To proceed through this Unit and the following few Units, you will need
Malcolm Coulthard (ed.) (1994) Advances in Written Text Analysis, London: Routledge, and
Peter Grundy (2000) Doing Pragmatics (2nd edition), London: Arnold.
Semantics is the study of meaning. It is usually treated as being more specifically related to sentence meaning than to general meaning in a social context, which is the area of study of pragmatics (see Unit 7). In recent years, the boundaries of the sub-discipline of semantics have become increasingly fuzzy, as linguists have realised that it is misleading to treat sentence meaning in isolation. This means you are likely to come across phrases such as 'lexical semantics', 'cognitive semantics', 'discourse semantics' and so on. In this Unit, however, I will focus on the traditional central elements in semantic theory.
Sense and Reference
The crucial concept to grasp in semantics is the difference between the 'surface' form of the piece of language, and the 'propositional' content that it conveys - that is, what it means. There are several ways of representing this difference (some using complex logical notation and symbols); here I will use 'quotation marks' around surface forms, and italics to denote the meaning of those forms. Thus the marks on the page or the sounds in your mouth conveyed by 'dog' can be said to mean dog. In various languages, 'hund', 'chien', 'cao', 'cane', 'pies' all mean dog in German, French, Portuguese, Italian and Polish, respectively.
Clearly, there is not always a one-to-one relationship between the surface form and the propositional content. 'The canine', 'that mutt', 'man's best friend', 'Billy', 'your pet', 'boy' and so on, could all be used in different contexts to refer to a dog, but all of these surface forms have different senses. The classic example to illustrate the sense and reference distinction is to say that 'the morning star' and 'the evening star' both have the same reference (that is, the planet Venus) but they have different senses. This is similar to the distinction between a denoted meaning (its strict 'dictionary' definition) and its connotated meaning (its associated senses).
One way of identifying the denotation of a surface word is to make a list of the features that pinpoint its semantic field. This is an early technique of semantics known as componential analysis. Elements are usually listed as bipolar features: so 'dog' can be said to be
+ male
- human
+ living
+ four-legged
+ canine
- linguistic
and so on...You might notice that some of these categories are fairly arbitrary unless we can see the context for comparison. For example, differentiating a dog from a tomcat makes the [+ canine] feature highly relevant. Differentiating a dog from a human makes the [- human] element important. These features have been used to explain the selectional restrictions when words are collocated with other words. For example, a joke which begins 'A dog walks into a bar and says to the barman....' is clearly taking place in an unreal joke world because 'dog' is [- linguistic] and the verb 'says' has the feature
[+ linguistic]. This is a collocational clash.
Activity
Use selectional restrictions to account for the propositional oddity of the following sentences:
The king was pregnant
You could cut the air
Chaucer is the father of English poetry
This book speaks to me
Whispering lunar incantations dissolve the floors of memoryMetaphorical interpretation is one way of accounting for the meaningfulness of these semantically deviant sentences. Knowling the context can also assist to provide a meaningful frame around the propositions. (The sentences are, respectively, from a science fiction novel about gender-change, from a conversation about an argument, from the blurb on the back of a book of poetry, from a late night arts discussion show on television, and from a poem by T.S. Eliot).
Assertion, Entailment, Presupposition
The distinction between surface form and meaning operates most obviously at sentence level. Here we must distinguish between the 'sentence' and the proposition which underlies it. The complete meaning of a sentence can be regarded not as a single proposition but as a related set of propositions. For example, the sentence 'My dog bit the postman' expresses all of the following propositions:
My dog bit the postman
My dog bit someone
My dog did something to the postman
A dog bit someone
Something bit the postman
I have a dog
There is a postman
Something happened
and so on...The relationship between the surface sentence and each of these propositions can be described in one of three ways:
A sentence X presupposes another sentence Y if
in all situations where X is true then Y is true and
in all situations where X is false then Y is true.Activity
As with selectional restrictions, clashes between the propositions underlying a sentence can be used to account for the sense of oddity in meaningfulness of some sentences. For example, contradictions can be accounted for in this way:
That bald man has red hair simultaneously asserts that the man has red hair and presupposes that the man has no hair.
Can you account similarly for the following contradictions?
The stationary vehicle was doing 30 miles an hour
Consider the sound of one hand clapping
This is a road to nowhere
I'm a rich man with no money
War is peace
He was an unperson
The answer is yes and noand while we are here, try to wrap your mind round the semantics of
This statement is false.
Tautology can be similarly described. For example,
War is war simultaneously asserts as well as entails that war is war, and so conveys two propositions, one of which is semantically redundant.
Consider the following tautologies:
Boys will be boys
He's a bachelor and he never married
She's childless with no children
When I drink whiskey, I drink whiskey; when I drink water, I drink water
I think therefore I am
The green green grass of home.Are these tautologies different from analytical truths such as All fathers are men.
To anticipate Unit 7, try to imagine contexts in which all of these sentences could actually be meaningful. For example, That bald man has red hair could be said of a bald man wearing a ginger wig. Other ways of framing 'deviant' sentences include reading them as metaphor, poetry, science fiction or surrealism.
The examples of presupposition given so far have been existential presuppositions. Usually, the subject of a predication presupposes the existence of the referent of that subject. In every sentence X did something, there is a presupposition that X exists (though there is a difficulty here with the sentence 'X does not exist', of course!). Perhaps more interesting is the case of pragmatic presuppositions such as
When did you stop beating your wife? (presupposes: you beat your wife)
I managed to get there on time (presupposes: I tried to get there on time)
Miss Otis regrets she's unable to lunch today (presupposes: she is unable to lunch today)
Mussolini was as bad as Hitler (presupposes: Hitler was bad)
Further Reading
Cruse, Alan (2000) Meaning in Language: An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cruse, David A. (1996) Lexical Semantics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goddard, Cliff (1998) Semantic Analysis: A Practical Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Jackson, Howard (1990) Grammar and Meaning, London: Longman.
Jackson, Howard and Stockwell, Peter (1996) An Introduction to the Nature and Functions of Language, Cheltenham: Stanley Thornes.
Leech, G.N. (1981) Semantics: The Study of Meaning, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Lyons, John (1977) Semantics (2 vols), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lyons, John, (1995) Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Palmer, F. (1981) Semantics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Riley, Brian T. (1999) Semantics in Linguistics, Cosmo: New Delhi.
Saeed, John I. (1997) Semantics, Oxford: Blackwell.
Wilson, D. (1975) Presuppositions and Non-Truth Conditional Semantics, London: Academic Press.