UNIT 1 - WHAT IS SEMANTICS?

“Meaning” is a very vague term. In English, the word “meaning” is used to refer to
such different things as the idea or intention lying behind a piece of language, or the
translations of words between languages.

Meaning is the heart of language; it is what language is for. If there is no meaning,

there is no language. Only when sequences of sounds or letters have a meaning
they do qualify as language. Compare with: Is infants’ babbling language?

Without the capacity to express meaning, then, language loses one of its essential
aspects. We practically always speak or write in order to express a meaning of one
kind or another.

Not only sentences have meaning, but also words such as: the, not, of, ouch!, they
contribute something specific to the meanings of utterances in which they occur and
can thus be considered as having meaning in their own right.

The term semantics was coined in the late 19th century by the French linguist
Michel Bréal and comes from the ancient Greek word “semantikos”, “relating to
signs”. This derivation highlights the close relation between linguistic signs and signs
in general both artificial and conventional, road signs, symbols used in computer
programs... The study of signs in general is called Semiotics or Semiology.

Semantics: the study of meaning of words, phrases and sentences.

Informative signs vs. Communicative signs.

The type of meaning found in language can be seen as a subset of two broader
categories of meaningfulness

1- The significance of human behaviour in general.

2- The meaningfulness of communication specifically.

There are many meaningful ways of behaving which do not involve language, e.g.:
symbols involving body parts (bowing, waving, nodding and shaking the head, the
thumbs up/down signals...)
Imagine that someone is choking and that they do not have enough breath left to
say: “I’m choking”. However, just by seeing them we can infer that they are choking.
This shows that a fully articulated sentence is not always necessary to communicate
an intended meaning: the same meaning can be suggested in a variety of different
ways.

We can therefore remove fully articulated language from a communicative situation

and retain much of the meaning.

1.2. TALKING ABOUT MEANING IN ENGLISH AND OTHER LANGUAGES

Let’s start from a pre-theoretical point of view:

- Informal talk about what pieces of language mean is a very common part of
everyday life: we explain new words, give paraphrases of what people mean
by a certain phrase or expression, sometimes translate words from one
language to another in order to show their meaning.

From a theoretical, scientific point of view, developing an explicit explanation of

meaning is far more complex.

First of all... what does “meaning” mean?

English uses the verb to mean to refer to a relationship involving at least one of three
different types of things: language, the world (including people, objects, and
everything outside of ourselves), and our own minds or intentions.

1.2.1 “MEANING” IN ENGLISH.

When I said “Dublin” has lots of attractions I meant Dublin, Ireland, not Dublin,
Virginia.
Three-way relation:

1. Piece of language (the sentence)

2. Mind (speaker’s intentions),
3. The world (Represented by the two places). Linguistic Meaning

In Sydney, “the bridge” means the Harbour Bridge. Language/world (no reference
to people’s intentions). Linguistic Meaning

“Stout” means “short and fat”. Language/language relation. Linguistic Meaning

By turning off the music I didn’t mean that you should go. Mind/world relation.
Communicated meaning.

Trees mean water. World/world relation. Significance.

In English then, the one verb “mean” is used to describe reference, linguistic
meaning, intention, and general significance.
In French there is a close link between the meaning of words and the intention of
speakers. In French there is the expression “vouloir dire”, which literally means “to
want to say”. In order to ask:“what do you mean?” in French you have to say: “what
do you want to say?” Talking about meaning in French then, inherently involves
talking about volition (“wanting”).

French and English (among other languages) make an important connection in their
standard vocabularies between language and the world of inner conscious
processes like volition, perception and intention. Other languages, by contrast, seem
to bypass this connection by talking about the meaning of language in the same
terms used to talk about the identity of things in the world.

1.3 THE SEMIOTIC TRIANGLE OGDEN AND RICHARDS (1949)

THOUGHT reflects the fact that language comes from human beings and is a
product of processes in the mind or brain. THOUGHT can be a misleading label
because even though we sometimes do consciously think about what we are going
to say, our speech is more often spontaneous (non-rational, emotional side of our
inner life): the processes leading to speech should not be limited to what we would
classify simply as “thinking” but extended to include our emotions and volitions as
well: the more neutral term is “psychology”.

SYMBOL is chosen to express the speaker ́s intended meaning (strings of speech

sounds, marks on the page, particular hand signs). We can replace the broader term
“symbol” with the simple “language”.

REFERENT refers to whatever things, events, or situations in the world the

language is about. The world of referents must be considered not as a world of real
external entities, but as a world of representations which are projected by the mind.
The description of a situation will vary depending on how and who describes it, so
meaning can be totally different according to the point of view of the person who
narrates it.

There is a causal relation between psychology and symbol/referent, but there is no

causal relation between symbol and referent. Words have no direct relation to the
things they stand for (language is arbitrary). There is no relation between a string of
sounds and a particular referent, that is the reason why different languages use
entirely different words for the same thing.

Even onomatopoeic words are entirely different from one language to another:
cuckoo, moo, quack, and meow in English. In Spanish: muu, cuak, miau.

The connection between onomatopoeic words and their referents is thus mediated
by the psychology of language users.

1.4 SOME INITIAL CONCEPTS

Lexeme: Most basic and obvious unit of language. The lexeme is the name of the
abstract unit which unites all the morphological variants of a single word. Eg: go,
goes, went, have gone and to go all share the same lexeme: they are instantiations
of the lexeme to go.

We usually refer to the lexeme as a whole using one of the morphological variants,
the citation form: the form of a lexical set that represents its entire inflectional
paradigm in linguistic discussions and dictionary entries. “BE” is the citation form for:
“be”, “am”, “is”, “are”, “was”, “were”.

(No hay 1.4.1)

1.4.2 SENSE/REFERENCE/DENOTATION/ CONNOTATION

An important distinction within the general notion of a lexeme’s meaning is between

its sense and its referent (or reference).

Sense: May be defined as the general meaning or the concept underlying the word.
We can describe this as what we usually think of as contained in a dictionary entry
for the word in question, which means that the meaning is: stable, context
independent, linguistic relation. This is what LANGUAGES do.

Referent: A word’s referent is the object which stands for on a specific occasion of
use, and it changes each time the word is applied to a different object or situation in
the world. For example: The Queen has fallen off the table. Queen may have
different referents: Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Sofía, Queen Leticia... and the table
may also have different referents, which means that the meaning is: unstable,
context/dependent, world/language relation. This is what SPEAKERS do.

Denotation: Is the set of all the referents of a word. It is the entire class of objects to
which an expression correctly refers.

Words have the referents they have by virtue of a certain act on the part of the
speaker, this act is called the act of reference.

For example: Dr. Schreber suffered his first illness in the autumn of 1884:
 - A certain person (Dr. Schreber), a certain disease, at a certain time (autumn
of 1884). Since reference is an act, it is subject to the same problems as all
human ventures, and it may not be successful.

- For example: If I say: “I saw that cat again”, and you don’t know what cat I
mean, reference will not have been successful, because you are not able to
recover the referent intended, i.e. identify the cat in question.

Denotational range of words.

Connotation names those aspects of meaning which do not affect a word’s sense,
reference, or denotation, but which have to do with secondary factors such as its
emotional force, its level of formality, its character as a euphemism. For example:
“Police officer” and “cop”.

Brat and child, underprivileged area and slum, mutt and dog, doctor and quack...

1.4.3 COMPOSITIONALITY

All human languages have the property of productivity: by using a vocabulary

given, we construct an infinite number of sentences (not all of which will be
meaningful), by varying the ways in which the words are combined.

Meaning is compositional, that is to say, the meaning of sentences is made up, or

composed of the meanings of their constituent lexemes. We understand novel
sentences because we understand the meanings of the words out of which they are
constructed. If a novel sentence contains a word which we do not know, we do not
know what the sentence means.

Not all combinations of words are necessarily compositional: IDIOMS. For example:
... has thrown in the towel. Compositional vs. non-compositional reading.

An IDIOM is a phrase where the words together have a meaning that is different
from the dictionary definitions of the individual words. For example: Scapegoat (chivo
expiatorio), to have seen the lions (To have a lot of experience), monkey business
(dishonest, bad behaviour), to talk turkey (to talk frankly).

- If you keep on making that noise, I’ll go through the roof.

- He’s just kicked the bucket.
- Stop dragging the chain: we’ll never get there.
- We’ve run out of time, so we’ll have to wrap things up.
- Can you run off twenty more copies?
- After the delay, the plane took off as normal. I’ll take twenty per cent off the
price.
- Hello down there!

1.4.4 LEVELS OF MEANING

Sentence Meaning: It is the compositional meaning of the sentence as constructed

out of the meanings of its individual component lexemes. But the meaning of a
sentence is often quite different from the meaning it actually has in a particular
context. Note that we usually use words and expressions ironically, metaphorically,
insincerely, and in other “non-literal” ways.

Utterance Meaning: It is the meaning which the words have on a particular occasion
of use in the particular context in which they occur.

For example: You’re a very tidy cook, I see.

The distinction between sentence meaning and utterance meaning is also linked to
the difference between semantics and pragmatics. Semantics is taken to study
sentence meaning, whereas pragmatics studies utterance meaning and other
principles of language use (for some linguists).

1.5 OBJECT LANGUAGE AND METALANGUAGE

Semantics is interested in something that in one way or another, we experience. We

cannot see, hear or touch a word’s meaning: meanings are things we understand.
The main way in which we normally reveal the meanings of linguistic expressions is,
quite simply, by describing them in language.

Object language: The language whose meanings we are describing.

Metalanguage: The language in which we describe these meanings.

Let us take the example of English as the metalanguage for Dutch, as would be the
case if we were explaining the meaning of the Dutch word groot to an English
speaker. One possible metalanguage explanation, or definition, that we could give of
groot in English would be the word “tall”.

The object language expression groot is here defined by the metalanguage

expression “tall”. But note that not all aspects of the word “tall” are relevant to this
definition, all the phonetic and orthographic details are irrelevant to semantics as
long as the person for whom the definition is intended understands the meaning of
“tall” in English, then the definition is successful.

Circular definitions: Consider someone who wants to find out the meaning of the
English word “humorous”. One possible definition of “humorous” would be “droll”. But
this definition would only be effective if the meaning of “droll” was already known. If
not, the word “droll” could be explained through the metalanguage definition
“amusing”. “Amusing”, in turn, could be defined as “funny”. As long as we remain
within the circle of definitions by substituting one word or phrase as a definition of
another, we remain confined within language.

If linguistics is to play a part in explaining the way language can be actually used by
real speakers, we need to find a point at which the circle can be broken in order to
link meaning with something non-linguistic.

THEORIES OF MEANING
MEANING AS REFERENTS/DENOTATIONS (Referential/Denotational theories of
meaning)

MEANING AS CONCEPTS/MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS (Conceptual theories of

meaning)

MEANING AS BRAIN STATES (Neural theories of meaning)

MEANING AS USE (Contextual theories of meaning)

They all try to break the definitional circle, by explaining meaning using something
that is NOT linguistic.

1.6.1 MEANINGS AS REFERENTS/DENOTATIONS

Referent or denotation as the main component of the meaning of a linguistic

expression. Metalanguage explanations of a meaning should be seen as the names
of the referents of the object language term. For example: In Sydney, “the bridge”
means the Harbour Bridge. “Bridge”, we might say, means what it refers to; its
meaning on any occasion of use is its referent.

This identification of meaning and referent/denotation succeeds in breaking the circle

because it identifies meaning with non-linguistic objects in the world: the meaning of
“bridge” on a particular instance of use is the real bolts and metal structure. It doesn’t
matter that we would eventually run out of new words with which to define it, since
we can ultimately analyse its meaning by simply pointing at the actual bridge itself.

PROBLEMS WITH MEANINGS AS REFERENCES

Referents of expressions must be taken not as actual objects in the world, but as
representations in the world as projected by the speaker. This means that in order to
understand reference we have to pay attention to the particular “versions” of the
world as projected by the speaker’s psychology. (Robin Hood’s private helicopter).

It is often the case that there is simply no referent for a given expression, so the
postulation of the world of projected representations allows us to avoid this objection
(abstract nouns, non-real referents, non-existent referents, grammatical words...)

Two expressions may share the same referent: does this mean they have the same
meaning? = María/the Semantics teacher/Martín’s godmother/Laura’s sister...

Identification between meaning and reference may be successful in breaking the

definitional circle but leads to a fragmented picture of the nature of language. On the
reference theory bridge has many different meanings and referents. This clashes
with our previous intuition that the meaning of bridge is actually something much
more unitary: although there are many different individual bridges out there in the
world, the meaning of the word bridge, or, we might say, the concept of a bridge is a
unified, single entity.
So, there must be more to meaning than reference/denotation: the level of
conceptual, abstract, mental representations (the level of sense).

1.6.2 ADVANTAGES OF CONCEPTUAL THEORIES

One very common way of describing language in the Western tradition, going back
to Aristotle, is to see language as communicating ideas, that is to say, we choose
the particular words we use in order to achieve the closest fit with the particular ideas
we have.

As pointed out by Reddy (1993), we often talk, in English and many other European
languages, as though language was a receptacle into which we put ideas in order to
transfer them to the hearer.

Language, then, is often spoken about as though it was the “conduit” for ideas. A
natural extension of this common understanding of language is that what words
actually mean are ideas or concepts. Thus, the meaning of the word “tolerant” is our
concept TOLERANCE: when we say: “Oliver is tolerant”, we are attributing to Oliver
certain properties which together define our concept TOLERANCE, like patience,
kindness, respect for the opinion of others, and so on. These properties can be
thought of as combined together into the concept TOLERANCE, rather like the
different components of a definition of TOLERANCE in a dictionary.

The conceptual theory of meaning has often been taken to explain compositionality
and relations between meaning. For example: the linguistic expression horse drawn
carriage has at least three elements, and they can be individually changed to create
different expressions with different meanings (HORSE, CARRIAGE, and DRAWN).

Meaning relations like synonymy (sameness of meaning) are also explained by the
conceptual hypothesis. Two words are synonyms if they have the same meaning.
And “having the same meaning” means “instantiating the same concept”.

What form do concepts take psychologically? Concepts have the form of symbolic
mental representations. On the view of concepts as mental representations,
thinking and expressing meaning are both to be understood as the manipulation of
mental symbols, in much the same way that using language is the manipulation of a
fixed series of linguistic symbols. Communication, then, involves using the
conventional names for individual mental representations. But....

- Symbolic representation of grammatical words?

- How do we define concepts?
- What form do they have?
- What if my conceptual representation is wrong? Inexact? Confusing?
- How much conceptual information do we need in order to understand/use a
linguistic expression?

1.6.3. NO CAE, SOLO LA FRASE DE ABAJO

When the technology is advanced enough we will be able to understand meaning

thanks to x-ray, understanding the brain…
1.6.4 MEANINGS AS USE

An alternative to the three previous theories is the view that a word’s meaning
consists simply in the way it is used. This is the use theory of meaning. This theory,
advanced by behaviourist psychologists such as Skinner (1957), and linguists such
as Bloomfield (1933) rejects the very notion that words have hidden, unobservable
properties called meanings: since meanings are unobservable, it is, they would
claim, unscientific to use them in explanations.

Use-theorists have claimed that the only objective, scientific way to explain language
is to avoid postulating unobservable objects called meanings, and to attend only to
what may actually be observed, the particular sequences of words and expressions
that occur in actual examples of language use, and to describe the relations between
these linguistic forms and the situations in which they are used. In the words of
Skinner “What happens when a man speaks or responds to speech is clearly a
question about human behaviour”.

For Bloomfield, the only meaning a linguistic form has “is the situation in which the
speaker utters it and the response which it calls forth in the hearer”.

For example: One of the “meanings” of “sorry” in English might be described as a

situation where the speaker apologises; the hearer’s typical response will be to treat
the utterance as an apology and behave accordingly. We can describe this situation
without having to make any reference to a “meaning” of sorry: external analysis of
the situation is all that is needed.

What about Hi, please, you, apple, thanks, this? Can they be described in terms of
situations?

Words are used in accordance with their meanings. For proponents of the use theory
of meaning we should directly describe the actual situation themselves in which
language is spoken or written, rather than doing this via the intermediary notion of
meaning.

The main objection is that the number of different situations in which language is
used is infinite. There are very few, if any, linguistic expressions which are
automatically called up by a specifiable external situation. To catalogue these, we
would need to know the individual circumstances of a representative number of
speaker/hearer pairs in whatever linguistic community we were investigating.

1.7 MEANING AND EXPLANATION

There are four important answers to the question “what is meaning?” the referential/
denotational theory of meaning (referential semantics, formal semantics), the
conceptual theory of meaning (Representational semantics, cognitive grammar), the
brain states theory and the use theory (Functional theories).

We do not have to categorically choose between these theories, the four proposals
about the nature of meaning are valid according to different contexts, types of
utterances or situations. We can see referents, concepts, brain states and uses all
relevant to this task.