chapter 1
Semantics in Linguistics

1.1 Introduction

Semantics is the study of meaning communicated through language. This book is an introduction to the theory and practice of semantics in modern linguistics. Although this is not an introduction to any single theory, we begin with a basic assumption: that a person’s linguistic abilities are based on knowledge that they have. It is this knowledge that we are seeking to investigate. One of the insights of modern linguistics is that speakers of a language have different types of linguistic knowledge, including how to pronounce words, how to construct sentences, and about the meaning of individual words and sentences. To reflect this, linguistic description has different levels of analysis. So phonology is the study of what sounds a language has and how these sounds combine to form words; syntax is the study of how words can be combined into sentences; and semantics is the study of the meanings of words and sentences.

The division into levels of analysis seems to make sense intuitively: if you are learning a foreign language you might learn a word from a book, know what it means but not know how to pronounce it. Or you might hear a word, pronounce it perfectly but not know what it means. Then again, you might know the pronunciation and meaning of, say, a noun, but not know how its plural is formed or what its genitive case looks like. In this sense, knowing a word unites different kinds of knowledge, and this is just as true of your knowledge of how to construct phrases and sentences.

Since linguistic description is an attempt to reflect a speaker’s knowledge, the semanticist is committed to describing semantic knowledge. This knowledge allows English speakers to know, for example, that both the following sentences describe the same situation:

that 1.3 and 1.4 below contradict each other:

that 1.5 below has several possible meanings, that it is ambiguous:

and that 1.6 below entails 1.7:

We will look at these types of semantic knowledge in more detail a little later on; for now we can take entailment to mean a relationship between sentences so that if a sentence A entails a sentence B, then if we know A we automatically know B. Or alternatively, it should be impossible, at the same time, to assert A and deny B. Knowing the effect of inserting the word not, or about the relationships between above and below, and murder and dead, are aspects of an English speaker’s semantic knowledge, and thus should be part of a semantic description of English.

As our original definition of semantics suggests, it is a very broad field of inquiry, and we find scholars writing on very different topics and using quite different methods, though sharing the general aim of describing semantic knowledge. As a result, semantics is the most diverse field within linguistics. In addition, semanticists have to have at least a nodding acquaintance with other disciplines, like philosophy and psychology, which also investigate the creation and transmission of meaning. Some of the questions raised in these neighboring disciplines have important effects on the way linguists do semantics. In chapter 2 we discuss some of these questions, but we begin in this chapter by looking at the basic tasks involved in establishing semantics as a branch of linguistics.

1.2 Semantics and Semiotics

So we see our basic task in semantics as showing how people communicate meanings with pieces of language. Note, though, that this is only part of a larger enterprise of investigating how people understand meaning. Linguistic meaning is a special subset of the more general human ability to use signs, as we can see from the examples below:

The verb mean is being put to several uses here, including inferences based on cause and effect, and on knowledge about the arbitrary symbols used in public signs. These uses reflect the all‐pervasive human habit of identifying and creating signs: of making one thing stand for another. This process of creating and interpreting symbols, sometimes called signification, is far wider than language. Scholars like Ferdinand de Saussure (1974) have stressed that the study of linguistic meaning is a part of this general study of the use of sign systems, and this general study is called semiotics.1 Semioticians investigate the types of relationship that may hold between a sign and the object it represents, or in Saussure’s terminology between a signifier and its signified. One basic distinction, due to C. S. Peirce, is between icon, index, and symbol (Peirce 1955). An icon is where there is a similarity between a sign and what it represents, as, for example, between a portrait and its real life subject, or a diagram of an engine and the real engine. An index is where the sign is closely associated with its signified, often in a causal relationship; thus smoke is an index of fire. Finally, a symbol is where there is only a conventional link between the sign and its signified, as in the use of insignia to denote military ranks, or perhaps the way that mourning is symbolized by the wearing of black clothes in some cultures, and white clothes in others. In this classification, words would seem to be examples of verbal symbols.2

In our discussion of semantics we will leave this more comprehensive level of investigation and concentrate on linguistic meaning. The historical development between language and other symbolic systems is an open question: what seems clear is that language represents man’s most sophisticated use of signs.

1.3 Three Challenges in Doing Semantics

Analyzing a speaker’s semantic knowledge is an exciting and challenging task, as we hope to show in this book. We can get some idea of how challenging by adopting a simple but intuitively attractive theory of semantics, which we can call the definitions theory. This theory would simply state that to give the meaning of linguistic expressions we should establish definitions of the meanings of words. We could then assume that when a speaker combines words to form sentences according to the grammatical rules of her3 language, the word definitions are combined to form phrase and then sentence definitions, giving us the meanings of sentences. Let us investigate putting this approach into practice.

As soon as we begin our task of attaching definitions to words, we will be faced with a number of challenges. Three in particular prove very tricky for our theory. The first is the problem of circularity. How can we state the meaning of a word, except in other words, either in the same or a different language? This is a problem that faces dictionary writers: if you look up a word like ferret in a monolingual English dictionary, you might find a definition like “Domesticated albino variety of the polecat, Mustela putorius, bred for hunting rabbits, rats, etc.” To understand this, you have to understand the words in the definition. According to our aims for semantics, we have to describe the meanings of these words too, beginning with domesticated. The definition for this might be “of animals, tame, living with human beings.” Since this definition is also in words, we have to give the meaning, for example, of tame. And so on. If the definitions of word meaning are given in words, the process might never end. The question is: can we ever step outside language in order to describe it, or are we forever involved in circular definitions?

A second problem we will meet is how to make sure that our definitions of a word’s meaning are exact. If we ask where the meanings of words exist, the answer must be: in the minds of native speakers of the language. Thus meaning is a kind of knowledge. This raises several questions: for example, is there a difference between this kind of knowledge and other kinds of knowledge that people have? In particular: can we make a distinction between linguistic knowledge (about the meaning of words) and encyclopedic knowledge (about the way the world is)? For example, if I believe that a whale is a fish, and you believe that it is a mammal, do our words have different meanings when we both use the noun whale? Presumably you still understand me when I say I dreamt that I was swallowed by a...