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2 ENGLISH WORDS
such as PHONOLOGY, the study of how sounds are used to represent words in speech, SYNTAX, the
study of sentence structure, and SEMANTICS, the study of meaning in language.
In order to use even a very simple word, such as frog, we need to access various types of information
from the word-store which we all carry around with us in the MENTAL LEXICON or DICTIONARY that
is tucked away in the mind. We need to know:
[1.1]
(i) its shape, i.e. its PHONOLOGICAL REPRESENTATION/Sftg/ which enables us to pronounce it, and its
ORTHOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATION frog, if we are literate and know how to spell it (see the Key to
symbols used On page xix):
(ii) its grammatical properties, e.g. it is a noun and it is countable—so you can have one frog and two frogs;
iii) _its meaning.
But words tend not to wear their meaning on their sleeve. Normally, there is nothing about the form of
words that would enable anyone to work out their meaning. Thus, the fact that frog refers to one of these
simply has to be listed in the lexicon and committed to memory by brute force. For the relationship between
a LINGUISTIC SIGN like this word and its meaning is ARBITRARY. Other languages use different words
to refer to this small tailless amphibian. In French it is called (la) grenouilie. In Malay they call it katak and
in Swahili chura. None of these words is more suited than the others to the job of referring to this small
reptile.
And of course, within a particular language, any particular pronunciation can be associated with any
meaning. So long as speakers accept that sound-meaning association, they have a kosher word. For
instance, convenience originally meant ‘suitability’ or “commodiousness’ but in the middle of the nineteenth
century anew meaning of ‘toilet’ was assigned to it and people began to talk of “a public convenience’. In
the early 1960s the word acquired the additional new meaning of ‘easy to use, designed for hassle-free use”
as in convenience food,
We are the masters. Words are our servants. We can make them mean whatever we want them to mean.
Humpty Dumpty had all this worked out, The only thing missing from his analysis is the social dimension.
Any arbitrary meaning assigned to a word needs to be accepted by the speech community which uses the
language. Obviously, language would not be much use as a means of communication if each individual
language user assigned a private meaning to each word which other users of the language did not recognise.
Apart from that, it is instructive to listen in on the lesson on the nature of language that Humpty Dumpty
gave to Alice (see overleaf),
Let us now consider one further example. All competent speakers of English know that you can add -s to
a noun to indicate that it refers to more than one entity. So, you say cat when referring to one and cats if
there is more than one. If you encountered in the blank in [1.2a] an unfamiliar word like splet (which I have
just made up), you would automatically know from the context that it must have the plural form splets in
this position since it is specified as plural by all. Further, you would know that the plural of sp/et must be splets
{rather than spletren by analogy to children or spleti by analogy to stimuli). You know that the majority of
nouns form their plural by adding the regular plural suffix or ending -s. You always add -s unless express
instructions are given to do otherwise. There is no need to memorise separately the plural form of most
nouns. All we need is to know the rule that says ‘add -s for plural’. So, without any hesitation, you suffix -s
to obtain the plural form splets in [1.2b]:
