Tài liệu Đọc thêm môn ngữ nghĩa học dành cho sinh viên khoa tiếng anh

Lý do biên soạn tài liệu đọc thêm môn Ngữ Nghĩa Học tiếng Anh cho sinh viên Khoa Anh 1.1 Tài liệu chính để dạy môn Ngữ Nghĩa Học theo qui định của Khoa 1a 11 bai trong cuốn Semantics:

TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC SƯ PHAM THANH PHO HO CHi MINH

BAO CAO TONG KET

DE TAI NGHIEN CUU KHOA HOC

TALLIES DOC THM MON NGO §GtÏA HỌC DASH CHO SIN VEN KHOA THENG, ANH

BÁO CÁO TÓM TẮT

1 Lý do biên soạn tài liệu đọc thêm môn Ngữ Nghĩa Học tiếng Anh cho sinh viên Khoa Anh

1.1 Tài liệu chính để dạy môn Ngữ Nghĩa Học theo qui định của Khoa 1a 11 bai trong cuốn

Semantics: a coursebook cua hai tac gia James R Hurford va Brendan Heasley do nha

xuất bản Đại học Cambridge phát hành Sách gồm 25 bài, và mỗi bài đều có phần lý

thuyết, định nghĩa, bài tập, và phần đáp án Nhìn chung cuốn sách này viết khá đơn giản, trình bày ngăn gọn các khái niệm khá trừu tượng của môn Ngữ Nghĩa Học Tuy nhiên do các tác giả viết quá ngắn gọn dẫn đến việc sinh viên thiếu những cách nhìn khác nhau của

một vấn đề Kiến thức về môn học không được sâu do cuôn sách được viết như một sách

giáo khoa Thêm vào đó, các tác giả đã viết theo ý kiến chủ quan của mình đối với những

vấn đề còn nhiều bàn cãi Tóm lại, giáo trình đang được sử dụng ở Khoa có một số hạn

chế nêu trên Sinh viên sẽ dùng cuốn sách nêu trên tốt hơn nếu họ có thêm những tài liệu đọc thêm về môn học này

1.2 Môn Ngữ Nghĩa Học là một môn học khá mới đối với sinh viên Khoa tiếng Anh Tài liệu

về môn học này chỉ có vài cuốn trong thư viện của Khoa và thư viện của Trường Vì vậy

sinh viên Khoa Anh rất thiếu các tài liệu đọc thêm về môn học này Nhu câu biên soạn tài

liệu đọc thêm về môn học này là rất cần thiết

1.3 Số tiết dành cho môn học này theo qui định của Khoa chỉ có 30 tiết (2 ÐVHT) Số bài qui

định là 11 bài Do số tiết lên lớp tương đối ít so với một môn học khá trừu tượng như môn

Ngữ Nghĩa Học, sinh viên cần phải có thời gian để nghiên cứu thêm ở nhà mới có thê nắm vững được môn học này Do đó sinh viên cần có tài

liệu tham khảo để có thể hiểu rõ hơn những nội dung đã thảo luận trong lớp và mở rộng

kiến thức của mình về môn học

1.4 Đề nâng cao trình độ tiếng Anh chuyên sâu của mình, sinh viên khoa Anh thường theo học các lớp sau đai học (Diploma hoặc Master) Trong các chương trình thi và học của các lớp sau đại học đều có môn Ngữ Nghĩa Học Đây là môn học bắt buộc của chương trình sau đại học do các Trường Đại Học Sư Phạm hoặc Trường Đại Học Khoa Học Xã Hội và Nhân Văn tổ chức Việc biên soạn tài liệu này cũng góp phần giúp sinh viên tiếng Anh có đủ kiến thúc nền để có thể theo học các lớp sau đại học

2 Cơ sở biên soạn tài liệu đọc thêm môn Ngữ Nghĩa Học

2.1 Cơ sở đầu tiên dé tuyển chọn các tài liệu đọc thêm cho sinh viên là dựa vào giáo trình do

Khoa qui định Chúng tôi căn cứ vào các khái niệm được dạy trong chương trình dé chon những tài liệu đọc thêm có liên quan, gần gũi với những khái niệm đó để giúp sinh viên vừa nắm sâu về mặt lý thuyết vừa có thêm nhiều ví dụ, bài tập minh họa nhăm giúp họ

hiểu rõ hơn các nội dung đã được học

2.2 Cơ sở thứ hai là chúng tôi chỉ chọn tài liệu được viết với văn phong đơn giản và đều năm trong khả năng có thê hiểu được của sinh viên

Tài liệu được chọn trên cơ sở vừa có lý thuyết vừa có thực hành để giúp sinh viên có thể tự

học, tự đọc, tự trả lời các vấn đề có liên quan đến môn học Một số chương có nêu lên phần ứng dụng trong việc dạy tiếng Anh Phần này giúp sinh viên thấy được môn học có tính ứng dụng cao

2.3 Tài liệu được chọn đề làm tài liệu đọc thêm là các bài viết do các tác giả Anh , Mỹ

chuyên viết về Ngữ Nghĩa Học với những cách nhìn khác nhau Điều này giúp sinh

viên tránh cách nhìn phiếm diện khi chỉ được học gói gọn trong một số giáo trình qui định Những bài viết này giúp sinh viên tự nâng cao khả năng nhận định, phê phán, tổng hợp kiến thức và có thể đưa ra ý kiến riêng Khả năng đánh gia, phê bình này rất cần cho sinh viên khi học đại học cũng như theo học các lớp sau đại học sau này

3 Phương pháp chọn tài liệu đọc thêm

Chúng tôi tiến hành thu thập các sách viết về Ngữ Nghĩa Học ( Semantics) của nhiều tác giả

từ các nguồn tư liệu của cá nhân, Khoa, Trường Sau đó chúng tôi đọc và chọn các sách có

nội dung gần và sát với nội dung mà sinh viên đang học Chúng tôi lại chọn các bài viết dễ hiểu nhưng chúng có cùng các nội dung mà sinh viên đang học tại Khoa

Các bài đọc thêm đều được sắp xếp theo thứ tự nội dung của sách giáo khoa do Khoa qui định Điều này giúp sinh viên dễ tra cứu khi tự đọc ở nhà

Sau khi chọn xong các tài liệu, chúng tôi cho đánh máy lại theo đúng nguyên bản của các tác giả Chúng tôi sắp xếp các bải thành chương Các chương lại được phân chia theo từng mục nhỏ và được đánh số trang theo thứ tự sắp xếp mới của chúng tôi và đóng thành tập đề giúp người học dễ tra cứu

Chúng tôi đặt phần tóm tắt nội dung ở ngay trang đầu tiên của tập tài liệu đọc thêm để sinh viên dễ tìm các nội dung cần đọc Phần tài liệu tham khảo cũng được xếp Ở phần cuối của tập tài liệu đọc thêm Phần này giúp sinh viên có thê tự tìm ra các đầu sách ngốc

4 Báo cáo quyết toán về đề tài biên soạn tài liệu đọc thêm môn Ngữ Nghĩa Học tiếng Anh cho sinh viên khoa Anh

Chúng tôi ( chủ đề tài: Ngô Thị Thanh Vân và cộng tác viên: Trần Xuân Bình) cùng đọc và chọn lọc tài liệu đọc thêm môn Ngữ Nghĩa Học trong thời gian một năm học Chúng tôi đã chỉ tiền để thực hiện đề tài với các khoản chi như sau đây:

- Tiền chi cho phần đọc sách, nghiên cứu, phân tích tài liệu và biên soạn lại tài liệu:

7.000.000 đ (bảy triệu đồng)

- Tiền sao chụp 14 chương sách : 20.000đ

- Tiền đánh máy toàn bộ tài liệu theo đơn giá:

5.000đ/tờ x 210tờ = 1.050.000đ (một triệu năm mươi ngàn đồng)

- Tiền in I1 cuốn tài liệu x 50000đ/cuốn = 550.000đ ( 05 cuốn cho 05 thành viên hội đồng,

02 cuốn cho 02 tác giả đề tài, 02 cuốn cho phòng sau đại học, 02 cuốn cho thư viện của Khoa

CONTENS

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CHAPTER 1 SEMANTIC - THE STUDY OF MEANING - ceceieiee 1 CHAPTER 2 INTRODUCTION TO LEXICAL SEMANTTIC .- 5 5-5- 19 CHAPTER 3 ON ENTERING THE REALMS - - SÁT SH, 32 CHAPTER 4 WORDS AND THEIR MEANINGS che 45 CHAPTER 5 WORDS AND THE WORLD - Gà ng HH He, 66 CHAPTER 6 WORDS AND WORDS - nàng HH HH nghiệt 76 CHAPTER 7 ANALYSING WORD MEANINGS -Ặ Hee 85 Ð:/.)300.0))299 5-11 117 CHAPTER 10 REFERENCE AND INDETERMINACY OF SENSE 128 CHAPTER 11 REEFEREENCE AND PREDICA TION Ặ.cceceece 146 CHAPTER 12 OPPOSTTES AND NEGATIVES Tàn HH 161 CHAPTER 13 PARADIGMATIC RELATIONS OF EXCLUSION AND

0)3495)/)i9)00155 176 CHAPTER 14 LOGICAL MA TTTERS À - - - 5S SH HH He, 185

Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

SEMANTIC

THE STUDY OF MEANING

1.1 Language and meaning

Semantics, the study of meaning, stands at the very centre of the linguistic quest to understand the nature of language and human language abilities Why? Because expressing meanings is what language are all about Everything in a language-words, grammatical

constructions, intonation patterns-conspires to realise this goal in the fiillest, richest, subtlest

way To understand how any particular language works we need to understand how its individual design works to fulfil its function as an intricate device for communicating meanings Equally, semantics is crucial to the Chomskyan goal of describing and accounting for linguistic competence, that is, the knowledge that people must have in order to speak and understand a language Semantic competence is a crucial part of overall linguistic competence

Another concern of semantics is to shed light on the relationship between language and culture, or, more accurately, between languages and cultures Much of the vocabulary of any language, and even parts of the grammar, will reflect the culture of its speakers Indeed, the culture specific concepts and ways of understandine embedded in a language are an important part of what constitutes a culture Language is one of the main instruments hy

which children are socialised into the values, belief systems, and practices of their culture

Meaning variation across languages

It's hard to believe the colossal variation in word-meanings between languages You might assume, for example, that since all human beings have the same kind of bodies all languages would have words with the same meanings as English hand and hair But no In many languages, the word which reiers to a person's hand can apply to the entire arm; the Russian

word ruka, for example, is like this In many languages, different words are used to refer to

head-hair and to body -hair; for example, in Yankunytjatjara ( Central Australia) mangka refers to head-hair and yuru to body-hair (as well as fur)

You might think that since environmental features like the sun, moon, sky, and clouds are found everywhere on earth, all languages would have words for these things Well, in a sense that's true In any language, one can say things about the sun and about clouds, for instance, but not necessarily using words which correspond precisely in meaning to English sun and clouds In the Australian language Nyawaygi, for instance, there are different words for 'sun lovv in the sky' and for ‘hot sun' (i.e overhead), bujira and jula respectively ( Dixon 1980:104) In many Australian languages, such as Yankunytjatjara, there are several words for different kinds of clouds but no general word like English cloud

The same applies to words for events and actions, as well It is natural (in English) to think that ' breaking’ is a single, simple event But in Malay there are three words which can cover the range of the English word, one( putus) for where the thing is completely

severed or broken off ( like a pencil being broken in two) another ( patah) for when the break isn't complete (like a branch which is broken but not broken off completely), and still another ( pecah) which is more like 'smash' (like what happens when you break a glass)

If even concrete and seemingly universal meanings like ‘hand’, 'sun', and 'break' are actually not universal but vary from language to language, just think of the variation that exists in relation to more abstract and culture-related meanings How many languages would have words with the same meanings as English privacy, or apologise, and work? How many language would draw a distinction, as English does, between guilt and shame? Obviously, we can't say precisely, but we can say that the number is much, much smaller than most non- linguists would ever imagine In a similar fashion, every language has its own culture- specific meanings, which don't translate readily into English Admittedly, each word in itself makes only a small contribution to the differences between languages, but when you sum up the meaning variation over 10,000 words, perhaps you can see why linguists sometimes say that every language represents a unique way of seeing and thinking about the world

The role of meaning in grammar

In this book we are concerned primarily with semantics, not with other areas of language description such as morphology and syntax Since many readers will have some familiarity

with these other fields of linguistics, however, it is worthwhile mentioning the relevance of

semantics to the boarder domain of linguistic theory

One of the main concerns of linguistic theory is to identify the governing principles that account for the regularity and orderliness of languages In other words, to answer questions like: Why does language X have the grammatical rules it has? Why does language Y differ from language X in the way it does? What underlying principles apply to both X and Y? For many years the orthodoxy was that semantics did not have much relevance to question like these, because it was believed that the syntactic workings of language were independent

of meaning In recent years, however, as Thomas Wasow (in Sells 1985: 204-5) points out,

‘contemporary syntactic theories seem to be converging on the idea that sentence structure is generally predictable from word meanings the surprising thing (to linguists) has been how little needs to be stipulated beyond lexical meaning" If so, semantics is not just an 'add on' to the study of morphology and syntax, but can provide invaluable keys to understanding why morphology and syntax work as they do

1.2 The nature of meaning

Whether we are interested in exploring the connections between meaning and culture, or between meaning and grammar, or simply in exploring meaning for its own sake, the first thing we need is a consistent, reliable, and clear method of stating meaning-a system of semantic representation Not surprisingly, the main theoretical controversies in semantics concern the nature of the optimal system pf semantic representation

The vexed question of the nature of meaning is easiest to approach indirectly, by first asking what meaning is not.

Meaning is not reference

People sometimes think that the meaning of an expression is simply-and merely-the thing that it identifies or ‘picks out’ in the world (the so-called REFERENT) This seems sensible enough in relation to names, for instance Margaret Thatcher, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Mexico, or deiinite descriptive noun phrases, such as the President of the United States But

to see the meaning is distinct from reference, we only have to think of words which do not

refer to anything at all, such as nothingy empty, unicorn, and, usitally, hullo These words are not meaningless, so whatever the meaning of a word may be, it must be something other than what the word refers to

Another argument against the view the meaning equals reference is that if this view were correct, expressions which referred to the same thing would have the same meaning The most famous counter-examples are the expressions The Morning Star and The Evening Star, which clearly differ in meaning, even though objectively they refer to the same thing, namely the planet Venus A more prosaic, but very nice, example (from Allan 1986) is furnished hy the two expressions the man who inventedparking meters and the man who invented the yo-

yo I'm sure you will agree that these tvvo expressions convey different meanings, and I don't expect your opinion will change if I tell you that as a matter of fact both refer to the very same man A classical example is the expression featherless biped Although this has the same referential range as the expression human being, as an explanation of meaning it clearly leaves a lot to be desired

A final reason for rejecting the simplistic view that meaning is reference is that the property

of 'making reference’ is not something that belongs to words or expressions in themselves at

all, but rather to the use of words on a particular occasion For instance, the words this, here,

now, and / can refer to any number of things, places, times, or persons depending on the context, but it would be foolish to say that such words had a different meaning every time they uttered

Of course, just because meaning is different from reference doesn't mean that the two are unrelated Obviousiy, they are related: the reference made by the use of a particular expression on a particular occasion depends, at least in part, on the meaning of the expression Linguists sometimes speak of the sense of a word, when they want to make it clear that they are interested in meaning as opposed to reference

Meaning is not scientific knowledge

It is also wrong to think that meaning can be described in terms of scientific knowledge, a position advocated by the early American linguist Leonard Bloomfield As a behaviourist, he believed that meaning should be treated as a stimuius-response relationship between a speech-form and objective aspects of the speaker's world Bloomfield ( 1933:139) wrote:

we can define the meaning of a speech-form accurately when this meaning has to do with some matter of which we possess scientific knowledge We can deline the names of minerals, for example, in terms of chemistry and mineralogy, as when we say that the ordinary meaning of the English word salt is ‘sodium chloride (NaCl)', and we can define the names of plants and animals by means of the technical terms of botany and zoology, but we have no precise way of defining words like love and hate, which concern situations that have not been accurately classified

Some dictionaries follow Bloomneld's prescription, supplying definitions like the following from the Concise Oxford Dictionary.

LIVER: large glandular organ in abdomen of vertebrates, secreting bile

Water: colourless transparent tasteless odourless compound of oxygen and hydrogen in liquid state

red: of or approaching the colour seen at the least-retracted end of the spectrum

Clearly, however, people use the words liver, water, and red quite happily and correctly without having nay ideas about glands, chemical compounds, or the spectrum Knowledge of everyday word-meanings is part of people's linguistic competence, but scientific knowledge

is not

Another reason for rejecting the idea that meaning can be described in terms of scientific knowledge is that such an approach would not lead to a uniform account of meaning, since,

as Bloomfield concedes, it would only be applicable to a limited a proportion of word-

meanings How could it cope with words like love, God, and hullo?

Finally, there is the point that technical terms like hydrogen, glandular, and spectrum are also words, an important principle is that the definition or explanation must consist of simpler, more easily understood terms than the word being defined

Meaning is not 'use'

Some people hold that the meaning of a word is ‘its use in the language’, a slogan taken from the work of the great twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein As with the reference theory, this view clearly has something going for it Children learn most word- meanings simply by exposure to them in use, without much verbal explanation There is no

doubt that the meaning of a word is related to its use; in fact, it can be argued that the

meaning of a word is the main determinant of its use But for the purpose of accounting for linguistic competence, the 'meaning is use’ theory must be rejected, or at least heavily modified What we are after is an account of what people know about their language Just to say that they know the use of all the words is not very helful—we would have to go on to describe in each case WHAT IT IS that they know about the use

It is also hard to see hovv the 'meaning is use’ view could account for the meaning of whole

sentences or utterances

1.3 Linguistic approaches to meaning

In this section, we briefly meet some views of meaning which are more relevant to modern linguistics

Truth-conditional theories Although the crude 'meaning equals reference’ theory doesn't stand

up for long, the basic notion that meaning is a relationship between an expression and a state

of affairs in the world has given rise to more sophisticated versions of the same basic idea One influential idea from the study of logic is that the meaning of a senterice is the conditions in the world which would have to be met for the sentence to be true To understand

a sentence like Snow is white, for instance, you have to understand how the world would

have to be for that sentence to be true Theories based on this approach are called trUth- conditional They say

that the meaning of a world is the contribution it makes to the 'truth conditions' of sentences

Another problem lies with what critics call the 'obiectivist' attitude toward meaning, that is

to say, the very idea that meaning resides in the relationship between a linguistic expression and aspects of an 'objective' world For, clearly, there are innumerable expressions in any language whose meanings are inherently subjective and/or culture-bound and cannot be

reduced to a correlation with features of the external world How could moral, aesthetic,

religious, or philosophical meanings be tied down to correlations with an objective world? Consider words like unfair, beautiful, Gody and rights It seems obvious that these meanings

do not correspond to anything in external reality, and the same applies to a myriad of culture

-specific words like Monday, bar mitzvah, associate professor, secondbase, or fiancé (Lakoff

1988: 135)

Conceptual theories

COCEPTUAL THEORIES OF MEANING are closet to the commonsense view They say that a meaning of a world is a structured idea, or ‘concept’, in the mind of the person using that expression As children growing up in a culture, we acquire, in the form of word- meanings, a huge number of 'prepackaged concepts shared hy those around us Because these underlying ideas are shared, communication becomes possible This view of meaning is often associated with the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke, who wrote:

[W]ords, in their primary or immediate signfication, stand for nothing but the ideas in the mind of him that uses them, When a man speaks to another, it is that he may be understood;

and the end of speech is that those sounds, as marks, may make known his ideas to the hearer (Locke 1976 [1690]: 208, emphasis in the original)

Conceptual theories take various forms, especially as regards the following important question: If meanings are concepts or ideas, where do those ideas come from, how are they acquired? Locke believed that the human mind is analogous to a blank slate (tabula rasa) at birth, but that since we all share the same kind of sense organs and therefore experience the

world in more or less the same way, we come, in time, to have more or less the same basic

ideas about it; our complex ideas are then built up from these basic ideas derived from experience This is called an empiricist position, because it emphasizes the importance of knowledge derived through the senses Modern versions of this position are held by many psychologists, and by some linguists, including George Lakoff and Ronald Langacker The alternative position is the rationalist one held by contemporaries of Locke's such as Gottfried Leibniz and René Descartes This holds that the very simplest concepts are a natural or innate property of the human mind, activated hy experience but not wholly and solely derived from it One argument in favour of semantrc rationalism is that it is hard to see

how concepts like time, causation, and identity (sameness) could ever be derived from 'pure'

sensory experience Another argument comes from the vast complexity and intricacy of language It seems implausible that children could acquire all this as reliably and

effortlessly as they do without some innate predisposition Many present-day linguists, including Noam Chomsky, Ray Jackendoff, and Anna Wierzbicka, adhere to a modern version of this theory

Platonist theories

Contrasting with conceptual theories, according to which meaning is 'all in the mind’, there are what are known as platonist theories, after the ancient Greek philosopher Plato Platonist theories view meanings as abstract relationships between expressions, existing independently

of speakers, hearers, and actual speech acts Again, there are several versions Plato's own

view was a metaphysical one He believed in the existence of a timeless insensible ‘world’ of

perfect Forms or ideas, to which the soul of a person, being itself immortal, has intuitive

access Thus he sought to account for the problem of how people could arrive at a concept like that of a perfect circle, a figure which is never found in the natural world

A modern Platonist theory, without the metaphysical slant, is that of linguist Jerrold Katz

He insists (Katz 1981) that meanings are abstract entities, existing somehow outside the mind That is, they are not necessarily located within people's conscious experience, although they may be accessed and known through intuition If that sounds mysterious and confusing

to you, all I can say is that most people have that reaction (myself included) Perhaps an analogy might help Consider the relationship between the number one, two, and four For sure we can known that ‘one plus one is two' and that 'two plus two is four’, and wouldn't you agree that the validity of these relationships doesn't depend on you, or me, or anyone, actually knowing it? Apply the same approach to word-meanings, and you have a Platonist attitude to semantics What Katz is saying boils down to the assertion that the relationship between meanings is not a matter of individual psychology One reason he wants to reach

this position is, I think, to avoid the endless and largely sterile debates about individual

variation in meaning which tend to surround the conceptual theories

Structuralist theories

Structuralism is a powerful intellectual tradition in modern thought, especially in literary studies and anthropology, as well as in linguistics One of its pioneers was the great French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who was fond of drawing an analoey between language and the game of chess Just as the various chess-pieces, and their moves, can only be understood

in terms of how they function together and in contrast with one another, so it is in language

also: to understand the meaning of a world, for instance, we have to understand how it

functions together with and in contrast to other, related words According to a fully structuralist theory of meanlng, the meaning of any word has with the other words in the language

Taken to its logical extreme a structuralist view holds that meanings (and sounds also, for that matter) cannot be characterised in positive terms at all A famous quotation to this effect

comes from Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (Harris 1983: 118):

In langUage Itself, there are only differences Even more important than this is the fact that, although in general a difference presupposes posrtive terms between which the difference holds, in a language there are differences, and no positive terms language includes neither sounds nor ideas existing prior to the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonetic differences arising out of that system (emphasis in original)

The favoured structuralist method is known as componential analysis

The semiotic approach

A final approach to meaning may be termed SEMIOTIC or translational This holds that it

is a mistake to become preoccupied with 'what meaning is', as though 'meaning' were a thing

of some kind Since our whole lives are infused with meanings, since we are communicating

in meanings even as we try to speak about them, we can never (on this view) escape from language and find a vantage point.from which we can look back and describe what it is we have been doing

This certainly does not mean, however, that we cannot describe and analyse specific,

concrete meanings True, we cannot get outside the system of meaning-expression and reduce meanings to anything else (individual ideas, brainwave patterns, mystical Platonist forms, patters of usage, or what have you) If we want to describe the meaning of one linguistic expression we have no choice but to do it in terms of the meanings of other linguistic expressions But why not? After all, it is a commonsense, pretheoretical idea that one can explain the meaning of an unknown word in terms of the meanings of other, known words-by paraphrasing the original word

This approach to meaning can be called ‘translational’ because, in this theory, the meaning

of a linguistic expression is regarded as a kind of translation; that is, you give the meaning of one expression hy way of a translation into another, more easily understood expression it is called 'semiotic' because it takes the world of 'signs' as irreducible In case you have not already guessed, this is the approach adopted in this book

1.4 Issues in semantic theory

The ‘irreducibility of the sign' was emphasised by Charles Sanders Peirce, the great American logician and philosopher It was Peirce who coined the terms semiotics, which he envisaged as a new science devoted to the study of 'signs' For our purposes a sign is just an

expression, such as a word, which has a meaning One of Peirce's (1932: 2.230 f.) main

contentions is that it is impossible to reduce a sign to any elements that are themselves not signs For all intents and purposes, it is impossible to analyse or describe meanings except in terms of some other language-perhaps a more or less ‘technical’ language consisting of special symbols, but a sort of language nonetheless

To make this clearer it is useful to introduce the terms metalanguage In general, a metalanguage simply means a language that is used to describe or analyse another language For instance, in a bilingual Russian-English dictionary, where Russian words are defined or explained in terms of English words, the metalanguage is English; in an English-Russian bilingual dictionary, on the other hand, the metalanguage is Russian because it is the language in which the definitions are given Another example: technical terms like noun, verb, adjective, subject, object, active, and passive are part of the grammatical metalanguage

of linguistics, that is, they are words used to describe or analyse the grammatical relationships in ordinary everyday language Of course, a metalanguage doesn't have to be a different language (or even a different register) from the one being described A normal English dictionary uses English words to describe the meanings of other English words Now, any semantic theory needs some way to state the meaning of an expression An object

of any kind which states the meaning of an expression can be called a SEMANTIC

REPRESENTATION of that expression The terms in which the representation (or just the

SEMANTICS METALANGUAGE, for short) There are many controversies about what is

the best kid of semantic metalanguage

Universality

On the face of it, it would seem only sensible to approach semantics with the aim of finding

a universally applicable system for describing meaning wherever we find it; just as in phonetics, phonology, and syntax we seek frameworks and principles which are equally applicable to all the world's languages As Noam Chomsky once remarked ( 1965:160):

It is important to determine the universal, language-independent constraints on semantic features- in traditional terms, the system of possible concepts The very notion of "lexical entry" presupposes some son of fixed, universal vocabulary in terms of which these objects are characterised, just as the notion of "phonetic representation" presupposes some sort of universal phonetic inventory

The possibility of translation between languages, and the ability that we all have to learn and understand new languages, also seem to indicate that there is some universal framework for understanding, which is shared hy all human beings The notion that there is a "psychic unity" to humankind has a long history in philosophy, and, more recently, in linguistics and anthropology

Many modern linguists, however, doubt that a universal system for describing meanings is possible For one thing, translatability is not always a simple matter if there are wide differences in culture and grammar to be reckoned with Also, many linguists are daunted by the 'slipperiness’ of meaning, and fear it would be impossible to establish a universal inventory of semantic features because it would be too difficult to choose between competing analyses

Primitives

If meaning analysis is possible at all, it would seem only logical that there must be a set of basic terms which cannot be defined or reduced further which we would reach as the endpoint of all the analysis Such elementary meanings are these days often called SEMANTIC PRIMITIVES, though they were known to the rationalist philosophers of the seventeenth century as ‘simple ideas’

A conceptualist argument for elementary meanings is that without them, we would be unable to understand anything; because to understand anything, there must be something in terms of which it is understood As Leibniz put it back in 1697:

Whatever is thought of by us is either conceived through itself, or involves the concept of another Whatever is involved in the concept of another is again either conceived through itself, or involves the concept of another and so on So one must either proceed to infinity, or all thoughts are resolved into those which are conceived through themselves If nothing is conceived through itself, nothing could be conceived at all (Leibniz 1973:1)

Modern linguists vvho have taken a positive approach to universal semantic primitives

include Manfred Bierwisch, Jerold Katz, Ray Jackendoff, and Anna Wierzbicka

Discreteness

Are the terms of semantic description discrete elements, each one clearly separate form the others (like words, for instance)? Or is it necessary to have a system with continuously

varying dimensions, where a specification could be given as a number on a scale, for instance? This is the issue of discreteness

One point upon which almost all semanticists agree these day is that there is a certain vagueness and subjectivity to the meaning of many (perhaps most) words, which makes it impossible to pin down the complete meaning in terms of a list of cut-and-dried objective

features Take the words man, fruit, or red It isn't hard to think of situations where one

wouldn't be quite sure if they were applicable or not Is a male person aged 16 or 17 a man,

or not? Is a tomato a fruii? When does a reddish-orange become red? Obviously, it is hard to say Some linguists have concluded from facts of this kind that the underlying components of meaning are 'fuzzy' rather than fixed and discrete

The influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, possibly the twentielh century's most brilliant philosopher, cannot be underestimated in this regard In a famous passage Wittgenstein came

to the conclusion that the word game (or, more precisely, German Spiel) could refer to so

many different kinds of thing (board-games, card-games, ball-games, chess, noughts-and- crosses, tennis, ring-a-ring-a-roses, etc.) that it was inconceivable that its meaning could be captured in a specifiable set of common features 'What is common to all of them?', he wrote,

‘Don't say: "There must be something common, or they would not be called games"-but look and see whether there is anything common to all For if you look at them you will not see

something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships and a whole series of them at

that’ (Wittgenstein 1953:31-2)

In place of the traditional notion of meaning Wittgenstein introduced the notion of family resemblance: 'a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing.' The various uses of a world cannot be summed up in a single statement of meaning, he insisted, but overlap and criss-cross in much the same way as the various resemblances (build,

features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc.) between members of a family do

Although many have tried, however, no one has been able to adapt the family resemblances idea indo a practical analytical system We will see at many places in this book that vagueness are not actually incompatible with the idea of discrete and specifiable meanings Linguistic vs encyclopedic knowledge

Most linguists accept that in principle it is possible to draw some son of line between our knowledge of a language and our other knowledge, that is, between linguist knowledge and

‘real-world’ knowledge (encyclopedic knowledge, as it is usually called) Thus, what we know about the meaning of the words dog, hair, and light bulb (for example) should be distinguishable in principle from our other factual knowledge about dogs, hair, and light bulbs One argument in favour of this view is that linguistic knowledge is essentially shared between all the speakers of a language, whereas real-world knowledge is not Dog-breeders, hair stylists, and electrical engineers, for instance, know a lot of specialised things about dogs, hair, and light bulbs which are not part of the shared meanings of the words

So far so good But what about ‘common knowledge'-the kind of thing which almost everyone knows, for instance, that dogs have four legs, bark and wag their tails? It is not always easy to decide whether such information should be regarded as a part of die meaning

of a word or not Geoffrey Leech (1981) expressed the minimalist view when he said that it

is a matter of real-word contingency, and nothing to do with word-meaning, that an elephant has four legs rather than eighty Jurij Apresjan and Anna Wierzbicka are associated with the maximalist view Apresjan (1992: 32-3) says that there is nothing less

than a ‘naive picture of the world hidden in lexical meanings', Including a folk geometry, physics, psychology, etc 'developed in the course of centuries and [which ] reflects the material and spiritual experience of a people’ Wierzbicka (1985) argues that the full meanings of words like dog, cat, and mouse incorporate a great deal of folk knovvledge; that the linguistic concept of dog, for instance, includes barking, tail-wagging, and much more besides

A minority view, but an important (and perhaps ascendant) one, denies the existence of any boundary between real-world and linguistic knowledge (cf Haiman 1980) Theorists like Charles Fillmore and Ronald Langacker believe that knowledge of all kinds is integrated in the mind to such an extent that it doesn't make sense to partition it into two distinct realms Semantics vs pragmatics

Linguists generally agree that, when people are communicating, they do more than just attend to what is actually being said hy way of words, grammatical constructions, and intonation patterns They are also alert to what is implied-for example, by the speaker's

choice of certain words rather than others, and by the extralinguistic context in which the

communication is taking place

A distinction is often drawn between meanings which are encoded in the structure of the language as opposed to meanings which can be derived or deduced from how language is used on a particular occasion, in a particular context Semantics is usually understood to be

the study of meaning in the first of these senses, that is, the study of the more-or-less stable,

conventionalised meanings of linguistic signs The study of how speakers and hearers interpret meanings in particular contexts-taking account of the physical and social situation, knowledge of each other's backgrounds, and cultural conventions, among other factors-is usually termed pragmatics Roughly speaking, semantics deals with meanings which are coded into linguistic forms, while pragmatics deals with the inferences people make from how linguistic meanings are used in particular situations Even more roughly, semantics deals with words and sentences, while pragmatics deals with words and sentences as used on

particular occasions, 1.e with utterances

Distinctions like this may sound clear enough in theory, but when it comes down to practical applications there is often disagreement about where the line should be drawn Much of it stems from disagreement about the criteria for stating and testing semantic

meaning Some linguists, such as Fillmore, Langacker, and Lakoff, argue that it makes no

sense to draw a hard and fast distinction between semantics and pragmatics, just as it makes

no sense (they say) to draw a rigid distinction between linguistic and real-world knowledge

In any case, even assuming that semantics and pragmatics are conceptually distinct fields of study it is obvious that they must be very closely integrated if we are ever to achieve a satisfying theory of linguistic communication There is also plenty of evidence from the study of language change and language acquisition which leads to the same conclusion

In this book we stay largely within the realm of semantics, in the sense just described it should be noted, however, that there is another use of the term pragmatics, employed hy linguists whose approach to meaning is strongly influenced hy the study of logic As mentioned earlier, in the logical tradition meaning is defined in terms of relationship (truth- conditions) between sentences and an objective outside world In this framework, all aspects

of meaning which cannot be stated in terms of truth-conditions are regarded as part

Of 'pragmatics', as opposed to truth-conditional semantics In this logic-based terminology (which we will not adopt), much of this book would be about pragmatics

1.5 Semantic phenomena

As you can probably appreciate hy now, semantics is such a controversial field that there

isn't even consensus on what it should cover To conclude this chapter, we take a look at

some phenomena which are widely accepted as semantic in nature-that is, at the kind of phenomena any reasonable semantic theory could be expected to cover

Meaning relations

There is general agreement that semantic analysis should give an illuminating account of meaning relations, i.e the systematic relations between word meanings The meaning relations which have attracted most attention by semantic theorists are:

HYPONOMY-where the meaning of one word is included in another; for instance the

meaning of the word human is included in woman and man; the meaning of say is included

in tell promise, and denounce

INCOMPATIBILITY of various kinds-where meanings conjflict; for instance, by being opposites like up and down (complementary antonyms) or hot and cold (gradable antonyms),

or by being in a converse relationship with one another like huy and sell (RELATIOLNAL antonyms), or hy belonging to a set of mutually exclusive words like red, blue, green, etc Most textbooks also say that another important semantic relationship is synonymy or sameness of meaning, but as soon as the term is introduced they have to add that true synonymy is so rare as to be almost non-existent The usual examples are pairs like father and dad, or couch and sofa, but these are better termed 'near-synonyms because most people wouid say that they don't convey exactly the same meanings

Semanticists in the structuralist tradition have spent a great deal of time devising schemes for classifying different kinds of meaning relation Why? Because the basic idea behind structuralism is that meanings is not exist 'in themselves’, but only in relation to one another

as part of an overall system of cross-cutting contrasts and similarities Whether or not one accepts the structuralist approach, however, it is obvious that an intuitive knowledge of such meaning relations is part of ordinary linguistic competence You can learn more about meaning relations by doing the Exercises at the end of this chapter

Entailment, contradiction, and paraphrase

Strictly speaking, the term 'meaning relations’ is reserved for relations between individual words, but speakers also have an intuitive knowledge of certain relationships between single words and word combinations ( phases and sentences), and these ought to be accounted for

by an adequate theory of semantics ENTAILMENT is a relationship that applies betvveen two sentences, where the truth of one implies the uuth of the other because of the meanings

of the words involved CONTRADICTION is where a sentence must be false because of the meanings involved

Many obvious entailments comes about because of hyponymy relations between words

For instance, because the meaning 'do something to' is included in eat, the sentence MAX ate

the pizza entails Max did something to the pizza Similarly, many obvious

contradictions come about because of incompatibility, as for instance, It moved up and down

at the same time or It was (all) blue and it was (all) red However, there are entailments and contradictions which are subtler than these The contradictoriness of I'm my own mother, for

instance, does not come from any special relation between I and mother And if I love her

entails I want the best for her, this isn't on account of any obvious relation between the

individual words either

Perhaps the most important relationship for the whole enterprise of linguistic semantics is PARAPHRASE - the relationship between a word and a combination of other words with the same meaning For instance, most people would agree that loud means something like "can

be heard from far away" Ultimately, the whole proiect of describing or explaining word- meanings depends on paraphrase because we must use words - or other equivalent symbols -

to explain other words

Homonymy, polysemy, and generality

HOMONYMY designates a situation in which different words (homonyms) happen

accidentally to have the same form; as for instance, bank (as in She robbed the bank) and

bank (as in We walked (along the bank), left (as in Turn left) and left (as in He left\ port (as

in The ship left port) and port (as in He drank port) Generally speaking, sameness of form is taken to refer to phonetic form If it is necessary to distinguish terminologically between sameness of phonetic form and sameness of graphic form, one can use the terms homophone and homograph, respectively Because English spelling is not phonetically consistent, there are many English homophones which are not homographs ( e.g two, to, and too; sight and

site, or sun and son ); and vice versa, there are some homographs which are not homophones

(e.g the written form live can be pronounced to rhyme with grve, or with strive)

Defining homonyms as "different words with the same form", as I have just done, does not

take into account the fact that the term "word" can be used in several different ways Linguistics often distinguish between "word as lexeme" and "word as word-form" Lexemes are words through of as items in the vocabulary of a language (roughly, the expressions one would expect to find listed in a dictionary); for example, talk, think, go Word-forms are variant forms which lexemes adopt due to the grammatical rules of the language; for

example, talk, talks, talked Word-forms of the same lexeme can be quite dissimilar from one

another (e.g think, thought), or even completely unrelated in form (e.g goes, went) When

we look at things from this point of view, we can see that it is possible to have partial homonymy: a situation in which some word-forms of tvvo different lexemes are identical, but others are not (cf Lyons 1995: 55-8) For example, the same word-form found can belong either to the lexemefind (as in I can 7 fmd my pen) or to the lexeme found (as in Hefounded the bank in 1922) Since homonymy is not a meaning-based phenomenon we will not pursue these complications here

POLYSEMY designates a situation in which a single word has a set of related meanings Many- perhaps most -words are polysemous For example, the noun chip can mean (i) a small piece of some hard substance which has been broken off from something larger, e.g a chip of wood/ glass; (11) a small cut piece of potato which is fried for eating, e.g Can 1 try

om ofyour chips ?; (iii) a small but vital piece of a computer, e.g It's got a faster chip than the old one The meanings are related because they all contain the component "small piece".

Polysemy ( i.e the existence of several distinct-but-related meanings) must be distinguished from semantic GENERALITY This designates a situation in which a word has

a single general meaning which can be used in different contexts Consider, for example, the word wrong as used in these two sentences: We thought that the war was wrong and It was wrong not to thanh your host It would be easy to jump to the conclusion that there are two different meanings involved ( roughly, immoral" vs "improper"), but closer thought will show that it is possible to formulate a single meaning which is applicable to both contexts; roughly, saying it is wrong (to do such-and-such ) means that "if one thinks about it, one can know that it is bad (to do such-and-such)" Admittedly, it is not always easy to tell the difference between polysemy and generality

A useful indicator that we are dealing with polysemy, rather than with generality, is the presence of different grammatical properties associated with the (proposed) different meanings Consider the verb to skip, for instance: How many meanings are involved in the following sentences?

a The children skipped happily down the street

b We skipped the first chapter

Even without our intuitions as native speakers of English, we can tell that two distinct

meanings are involved because skip is an intransitive verb in (a), but a transitive verb in (b)

The existence of different meaning relations can also be diagnostic of polysemy For example, one piece of evidence that the word faithful is polysemous is the existence of two corresponding nouns, faithfulness and fidelity To describe the quality exhibited by a faithful friend, a faithful servant, or a faithful disciple we would speak of this person's faithfulness, but to describe the quality designated hy a husband or lover who is faithful we would speak

of his or her fidelity This suggests that faithful has two ( related ) meanings, one of which is more specialised than the other Further support for this idea is that the word unfaithful relates only to the more specialised, "love-related” meaning; one could have an unfaithful husband bui not an *unfaithful friend

Even when it is clear that two distinct meanings are involved, it can sometimes be difficult

to decide whether these meanings are related closely enough to warrant being considered polysemic This problem arises particularly when working with a language which is not one's mother tongue Ultimately the decision depends on being abie to state the common component of meaning, in order to assess how important it is to the semantic structure of the two meanings involved

What would we want to say about to skip for example? Is the meaning in (a) closely related

to the meaning in (b)? For someone who is not a native speaker of English they could seem quite unrelated Let's analyse each meaning more closely The (a) meaning (as in skipping down the street) involves a certain sequence of moving the feet: each foot touches the ground more than once before the other foot does, unlike the normal sequence in walking or running

in which one foot touches the ground followed immediately by the other That is, physically skipping involves missing out one of the usual 'steps' The (b) meaning (as in skipping a chapter or skipping a class) also involves missing out one element in the normal or expected sequence Now that we have analysed each meaning, we can see the connection between them more clearly and would have little hesitation in recognising polysemy.

Another phenomenon which is often called polysemy concerns examples like table; (noun,

as on the tabie) and tablez ( verb, as in Don't table that document) Most linguists would say

that even through table; and table2 are identical in form and closely related in meaning, they must be different words because they belong to different part-of-speech categories Strictly speaking, therefore, such a situation doesn't quality as polysemy but you will sometimes see

it designated as such; some linguists use the term heterosemy instead Other examples are

behind, ( preposition, as in behind the couch ) and behind (noun, as in He kicked me in the behind)

There are some Exercises on polysemy and homonymy at the end of this chapter

Connotations

What are 'connotations' ? Unlike most of the technical terrms of linguistics, connotation

exists as a part of everyday English, where it means something like 'a subtle aspect of meaning’ In the strict linguistic sense, CONNOTATIONS are shifting and idiosyncratic associations which a word may have for some speakers but not for others (as opposed to the fixed and generally accepted meaning of a word) For example, the words feminist and environment tend to have very different connotations depending on a person's attitudes and experience

Sometimes, however, even linguists slip up and use the term connotation to refer to an aspect of word-meaning which is, so to speak, subjective and value-laden For instance, one textbook says that stingy sees the attitude toward money as bad and thrifty sees it as good But- and this is the crucial point- these evaluational components are integral to the meanings involved and are therefore not connotations People are judgemental creatures ft stands to reason that many word-meanings incorporate evaluational components Connotations in the strict sense of the word have only a minor place in semantic analysis, since they are idiosyntactic and not part of word-meaning They are important in the study of semantic change and variation in the speech community, but we will not touch on these matters in this book

Collocations and fixed expressions

The term COLLOCATION refers to a combination of words - usually, to a frequently found combination A fixed expression, as Wie term suggests, refers to a collocation which is fixed to the extent that it could be listed in a comprehensive dictionary Some semantic theorists believe a complete semantic analysis of a word should provide a basis for understanding its appearance in at least some kinds of fixed expression For instance, they would say that the meaning description of snow and mouse should help account for the expressions white as snow and quiet as a mouse Most people find it easy to accept that the meaning of snow includes the component 1t is white’, but many wouldn't go as far as saying that the meaning of mice includes reference to the fact that mice are quiet Similarly, some semantic theorists believe that a complete explication of rage and blue, for instance, would help us see the sense in expressions like a ragingstorm or having the blues; but others disagree

How far collocational possibilities follow from meaning is a contentious point, and, iike most interesting questions about meaning, one which cannot be resolved vvithout a workable method for deciding on and stating meanings in the first place In modern linguistics, the most detailed theory of collocation is that of the Russian linguists Jurij Apresjan, Igor Mel'cuk, and Alexsandr Zolkovskij (Zholkovsky).

collocation paraphrase

connoiaion tradi olysemy referent

seyelpedic knowledge penane mengaet

entaiiment semantic primiiv

family resemblance semantic epresenation

generality sense

homonymy

hy incompatibility sponomy plac, th onal of men seaning: conceptual

‘meaning relations Semioi, strctualist

EXERCISES AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

+ next to a problem meuns that a solution or some commentary can be found atthe end of the book

11+ In daily life, people use the words mean, meaning, etc in a wide variety of ways, including sometimes to indeae eference Tn the following examples mark whether Wha intended is sense (S) or reference (R

a, Extinguish has the same meaning as put out SIR ‘When he ‘my ex\ he meant Helen

& {you lok out the window, youl se who Iman, SiR

2+, Decide whether the following are examples of polysemy or of homonymy

a bark (of adog vs ofa tree)

bf tal (of a coat vs ofa in aoa vs fi

G steer to gue young desexed bull)

+ Như te Đệ Test Now ry the best,

nibs cid ot fore

b Lean see the reason frit What did you see?

‘The dancer al wre atonal dress

4 Don't patronise m Talay paris his plas

4, Comer lone pin of sees and eid inca ae wheter an cap ‘or polysemy In case of polysemy, state clearly what the relationship between

themaniag

a, Lend me your pet ‘They put the pigs in the pen,

b.T got ‘The lip ofthe cup was chipped a eut lip,

« She landed the first punch We all got stuck into the pu

«d, When I started, couldn't even drive ina nail

Suzie decide she'd better drive

5 The following expressions all have something odd about them Say what it is in each case, and what it cells us about the meanings of the words involved in each case’ intentionally murder, accidentally chase, seruinise carefully, wailed silently circumnavigate around, male uncle

A mone nthe caper wilting est hes Kind of ators Complementary anon ae Hic endive win the eleva domat af m ng have to be either one othe ser, Gratale antonyms on the other bands allow an Cold Relational anionyms (or converses are pais in which the elatonship Between the two antonyms

(a) cruet-kind (b) win-lose (c) grandparent-granadchild (d) present-absent (e) quictty-shwly

() serve-receive (in tennis) (g) soft-loud

7 For ach of ths fellows pas, sy hte he lansip Best he ow worl fone of hyponymy IF itis, identify the hyponymy and the superordinate, ic, the broader more inclusive word: for example, terrier ia hyponymy ofthe superoninate do (a) cottage-house (b)team-club (c) run-sprin (d)king-queen (e) chess-game () hot-warm

8 Consider the pair of words given in (a)-a) below, and decide which of the following terms tex cats the aon: gral aon, comply anonym ana conyms, homonyms, hypon} (a) lndondtenat (0) hihfow fe) tort (4) teacclearm () death uder-nake (noel oak) eset (8) horwarm 0) faeperc someone somchad keo (

1 Ewe, a language of West Aftica, comes from Adzomandas {ibg) Deuonry of Eve Homonyes Carly const each st a om dp fra

meanings th here i omonymy sone ae tld meanings of single word that there is polysemyésome are separate words because they belong to different parts-ol-speech, pata in meaning use the ‘Senses’ given are not distinct; instead, there is a general meaning which is «for some forms, there is neither homonymay nor polysemy fpplicable to the varios uses To give You a clear idea of Whats involved ty Your hand with the set of four forms dzo shown below

1 consider the data below Take your time This will need careful thought There is some ghe nlươnton and sôuce sec dượ

nya to case (avy)

fy to wash late) purge of it

CRUISE, D.A, (1980, Lexical Semantics Cambridge: Cambridge Universiy Pros: ch 4 xical Relations’ (pp 84-111) Ere, UMBERTO (988), Semotes and the Philosophy of Language London: The Macmillan Press Ltd: ch.2 Dictionary vs Encyclopedia’ (pp 46-86)

CHAPTER 2

INTRODUCTION TO LEXICAL SEMANTIC

2.1 The nature of words meaning

In s descriptive introduction lo meaning ruc a his i is inevitable thatthe meanings of

‘worl hold loom lage, ten though n moe fomalyaviened acount ines fet rely uname ae in ede realtone ofthe ius sles There fof course, ices reputable josticatone for nich neglect However most linguistically mon) people have an intton tht meaning i intimately bound up ih inven words indeed ti par exelece, i wha words are fer, Whi sch an inion seriously uneresintes ote aspects of mening, iis min sel, wong, odo mem soul Ty hoan Tan hột be neatly coma int a avoured formalization, Hence ik oh penn apex of word the preset and the fllowing eight chapters wll be devoted to varius aspect Of fxs semantics,

2.11 What is a word?

Thực ba been a ret deal of discussion of te nature ofthe word a grammatical uit, to much even to summarize here Most of NẠI lộ ave some idea of what we ate dealing wath The notion has notoriously resisted Zeevan to our conerns, Bt it 5 precise definition, Probably the best approach is a prototypic one: what is a prototypical word Ike? Well or our purposes the lass aatezaton sa minal parma sent will serve This attributes two features to a prototypical wor

{ottcan altered by inserting new material be moved about inthe sentence, rat eas its postion lave oor consents

«a cannot be eed or 8 prs sender es {0 a sentence, we are by and large obliged to treat its trond ss alr invisible wholes, Lets se by how this works Take snnee liked):

‘opposed (not only) to (creeping) denationalization, but ete ©

Notice thatthe only possible insertion points between words Words, of course, by spaces in wing although nt usualy hy silences in speech They also have aare separated

characteristic internal strueture, in that they protetypically oot(This notion will become clearer below, but, for instance, the lexical roots of the have no more than one lexical following words are shown im capitals

GOVERNment reORDERing STRONGIy deNATIONalization

oF ‘Some words, such as HEDGE-HOG, BUTTER-FLY, and BLACK-BOARD seem to have tore han oe lx roo, These, however, ae api, and fr many ofthe its possible target te apaen rot ae ot ally slonomous semana, but form usd Other words have lexical rots tll: these re the so-called grammatical werd ike the, rand of There wil be move onthe lexiaivnon-lexca distinction below

AL this point itis necessary to be somewhat more precise about what we mean hy a word

purposes): h s of d XNonld út, generally speaking, expect hen o have separate entres in x dictionary, On the wre the same word for crossword purposes, but we would expect them to have SSparte dictionary ens and they are therefore dierent words in he seond sense, Fer tnd Termes, Word fora the name sugges ae indviuated by thet form, wheter Die groupings ox eepic (nest of cur cxanples ‘il be Bot) lecmes can be egtded as ‘or more word forms, which are individuated by their roots and/or seat Mies Soran us, rnnng, and ar the word fom feonging othe same sxeme run, whi ae tụng ad sated bdøng to» deren lene Gistngushed fom the former by its rls, obey" bays obeying sod choy Belong toa ingle xem and ah, se ‘lsobeying, and disobeyed despite having the same root as the fust set, belong to a lexeme, distinguished this time by th possesion ofthe van as ass A simple est forthe dervational fixes (he mater les and conve) th hey ae ever ranma Sbligaeny Por ius, Tok ‘obey can be substituted by chau giving an ungeanmtcal encnce Ths Tr tne oF al oecauences of aie: Othe allix ‘ing, showing that itis not a derivational, but an inflectional affix: word forms that differ only in respect of inflectional affixes belong to the same lexeme, ft is the word-as lexeme which is the significant unt for lexical semantics,

2.1.2 Lexical and grammatiacal meaning

A distinction is often made between lexical and grammatical meaning (sometimes only the Intrisallovved as being propery igus), There are danger in ll chromic: this one smless provided itis borne in mind that in fre is a continuously varying seale,

Or wat gi be termed leicalty and amma A convesent way of presenting ể distinction is in terms of the sorts of element which carry the meaning in question We can

id gamma ais lsat tens a pase ens ate dehtony which graded scale) Cental examples of clos © have the following

Gi) Their principal function isto articulate the grammatical structure of sentences,

i Ty cage rlatvely low cae trough ime 0 that a single spk is unlikely to see loss or gain of items fetime, (No new tense m: determiners

ve spendin Engl for Tong tne) I he or

Ge closed’ hence the name) the enogny oes Bed

“These may be contrasted with open-set items, which have the following characte

0 1s ignored) Delon to elmlto lage subttun sos especialy seman plausiiy cc) Je speaker is likely to encounter many'Tosses and gains in single hfe0me (Think of Thee ia relatively rp mover in membership of substation le and

the proliferation Cg el function 40 camry the meaning of entnee of words relating to space travel, or computing, in recent year Both closed an openet ets cary meaning, but tit feet functions mean that there are differences nthe characterises ofthe meanings that thọ EElý cm A lose stems in order tobe abl futon properly as grammatical clement, has to

be able to combine without anomaly with a wide range of roots, and for ths to be possible,

mu hưng a Meaning which Rexle o bead enough or sulfiely atented” no ©

snal contrasts which recur frequently Hence, which ean co-eeur with vast mambers of

ep Ci is no imi tothe "cin oF richness of the meaning an open-set ings element may cary, as, there re no requirements for recut meanings, © wide co sess posi pcllyeany the burden of the seman ontent of tterances Because of the rchnes of their meanings and thet unestited numbers, they partcipten complex peraiigmatc and symagmaic etree, What are called content words (basically nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) Oppo ly t pest moet sul led hero opi) amy ao

fe one or mere cloedt tern form of ss, Leni! wma ofthe meanings of content words, and is oreted principal oth cob that is by and set do these Grammatical semanies eon m the meanings of Closedet tems, However, a set separation betvecn stantial and lexical semis Is

‘not possible because the meanings of the two kinds of element interact in complex ways 2.1.3 Word meaning and sentence meaning

‘complex semantic entities are necessary -built out of words, certainly -having at least the

‘morphemes) form the building blocks for these more complex structures, 1.4 The notion "possible i

‘worth while to pose the question of whether there are any restrictions on possible

‘meanings for vords We may approach this in two stages We can first ask whether there are any universal restrictions; and we can then enguire as to the existence of language-specific restrictions tw tae the Hist question isthe aytingconecivbl đa could never be the

‘meaning of a word? It will be as well to restrict ourselves to notions that ean be expressed by

2 combination of words othervise we shall bein eally deep Water-One ine of inking cn Đề i0 of elaily que my be howhr ano angus cold poss hive word meting, for imei o hec west ona simy mong while deny someting quickly" T eonfese that T would be astoished to find such 4 word, But the reason is no that itis theoretically impossible, but that it would be of such limited utility Languages have tobe communicated, (Of cours, uur von can eve words this doesnot invalidate the basic point that words at some stage must be motivated in terms

Now let us look ata difierent son of ease Take the sentence (6):

(1) The woman drank the wine stow The notion "rink slowly" cou aly be levicalizad (Le exrsied by a single word we all, such as qugff, and Sip, which combine the meaning of

beverage” (in Mary does dik, sel ust have an range ie) In conta thọc

‘meaning "The woman drank" (bi he wine slowly” (enn this system, Bsk tine Would mean "the woman dank wine nod The Woman drank blenk Would m woman drank the wine slowly” 1¢ seems clear that here we are in the ren Mot of

coffee It is perfectly within the bounds of possibility that th ‘Very sweet even "vey sweet co

be (Ge any adjective applied to coffee

ud be automat iteated), What i the ifeence between the pose and posible cases} There sem tobe to paso he answer, Fist 2 word mating isnot wed o rad the wal subjected dvd, Second, possible word meanings ae Sonsained in a strange way by se ie dependencies, If ness ieuish dependent and independent components 0V + Combination The indepenlent component is the one which determines the semantic relaions ofthe combina

with other items Thus the oddness of, say a very winds stabuubl ow somaricincompeibiiy between large and wind Wei inherent clash betweon ery and wid, asthe normally ofa very ht wind demonstrates By Similar easoning, the independent item in warm milk is mill and in dink

|warm milk is drink By following this line of reasoning, we can establish chains of semantic dependencies Foran, the chan over oun boy

"boy"

mm hat Tor dank warm miki milk” "drink!

“The constrain that we are looking at says tha the elements that constitute the meaning of a ord mus fom a oninous dependency ein This means meaning of word ms fom a y chain, This cans fst dt there must be a reltion of dependeney ens This tules out "wine slowly” a a posible word meaning, because the "wine" and “slowly” in "Drink wine slowly Second the

completed by an external kem ay of approaching the guenion under discussion is t take an extensional "hot iscsion wl ea only wth he fit of san wil foto Putman (058), Names,

bat also hy the by tober means of singular,

leas in English, The cảmactedpulon of numesbily sate process event and soon ‘would require reference to adjectives and verbs, as well as nouns.)

We hl hse est of eae ivednsayng wat namely eee 0

8 parila som of aes any, physica bjs T «of physical object seems

to involve at atthe nouns of pete lane chay in space and time, and

st il atc ually ameable- A couple of quotations fm Chomaky are Yelevant he from surroundings, However, not all physical tien by these

o the mos elementary notion we hoe, te notion pial abject seems tobe quite complex One wings of an aeroplane is an object, but itslef, though equally continuous, is not (1976:208)

(Since, in an obvious sense, the left half of an aeroplane wing is a physical thing, we may interpret Chomsky as talking about nameability.)

function and appearance, the left half is not separated from the rest ofthe wing hy any salient tunction or visual discontinuity, nor does it behave in a characteristic way In this way, the lef par ofan sro wing ies fom an ere, which is sully speed om he the ea, ad the tp ofthe tongue, which has no vss separateness, but basis own Chavste fens ata spcil ace nour expenence af bodes Notice that come

Chomsky’ exmples of LIMB and HERD ae moe dif and controversial, itt mst

bs soz th one “ted nt ae nen sch as feces, 3 Palma slight

kì oie independ names ens genraly show ơn or ore) ofthe flowing

ur

@ The collection eatvelyspatio-temporally contiguous ene, foes, vi, Gi) tis the product of human agency (Fence, village, artistic installation ti), The members ofthe calston fon R's function no fulfled hy any of them separately (fence, bikini) Notes at uth Chany and Plan ino dino bewesn singly sea objects and collectives But the criteria are not clear Pulman refers propor nam but novees rege st lt which are

1d proper names like the United States or the

collective words like her,

Commomvealth”, (Notice that the possession of one of the features mentioned above tobe mcs fortes clletve words) Bu what is mea hy ae regarded ord Ui ee can tke paral concord wi eb: The commit ved ths is note case with for instance, pile The pleofdonesae lack homsty isnot much mere expt for LIMB, although te it for MERD nth ese of LIMB, he gives as the son of sentence which would prove that there was a genuine word LIMB: something lke The LIMB ofthe dog is brown Actually sch cases arena ae The figs of this we sgt aten means simply thet the leaves ofthe eee ae ht eee CChomsky's requirements for HERD ate petty It scems that for HERD to be a bona fide example apart of acow must coun sss part of HERD (which it elearly doesnot for the ‘normal’ word herd) Notice that this criterion would rule outfoliage: one would not say The flag of dhs ue has prominent wis, bu The aves of ts us have Prominent

veins (Similar: obs priceless bray of iat eons has lost several pages) But its not Clear that has for fee er (an sed hy Puiman a boa ie singular non-clletves) I the separ and “Cyan posts whch cota a ene each ad hole in it, would one sa ce has holes init of The fence poles have holes in them? Mould be happier with he later On the eer han T would be fappy wih You cn 7 wea fis tiki sce thle, so This in ae infor T sspect that thee iit fat, no sharp dsinetion between the HERD type of example and the herd tp Lam inclined wo apree with Chomsky, họa ve to the exten that the HERD Obviously similar invetiaion nes o be cared out ơ ses actos, roceres and events, and so on, (0 see whi detertine naneabity hy a singe lx (ntce that rope me algo) conned om fa more controversial status ae ke the putative impossible! worl ene and succve (ackendoff 1990-261) Let us consider benter frst This is propose sally coherent

converse of enter which cannot be lexically realized, Sentences such as (7) ate fully norma

@ lary enter the room,

Tre proposed conven otis would be (8)

a2) seat Jon pack he ese it ys, (3) “The constraints on word meaning discussed above Would seem to be universal in nature | sent John a parcel; it reached him yesterday, However, ete a also exist constaits proseribe the packaging together of certain sorts of meaning in a single word A single of more language specie type Somme languages scm Aanple vll suffee Consider seen (13)

4) in up the stairs

tere, the word an encapases to notions that of movement, and tht of manne This

a Gominon pattern in Engl

15 Staggered it the rom, John craviled across the road ald throug he office, te However, this pattern is not possible in many languages including French, In French, such senenes met Be ender ayn (5)

“ od s

mounted the st

2.2 The major problems of lexical semanties

Linguine wi dre hort commitments wil sve dfn sccounts of vhm te neuval summary

2.2.1 Description of content

Describing content is in a sense the most obvious task: how do we say what a word means? theoy, boauleien trọ choluy nha mai tha he an he meaning of not areaherent one; and For those who believe thre i sch thing the nature ofthe deseripton it wll ang ersaly om what sor hing it is Believed tobe We shall look belly below

at some of the options

2.2.4 Word meaning and syntactic properties

‘An important question is whether and to what extent the syntactic properties of words are inept of ote contol ye mening Tete ae tl many et ies om this

2.3 Approaches to lexical semanties

2.3.1 One-level vs two approaches

A major viding ie which simnles seman isthe question of wheter a iinetion 1 be made between semantics and encyclopaedic knowledge Those who believe such ison cn ‘make and lear to recognize an almost infinite variety of speech sounds, but in any be mad gen dụ an alogy wth phonetics snd phomlosy Human beings paritlar language ony» andl of thee function distinctively to convey Means, of enter into systematic relations of any complexity These are true linguistic elements on the ‘sound’ side of language (Saussure's expression plane) In a similar way, the variety of ‘raw’ esis i uly iis, but omy Hed numberof hese ate uly Ung ad

án (Han) snemhie Tomtzaton, One cerion svageted for recognizing Mingus

‘meaning is involvement with syntax, whether by virtue of being

‘meaning carried hy some grammatical element, or because it couelates with such factors as

saeemen pater or hategraion of majors Partisans ego searing (or knowledge) to the y

han bon pH fanl take the view that all meaning is conceptual, and thatthe ext level of structure proposed Vhích sư sienacttry senfip, Moxsobiite ngs would

T rejects the assumption that a motivated extension of a word sense {does not need to be recorded in the lexicon, The basic reason for this is that lexical rules only specily potential extensions of meaning, only some of which become conventionalized and none ine ls ser dnincton between hese and hoe which are eased (npn continuous seale of establishment), Take the case of drin tis scl wt i being drunk, bat obviously one would nor wih to sec wr drink corresponding to ble liquid To this extent the monosemists and Öe poyacnies vold ossible for some panilrdinkable tems obs incorporated ino a specific eding for nk In pri,

any class of beverage could be incorporated in ths wa ‘alcoholic beveraged” can be encoded thus: Im afiaid ni is sured ining sean Now in English, only

ith frruit juice instead of alcohol, but itis a fact

in ini his could ive happened

about lexicon that drink has one of tese posites, but no the other The mjoriy view nowadays i probably mononec bat te ponon adoped in is ook i polysemic,

2.2.3 The componential approach

Om of he eat and ot pete and wiped ways of aos word

‘meaning is (0 think of the being constructed out of smaller, mien neta ans of ean Semswhat ont snalonyof he sonic sacar of physics, but phonology) These ‘semantic atoms’ are variously known as Semes, semantic features, semantic component, semantfe markers, semantic primes (o cite afew ofthe

terms) Here, the merest outline of the approach is presented; componential semantics is tweated in greater detail in Chapter Probably the fst sateen of a componcrtil programme fr seramice wikin modern linguistics ws due to Hjelmslev (1961) He believed as a matter of principle that the meaning Side ofthe inguiste sign should show the same stactrng principe as he youd side, Fr him the notion of reduction was of mgjor importance The phonologi

of thousands of diferent sine in a anguags canbe analy led, and

mn ft these, in turn, can be shown to be built out of phonemes blonsing to an inventory of fy ro, thus avg te timate Dhonloel bailing locks, the disinetve eats, whose numberof the ode fa dozen nthe the m

way, 8m ess numerous tan he tsk of in Being ape Hn dd ot ane * shouldbe reducible to combinations drawn fom an inventory any u tensions, cach nga being nique and nding an ately own terms, nor were Ms igure’ his tem for he bc clements) in any way abstract: hey were discovery of set of basie words, out of whose meanings all other commuted, Fismlev'was dhe fist sca seal the approach was developed considerably by European linguists, with ‘A component approach developed in Americ, ‘sonnet independently (ad largely in a German ignorance) of the movement in Europe It fist appeared amongst anthropological linguists, sys combinations fom Hite at of estes A new veo, propo hy Ka ad

2.3.4 ‘Holist’ approaches”

[is a belie of all componentialists that the meaning of a word can, in some use s

be spevted, n ssolauon họm the meanings af oiber words in the language, Among philosophers’ of language, this is knowrras the localist view, For a localist, contextual variation can be accounted for by rules of interaction with contexts The contrary position is the holistie view, according to which the meaning of a Word cannot be known without

taking into account the meanings of all the other words in a language There are various versions of holism: two will be outlined here

2.341 Haas

T first learnt semanties from W.Haas (1962,1964), whose highly idiosyncratic view of

‘meaning derives from an aspect of Witlgensten's work, namely, his use’ theory of meaning, which i eneapelated in the dictum: "Dont look fr the meaning Tok fot he ws" In ther rs the meaning of an expression isthe use to which it is put AS it stands, ths isnot very

Ni Merely sggenv, Hats gave it personal twist inspired by TRF dictum shall be known hy the company they keep" This interprets ‘use’ as the contexts, actual and potent, in hich he expeson oes nomally (without anomaly) Hass

‘went further than this, He said that the meaning of a word was a semantic field (not the usual seme field) which hd two dimensions: syntagmate dimension, in which all possible (grammatically well formed) contexts of the ranged in order of normality Relative normality was for as a primitive Ta peiniple, tontext includes exralinguisic context; but Haas argued that since every relevant aspect of extralinguistic context ean be

as understood inthe meaning hy Haas, constitutes its of every other word {be we inpied bee by Leibnzs monsd) ere therefore ao distinction bettoca Word

he defined it) actually constituted the meaning of the word: here, the view will be taken that the semantic field of a word reflects its meaning,

“he og of the prototype approach canbe taced to Wingestn (1972) (who inated

‘more thas one line of thinking that Was to iniluence linguistics) He is usually eredited Being the fist to Shang te clase Aisccian notion of mural cqsgiies as being definable in terms an sulcent tere pt forward the wel known example of GAME, “ate hn reader o come up withthe nessa and sufficient 2 for something beings game None of the obvious suggestions is et involves mse aetvity has winners and losers played for amusement has ules of thee is elie excsive 1 gues or neces fo Something to be game

Witgenstein proposed the nation of family resbance the members of large family have, and there may be members who share no features, bu these will none the less be linked tothe others by a cain of resemblance Although important the Aristotelian theory, this notion isnot very helpful for semantic analysis in breakin the stranglehold of

Wittgenstein did not say what family resemblance consisted of, in particular, how in-family

ike many cognilive linguists, however, he is strongly componentaist and believes that may ete tlatomtips should (ais) be accounted for in ems of sae seat bing bo also has a strong predilection for Jackondot fom te cogntv ings ih coninued espoul of the Chomsky precepts malized representations Peaps tic mos imporancharscorii separating

of strong innateness, the insufficiency of general cognitive abilities to explain all linguistic behaviour, and the autonomy of syntax,

CHAPTER 3

ON ENTERING THE REALMS

iow is it that I got ideas in my head when I hear sounds of my Tanguage, but not when T hear sounds of another language?

Humpty Dumpty said to Alice that he could make a word mean exactly what he wanted really?

In du moe nesting oak ao te meanings of wor an sens han 0 try to talk about what svertheless itis worth a few words at least, to know there “The English verb to mean can be used for many things: in just about any case where you we are going and ow to Fethings together can learn something important, F, from something else, X, we can say 'X means F (to you) For example if we can iow that it going ori om some dak clouds lowing wits perfectly natural to say ‘Those clouds mean rain,’ The optional ‘to you) is used in case you twould conclude i but others might not

that nasal accent means he comes from Chicago,

how she feels means Jot to me

who do you mean to refer to by that?

who do you mean by that guy with an ering?

‘what does the word teacher mean

stat do you meu y hạng

Really however, we ate not s0 interested in this panicular word of English, even if phieeehe wom Te abow Ít As wold-be sient we ae incre rater what he

‘world of meaning in language is like, and freely accept that English words might not match that world to closely The noun meaning i laser to Out needs, frit eannot be Used the ways the verb cau, Q Which of the ways that to mean was used above can be paraphrased (i said in a different

‘way) withthe word meaning? The last, for example, can be paraphrased as “The meaning of (the word) freedom for me is

On a most basic level, th

‘meaning: what is communicated ae one pen Họ ant meting That we te interested in the meaning that ca sed in language, meaning that desribes something There Some other things tat we can fan 09 Tseng toa person ike his soil or geographical oigim his ©

‘meaning If we heard 'Gimme a cup o! wa

he comes from as well as the fact that he is thrsty-but all that is hardly his meaning He did from London, only that he wanted some water ~ and he might be an actor

pt things are seldom subject to much Anh và deserve meaning can usu be dsinguished as being easy controled hy all

‘competent speakers, OF course, some people control it less well, but by learning more about itwe can all contro it better Is there any dferencebeveen syingShe gave me man fom Yk ll am gave us a ca le Yorkshire voice? itt were a New Varker would Tbe these, pretending Language as a tool

‘hat makes human beings human and wat lowed us dosnt al Siker animal oat

typeof animal his sme pei weapon et defense ike runing fast or sharp tet, sharp cas, Tons claws ora long neck excl in none ofthese way, but we have language tu claws and teeth and speed? Simple: ten men armed with only ake a Uger ov an clephant by surrounding i and coordinating the actions so that several attack its weak spots whenever it attacks one of them, Some animals

ke dog or sheep use number sa weapon; ut in coordinating ous imal spread out in many different places! Th

$e limited in shat they can communicate tit ling se to call them languages The

Ios extensive on known tht of some Roey bss, ca ae communicate only s location = where some ne wean Ow guage hy ‘communicate siping" Tection, emotions, fats, procedure, possibile, fantasies, ies and

age

thy boerthan herpes in thkng who lang

Q Might there be something that human language cannot communicate? What? Please tell

oth an think much better than the great apes that

‘Whit tons hive you invented recent? Out languages give us amos om ax —

Q When you take an elementary course in chem poetry, oF any subject, a lot of your Short goes int leaning te specialized vocabuly, What ae you realy lamang?”

3.2 Communication oof ammunition n which We rinsed then that eee 0 people on

1 her mouth ( or hand movements in sign language, or pencil marks ening (or watching or reading) Of course it is not enon simply to make sounds, for sadn ng bud w8 su buted or exvee

«que tu comprends ke or simpÌy

Hi ha any idea of wt Twas saying Unless you knew some, Chinese, Tench Japanese and Eskimo sespecively We dont have communication unless the reeivers get

‘ideas from the sounds, Esc hat tou ey as et the es 1 pronouns he sun [a] ạ the right way, they might think I was agreeing with them if they thought I was speaking

Figure 1.1 Diagram of “good communication

Communication is successful if the idea they get (the impact on them) is the same as what I intended them to get (my intent) I they don’ match, then we have poor or no