knowledge of language that speakers have which enables them to communicate - to express observations, opinions, intentions and the products of their imagination. The text emphasises pragmatic investigation with numerous illustrative examples of concepts and ample exercises to help students develop and improve their linguistic analysis skills.

Introducing English Semantics:

• Discusses the nature of human language and how linguists categorise and examine it.
• Covers meanings expressed in English words, prefixes, suffixes and sentences.
• Examines such relations as synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, ambiguity, implication, factivity, aspect, and modality
• Draws comparisons between English and other languages
• Illustrates the importance of 'tone of voice' and 'body language' in face-to-face exchanges and the role of context in any communication
• Contains a wealth of exercises and a glossary to clearly define all terminology

This new edition includes expanded and updated textual exercises and a greater focus on compounds and other kinds of composite lexemes. Written in a clear and accessible style, Introducing English Semantics is an essential text for any student taking an introductory course in semantics.

Chapter 1

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The study of meaning

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1.1 The systematic study of meaning

1.2 The nature of language

1.3 Language acquisition

1.4 Demonstrating semantic knowledge

In this chapter we consider different approaches to the investigation of meaning. Linguistic semantics, the approach taken in this book, is concerned with the knowledge that speakers of a language have that makes it possible for them to communicate with one another. This leads us to a brief consideration of what language is and how a child acquires it. Finally we demonstrate some of the knowledge that all speakers have about the nature and expression of meaning in their language.

What is the knowledge that we have about the language we speak? Quite simply, a vocabulary and the ways to use it. More specifically, we have two vocabularies, an active vocabulary that we use in producing utterances and a somewhat larger passive vocabulary that we need for understanding a variety of people. The vocabulary contains numerous names as well as what we might think of as ordinary words. The productive vocabulary grows rapidly in early childhood and for most people changes somewhat throughout life.

1.1 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 what message we should get from something we read or hear, and we are concerned about getting our 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 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 but each discipline contributes to the other two.

Psychologists are interested in how individual humans learn, how they retain, recall, or lose information, how they classify, make judgments, 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 facts – what must be antecedent to that fact (a presupposition) and what is a likely consequence of it (an entailment); 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 or Swahili or Korean – that makes it possible for them to give and get information, to express their feelings and intentions to each other 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 such as 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 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 meaning in a single language, English. Here and there throughout the book we make comparisons with other languages but these are meant to be illustrations of language differences, not full accounts of what differences exist.

1.2 The nature of language

All animals have some system for communicating with other members of their species but only humans have a language that allows them to produce and understand ever-new messages and to do so without any outside stimulus. Bees, birds, dolphins, and chimpanzees, among other animals, transmit and interpret a fixed number of messages that signal friendliness or hostility, the presence of food or of danger, or have to do with mating or care of offspring. But human language differs from these animal communication systems in two crucial ways (Hockett 1957: 574–85; Bickerton 1990: 10–16). First, animals can communicate only in response to some particular stimulus. Bees, when they have located a source of nectar in some group of plants, fly back to their hive and report the discovery by doing a dance that indicates the approximate direction and distance to the site, but in general non-human communication happens on the spot and is concerned with what is immediately present. No animal can tell another one about past experiences or its plans for the future. Humans alone are able to talk about vast numbers of things that come from accumulated knowledge, memory, and imagination. Human language is stimulus-free. Second, while animals have only a fixed inventory of messages, human language is creative. We are always creating new messages that others understand; we comprehend new sentences that others have produced (as you understand this sentence, although it is not likely that you have read it before).

The importance of stimulus-freedom and creativity is often overlooked. Throughout history various thinkers have tried to describe and explain language as if language is only related to the phenomenal world, the objects and events that we can observe through our senses. The simple fact is that the human mind deals easily and frequently with what does not exist, or what does not yet exist. Nobody can explain just how people are able to abstract elements from their sensory world and put these elements together in ways that are partly familiar and partly new. Yet that is just what happens when an architect envisions a building not yet built, a composer puts together a concerto that is still to be played, a writer devises a story about imaginary people doing imaginary things, or when all of us take delight in nonsense and concoct names for things that might exist or might not.

The productivity of language is due to another feature that distinguishes our communication from that of other animals. While some bird-songs are different arrangements of a repertory of elements, generally each signal emitted by a dog or donkey or dolphin is an indivisible unit, different from any other signal that the animal can utter. Human utterances, on the other hand, are composed of interchangeable units on two levels. An utterance consists of at least one word, usually more than one in a particular sequence, and a word consists of sound-units, or phonemes, in a particular order. A fairly small number of phonemes, which are meaningless, combine to make a vast number of meaningful words, for example, the English words pat, tap, and apt consist of the same three phonemes differently arranged and these three phonemes occur over and over in combinations with a relatively small number of other phonemes to make up thousands of combinations that we call words.

The freedom from context is possible only because language is conventional, or has the feature of arbitrariness. There is no natural connection between the word goat, for instance, and what that word designates. Since ancient times people have been arguing abou...