Semantics

Howard Gregory

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9781138146389
• eBook ISBN: 9781134606658
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Semantics is an accessible and practical introduction to formal semantics, the study of linguistic meaning, for students new to the subject. Semantics:
* shows how meanings are built up and interrelated
* presupposes very little prior knowledge of grammar or linguistic terminology
* includes a glossary of technical terms
* provides a progression of exercises with answers given at the back
* backs up the activities with short, clear explanations
* includes an appendix on sets and functions.

1 PINNING DOWN SEMANTICS

Semantics is ‘the study of meaning’. For the purposes of this book, the object of study is the meaning of human language (sometimes termed ‘natural language’). It should not be forgotten, of course, that other structured systems (programming languages, diagrams, rituals, mathematical formulas) all have an appropriate concept of meaning, and hence their own semantics.

So what is meaning? Well, at one level ‘meaning’ is an ordinary English word, which like most words can be used in a number of different ways. Some of them are illustrated by the sentences in (1.1).

EXERCISE 1.1 How else could you describe each of these uses of the word ‘mean’?

a It’s a good job he doesn’t know what ‘malaka’ means.

b I’m sure she didn’t mean to pour olive oil in your hair.

c Mean it? I didn’t even say it.

d I think that means she isn’t coming back.

e So he’s Russian. Does that mean he’s good at chess?

f ‘Irony is the gap between what is said and what is meant’.

But semantics is not about the use of a particular English word, or its correlates in other languages, though these may give us clues about the area under discussion. The Greek word (from which we get ‘semantics’) conveys the idea of importance (compare the English words ‘meaningful’ or ‘significant’). The Chinese equivalent is also used to mean interest. This suggests that the subject touches on questions of why people bother to use language in the first place, and why we bother to listen to them. It is certainly a far cry from what people have in mind when they dismiss something as ‘a matter of semantics’!

However, semantics as covered by this book is more limited in scope. In terms of the contrast in sentence f above, it is confined largely to the study of ‘what is said’, leaving aside such interesting issues as irony, metaphor, and social interaction. It tries to characterize the meaning of expressions in relation to other expressions, and in relation to the objects and situations about which they offer information.

1.1 FORM AND CONTENT

Take a simple word like ‘book’. It can be analysed at many different levels. First of all we know how it is pronounced and spelt (or spelled?); this is one kind of information. And when we encounter it, we associate it in some way with books—either some mental concept of them, or objects in the real world instantiating the concept (never mind which for the moment). The first thing is to distinguish systematically between the first kind of information, which concerns ‘book’ as an expression in a language, and the second kind, which we can call (very provisionally) the concept of book. Typographically, this distinction will be re-inforced by using quotation marks for the former and italics for the latter, as in the previous sentence. (A word of warning: many linguistics books use different conventions.)

It may help to think of situations where words in different languages are said to ‘mean the same thing’. For example, ‘book’, ‘livre’, ‘carte’ ‘kniga’ and ‘hon’ are expressions in different languages, but are associated with the same concept, book. Note that although I have used an English word to label the concept, this is just a matter of convenience. I could have used anything—a word in another language, a number, or a little picture of a book. Equally, I am not implying that speakers of all languages have exactly the same stock of concepts.

Conversely a single word may have more than one meaning. For example the English word ‘table’ can mean an item of furniture or a kind of chart. To avoid confusing the two meanings (not likely in this case, but it is not always so simple), we should use different labels for the two concepts. Since these labels are arbitrary anyway, one way of doing it is to use table₁ and table₂ respectively (rather like in a dictionary). These may be termed word senses, as opposed to word forms.

There is no guarantee that a single word form in another language will cover the same group of word senses. For example in Greek ‘trapezi’ means what I have called table₁, while to express table₂ you would have to use a different word form, like ‘pinakas’. However, certain clusters of word senses often go together in many languages.

synonyms

EXERCISES

1.2 If two word forms share at least one word sense, then they are SYNONYMS. Pick out synonyms from the following list, and make sentences illustrating the word sense which they share (note that some of these senses may be specific to colloquial British English). The words may have slightly different connotations—it is quite rare to find exact synonyms in language.

store	lies	gift	bottle	porkies	current
guts	shop	hoard	intestines	present	betray

homonyms

1.3 Conversely if two distinct word senses correspond to one word form, they are known as HOMONYMS. The ‘same word form’ can of course be defined in terms of sound or spelling, depending which medium is being used. (In the first case they are called ‘homophones’, in the second case ‘homographs’—two different types of homonym.) Make pairs of homonyms of either kind based on the words below.

drag

wrap

wheel

read

polish

practice

1.4 Investigate whether English word forms with more than one sense correspond to the same word form in some other language known to you; and compare results. (You may be able to do this using a good bilingual dictionary.) Here are a few to start you off:

head	branch	cheek	sex	hard	appointment
black	field	terribly	way	bird	board
miss	pass

1.2 OBJECTS AND THEIR DESCRIPTIONS

reference referent

One simple approach to meaning is to associate each expression with a particular object in the world. This seems more or less plausible with certain types of expression, such as proper names: ‘Bill Clinton’ or ‘Saddam Hussein’, for example seem to refer to recognizable individuals. Similarly phrases like ‘the Eiffel Tower’ or ‘the moon’ seem to pick out particular objects. This idea of picking out objects can be termed the REFERENCE of an expression (the object picked out is its REFERENT).

EXERCISE 1.5 List the words and phrases in this text which have the same referent.

Einstein College today announced the firing of its director. The chairman of the board of governors said that he had phoned him last night to inform him that his services were no longer required. This follows overspending on a new residence for students, with resulting cutbacks in academic programs. Their representative, Tracy Sharpe, commented that they now had nice accommodation but no professors.

Reference appears to be an important part of meaning. For example, words like ‘it’ and ‘they’, which occur in some form in all languages, depend on it. But it is easy to see that this cannot be the whole story.

EXERCISE

1.6 What are the referents of the following expressions? (i) ‘the president of the USA’; (ii) ‘the World Cup winners’; (iii) ‘the highest mountain in the world’; (iv) ‘the first astronaut’.

These are easy enough to answer, but the problem with this exercise (or pseudo-exercise) is that it reads like part of a trivia quiz, rather than an analysis of meaning. It is possible to be mistaken about the answer to one of these questions (i.e. the referent of the phrase) while understanding perfectly its meaning (in the intuitive sense). Moreover the referent of some of these descriptions changes with time. As I write this chapter, the referent of the first is Bill Clinton (or let’s say bill_clinton, the same object that is the referent of ‘Bill Clinton’). But this may well not be the case by the time it goes into print. On the other hand we would hardly want to say that ‘the president of the USA’ has changed its meaning.

There are other considerations as well. To take a well-known example, ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’ refer to the same object. But it would seem paradoxical to say that they have the same meaning, especially given that ‘morning’ and ‘evening’ have (intuitively) opposite meanings. Again, if they had the same meaning, then the discovery that the two phenomena are one planet would hardly be news. It would be like discovering that 1=1. And so with all factual discoveries about the identity of objects.

sense

Thus reference cannot be the whole of meaning. What I have called the ‘intuitive sense’ of meaning, which remains constant when the referent changes, is often called the SENSE of an expression. If we know its sense, we should be able to pick out its referent in any particular set of circumstances, as long as we know the appropriate facts.

denotation

I am going to introduce another terminological distinction, that between reference and DENOTATION (though you should note that sometimes these are used almost interchangeably). If I use the phrase ‘the queen’, I...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• USING THIS BOOK
• 1. PINNING DOWN SEMANTICS
• 2. TRUTH CONDITIONS
• 3. GETTING INSIDE SENTENCES
• 4. MEANING RELATIONS (1)
• 5. MEANING RELATIONS (2)
• 6. THINGS AND EVENTS
• 7. QUANTIFIERS (1)
• 8. QUANTIFIERS (2)
• 9. ARGUMENT STRUCTURE
• 10. APPENDICES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY