Understanding Semantics

Understanding Semantics Understanding Semantics, Second Edition, provides an engaging and accessible introduction to linguistic semantics. The first part takes the reader through a step-by-step guide to the main phenomena and notions of semantics, covering levels and dimensions of meaning, ambiguity, meaning and context, logical relations and meaning relations, the basics of noun semantics, verb semantics and sentence semantics. The second part provides a critical introduction to the basic notions of the three major theoretical approaches to meaning: structuralism, cognitive semantics and formal semantics. 7 1 0 2 t s u g u A 6 1 3 0 : 6 0 t a 2 1 . 1 4 2 . 2 4 . 0 9 1 y b d e d a o l n w o D

Key features include: A consistent mentalist perspective on meaning Broad coverage of lexical and sentence semantics, including three new chapters discussing deixis, NP semantics, presuppositions, verb semantics and frames Examples from a wider range of languages that include German, Japanese, Spanish and Russian Practical exercises on linguistic data Companion website including all figures and tables from the book, an online dictionary, answers to the exercises and useful links at routledge.com/cw/loebner . ∑ ∑

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∑ ∑

This book is an essential resource for all undergradua undergraduate te students studying linguistics. Sebastian Löbner is Professor for general linguistics at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany. His main research interests are linguistic semantics and cognitive linguistics.

Understanding Language series ser ies

Series Editors: Bernard Comrie, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany Greville Corbett, Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey, UK

The Understanding Language series provides approachable, yet authoritative, introductions to major topics in linguistics. Ideal for students with little or no prior knowledge of linguistics, each book carefully explains the basics, emphasising emphasising understanding understanding of the essential notions rather than arguing for a particular theoretical position. 7 1 0 2 t s u g u A 6 1 3 0 : 6 0 t a 2 1 . 1 4 2 . 2 4 . 0 9 1 y b d e d a o l n w o D

Other titles in the series:

Understanding Child Language Understanding Langu age Acquisition (forthcoming) Caroline Rowland Understanding Language Testing Dan Douglas Understanding Morphology Understanding Morpholog y, Second Edition Martin Haspelmath and Andrea D. Sims Understanding Phonetics Understanding Patricia Ashby Understanding Phonology, Understanding Phonolo gy, Third Edition Carlos Gussenhoven and Haike Jacobs Understanding Pragmatics Understanding Jef Verschueren Understanding Second Understanding S econd Language Acqu Acquisition isition Lourdes Ortega (forthcoming forthcoming)) Understanding Sociolinguistics ( Enam Al-W Al-Wer er

Understanding Syntax, Third Edition Understanding Maggie Tallerman For more information on any of these titles, or to order, go to www.routledge.com/linguistics

Understanding Language series ser ies

Series Editors: Bernard Comrie, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany Greville Corbett, Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey, UK

The Understanding Language series provides approachable, yet authoritative, introductions to major topics in linguistics. Ideal for students with little or no prior knowledge of linguistics, each book carefully explains the basics, emphasising emphasising understanding understanding of the essential notions rather than arguing for a particular theoretical position. 7 1 0 2 t s u g u A 6 1 3 0 : 6 0 t a 2 1 . 1 4 2 . 2 4 . 0 9 1 y b d e d a o l n w o D

Other titles in the series:

Understanding Child Language Understanding Langu age Acquisition (forthcoming) Caroline Rowland Understanding Language Testing Dan Douglas Understanding Morphology Understanding Morpholog y, Second Edition Martin Haspelmath and Andrea D. Sims Understanding Phonetics Understanding Patricia Ashby Understanding Phonology, Understanding Phonolo gy, Third Edition Carlos Gussenhoven and Haike Jacobs Understanding Pragmatics Understanding Jef Verschueren Understanding Second Understanding S econd Language Acqu Acquisition isition Lourdes Ortega (forthcoming forthcoming)) Understanding Sociolinguistics ( Enam Al-W Al-Wer er

Understanding Syntax, Third Edition Understanding Maggie Tallerman For more information on any of these titles, or to order, go to www.routledge.com/linguistics

Understanding 7 1 0 2 t s u g u A 6 1 3 0 : 6 0 t a 2 1 . 1 4 2 . 2 4 . 0 9 1 y b d e d a o l n w o D

Semantics Second edition Sebastian Löbner

First published in Great Britain 2002 by Hodder Arnold, an imprint of Hodder Education Second edition published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2002, 2013 Sebastian Löbner

7 1 0 2 t s u g u A 6 1 3 0 : 6 0 t a 2 1 . 1 4 2 . 2 4 . 0 9 1 y b d e d a o l n w o D

The right of Sebastian Löbner to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Löbner, Sebastian. Understanding semantics / Sebastian Löbner. -- Second Edition. pages cm. -- (Understanding language) Previous edition published under Hodder Education, the second edition is now published under Routledge after Hodder Education Linguistic titles were acquired in 2012. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Semantics. I. Title. P325.L567 2013 401’.43--dc23 2012048797 ISBN: 978-0-415-82673-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-4441-2243-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-52833-4 (ebk) Typeset in 11 on 12pt Minion by Phoenix Photosetting, Chatham, Kent

Contents


Preface Acknowledgements

ix xi

1

Meaning and semantics 1.1 Levels of meaning 1.2 Sentence meaning and compositionality 1.3 Semantics: its scope and limits Exercises Further reading

1 1 7 14 16 17

2

Dimensions of meaning 2.1 Meanings are concepts 2.2 Descriptive meaning 2.3 Meaning and social interaction: the dimension of social meaning 2.4 Meaning and subjectivity: the dimension of expressive meaning 2.5 Connotations 2.6 Dimensions of meaning Exercises Further reading

18 18 21 28 33 36 37 39 40

3

Ambiguity 3.1 Lexemes 3.2 Lexical ambiguity 3.3 Compositional ambiguity 3.4 Contextual ambiguity 3.5 Meaning shifts and polysemy Exercises Further reading

41 41 44 48 49 57 59 60

4

Meaning and context Part 1: Deixis 4.1 Person deixis 4.2 Demonstratives and place deixis 4.3 Time deixis Part 2: Determination 4.4 Definiteness and indefiniteness 4.5 Quantification

62 62 63 70 72 74 74 83

vi


Contents

4.6 Generic NPs Part 3: Presuppositions 4.7 Presuppositions 4.8 Summary Exercises Further reading

90 94 94 101 102 104

5

Predication 5.1 Predications contained in a sentence 5.2 Predicate terms and argument terms, predicates and arguments 5.3 Verbs 5.4 Nouns and adjectives 5.5 Predicate logic notation 5.6 Thematic roles 5.7 Selectional restrictions 5.8 Summary Exercises Further reading

106 106 108 111 115 120 122 125 130 131 133

6

Verbs 6.1 Argument structure, diatheses and alternations 6.2 Situation structure 6.3 Aspect 6.4 Tense 6.5 Selected tense and aspect systems 6.6 Concluding remark Exercises Further reading

134 135 140 150 157 163 164 165 166

7

Meaning and logic 7.1 Logical basics 7.2 Logical properties of sentences 7.3 Logical relations between sentences 7.4 Sentential logic 7.5 Logical relations between words 7.6 Logic and meaning 7.7 Classical logic and presuppositions Exercises Further reading

167 167 172 175 184 187 191 197 201 202

8

Meaning relations 8.1 Synonymy 8.2 Hyponymy 8.3 Oppositions 8.4 Lexical fields

203 203 205 208 215

Contents

9


vii

Exercises Further reading

219 220

Meaning components 9.1 The structuralist approach 9.2 Applying the structuralist approach to meaning 9.3 Semantic features 9.4 Semantic formulae 9.5 Semantic primes: Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage 9.6 Summary and evaluation of the approaches to decomposition Exercises Further reading

221 223 226 228 237 242 245 246 246

10 Meaning and language comparison 10.1 Translation problems 10.2 Headache, international 10.3 Relativism and universalism 10.4 Berlin and Kay’s investigation of colour terms 10.5 Consequences Exercises Further reading

248 248 251 256 258 262 263 264

11 Meaning and cognition 11.1 Categories and concepts 11.2 Prototype theory 11.3 The hierarchical organization of categories 11.4 Challenges to prototype theory 11.5 Semantics and prototype theory 11.6 Semantic knowledge 11.7 Summary Exercises Further reading

265 266 267 276 279 284 292 298 300 300

12 Frames 12.1 Barsalou frames 12.2 Verbs and frames 12.3 Nouns and frames 12.4 Frames and composition 12.5 Frames and cognition 12.6 Conclusion Exercises Further reading

301 301 311 313 319 321 322 323 324

13 Formal semantics 13.1 Japanese numerals: a simple example of a compositional analysis

325 325

Contents

viii

13.2 A small fragment of English 13.3 Model-theoretic semantics 13.4 Possible-world semantics 13.5 The scope and limits of possible-world semantics Exercises Further reading


330 342 352 358 362 363

References

364

Index

369

Preface


As for many others, my entrance into semantics was formal semantics, about forty years ago. At present, this is still the standard approach in many linguistics departments around the world. Working in the field of semantics my entire academic life, my conviction has grown that formal semantics is not the ideal framework for working one’s way into the rich and fascinating reality of natural language meaning. The perspectives allowed by the formal apparatus developed in formal semantics are far too restrictive. And the aspects of meaning and the semantic phenomena that are neglected, or are simply problematic to deal with, are far too numerous. Above all, formal semantics has little to say about lexical meaning – which, after all, provides the ultimate basis of all linguistic meaning – and, not by chance, it fails to connect semantic theory to cognition. In Understanding Semantics , I have taken a different approach. It is driven by the idea that students of semantics should first grasp the level of meaning which linguistic semantics aims to describe and how this level is related to higher levels of interpretation; they should learn that there are different dimensions of meaning, in addition to descriptive meaning; they should know about ambiguity and about the existence of meaning shifts that interfere with lexical meaning; they should get a notion of the rich inventory of indexical means of expression including deixis, determination and presupposition carriers; they should learn the basics of lexical semantics of nouns and verbs; they should know that there are different theoretical approaches to meaning; and they should get a notion of the fact that linguistic meaning is ultimately a matter of conceptualizing the things we talk about: when we put things into words, we are not just giving a one-to-one mapping of what the world is like – we make a choice by putting things in the particular way we do. Meaning is not just a matter of logical relations and truth conditions. As to sentential meaning, the students need to know about the basic semantic functions of NP determination and the verbal categories of aspect and tense, and they should know the basics of predication. All this should be discussed from a perspective that also takes a look at other languages. On this complex background, the more advanced students may start to work their arduous way into the theory and technicalities of formal semantics. In order to give an idea of the basic notions of this approach, the book offers a substantial basic introduction in the last chapter, and a critique. The second edition of Understanding Semantics is not only a more up-to-date version of the first edition, but is supplied with new sections that considerably broaden the coverage of the field. These include:

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Preface

∑

basic notions of the semantics of word formation (chapters 1 and 12)

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deixis and demonstratives (chapter 4)

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presuppositions (chapters 4 and 7)

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NP semantics (chapter 4)

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verb semantics including voice, aspect and tense (chapter 6)

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Barsalou frames (chapter 12).

The book is accompanied by a website that provides additional support for students and instructors (http://www.routledge.com/cw/loebner). Along with a number of additional minor features, the webpage provides ∑

a checklist of key notions for each chapter, interlinked with

∑

a glossary of all technical terms

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pdf versions of all figures and tables for your use in teaching, presentations, term papers, etc. solutions to the exercises (instructors only).

Acknowledgements


Among the many people that directly or indirectly were of help in writing this book and preparing the second edition, I want to express my gratitude to Daniel Hole, Berlin, who took the trouble of commenting in detail on substantial new parts of the second edition. I would also like to thank Rachel Daw and Nadia Seemungal at Routledge for their kind and competent support and guidance for the second edition.


1 Meaning and semantics


Semantics is the part of linguistics that is concerned with meaning. This is, of course, a very superficial definition. The crucial term ‘meaning’ on which the definition rests has several different readings – a first semantic observation which you will find at the beginning of almost every textbook on semantics. Among the many uses of the notion ‘meaning’, only some belong to the field of linguistic semantics. Meaning is always the meaning of something. Words have meanings, as do phrases and sentences. But deeds may have meaning too. If a government pursues a certain policy, we may ask what the meaning is of doing so. The ‘meaning’ of an action or a policy is what sense it makes or what purpose it serves or what it is good for. More generally, we apply the notion of meaning to all sorts of phenomena that we try to make sense of. The first thing to be stated is that linguistic semantics is exclusively concerned with the meanings of linguistic expressions such as words, phrases, grammatical forms and sentences, but not with the meanings of actions or phenomena. We will approach the problem of linguistic meaning step by step, to arrive at a more precise definition of semantics at the end of this chapter. A more concrete idea of what semantics is about will result when you learn about the many facets of this fascinating discipline in the course of this book.

1.1 LEVELS OF MEANING Even if we restrict the study of meaning to words and sentences, the notion of meaning has to be further broken down into different levels at which we interpret words and sentences. 1.1.1 Expression meaning

Let us get started by looking at a simple example that will illustrate what semantics is about. (1)

I don’t need your bicycle.

This is an ordinary English sentence. Without even noticing, you have already recognized it as such, you have interpreted it and you are probably imagining a situation where you would say it or someone would say it to you. Since you understand the sentence, you know what it means. But knowing what the sentence

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Understanding semantics

means is one thing, describing its meaning is another. The situation is similar with almost all our knowledge. We may exactly know how to get from one place to another, yet be unable to tell the way to someone else. We may be able to sing a song by heart, but unable to describe its melody. We are able to recognize tens of thousands of words when we hear them. But the knowledge that enables us to do so is unconscious. Uncovering the knowledge of the meanings of words and sentences and revealing its nature is the central objective of semantics. Let us now try to determine the meaning of the sentence in (1). We start from the meanings of the words it contains. The main verb in a sentence occupies a key role. So, 1 what is the meaning of the verb need ? Actually, there are two verbs need : an auxiliary verb (as in I need not go) and a full verb. In (1) we have the full verb. It is used with 2 a direct object ( your bicycle) and roughly means ›require‹. We ‘need’ something if it is necessary or very important for us. In (1), what is needed is described by an expression composed of the possessive pronoun your and the noun bicycle. The noun means some sort of vehicle, usually with two wheels and without a motor. The words need and bicycle are the main carriers of information in the sentence, so-called content words. The meanings of most content words are very differentiated because there are thousands of the same kind. All the other elements in our sentence are different in that they represent items from a very limited choice of expressions of the same kind. Such words are called function words and include articles, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions and other ‘small’ words. We will examine these elements one by one. The subject expression I is one of seven personal pronouns in English (I , you, he, she, it , we and they). What is the meaning of I ? If Mary says the sentence in (1), it is Mary who is said not to need the bicycle. If John says (1), it is John. In other words, I is used for the one who says it; more technically: for the one who produces an occurrence of this pronoun. The technical term for using an expression for something is reference. When people use I , they refer to themselves. The entity referred to by an expression is called its referent. The meaning of the pronoun can thus be described as follows: I indicates reference to the speaker. Similarly, the pronoun you indicates reference to the addressee or the addressees. For each personal pronoun there is a corresponding possessive pronoun: I –my, you–your , etc. Your in (1) indicates that the bicycle referred to is linked to the addressee(s). For such a link, there is a broad variety of relations possible. Possession in the sense of ownership is only one option: the expression your bicycle may also refer to the bicycle the addressee is just riding or cleaning or repairing, or even the 3 bicycle they have been talking about for the last ten minutes. The meaning of your can roughly be described as ›linked to the addressee(s)‹.

1 It is common practice in linguistic texts to mark words which are referred to in a sentence, rather than just used, by using italics. In addition, I use italics for emphasis. Whether a word is referred to or used emphatically is always clear from context. 2 › … ‹ quotes are used for meanings and concepts. 3 I use they as a gender-neutral 3rd person singular pronoun.

Meaning and semantics


3

The form don’t is a contraction of the auxiliary verb do and the negation particle not . Don’t contributes two things to the meaning of the sentence. It negates the verb need and thereby turns its meaning into the contrary. In addition, the form don’t contributes present tense. Tense is the indication that the sentence refers to a certain time, e.g. present, past or future time. The actual time referred to depends on when the sentence is uttered. Due to the present tense in (1), we will by default relate the situation described to the ‘present’ time, i.e. the time when the sentence is being uttered. Combining these two components of don’t , we may say: the meaning of don’t is an indication of reference to the time when the sentence is uttered and it turns the situation expressed by the main verb into the contrary. So far this has been an attempt to determine the meaning of each word in the sentence I don’t need your bicycle . This is typical of the work of a semanticist. As you will have noticed, it is not trivial. For a content word, the description of its meaning must be specific enough to distinguish it from all words with other meanings. It would not suffice to describe the meaning of bicycle merely as ›vehicle with two wheels‹ because there are other kinds of vehicles with two wheels, such as motorcycles, kick scooters or kids’ balance bicycles. At the same time, the description must be general enough to cover all cases in which this word could be used. Since one usually imagines a particular context when one tries to think of a word and its meaning, one tends to take the meaning too specifically, disregarding other cases in which the word can also be used. As for function words like pronouns and auxiliaries and for grammatical forms such as present tense, their meanings may at first view seem elusive. But it is possible to account for them too, as our little discussion may have illustrated. If we put all the pieces together, we can describe the meaning of the sentence as a whole. It can be roughly formulated as: ›for the speaker, the two-wheeled vehicle of the addressee(s) is not required at the time when this is being uttered‹. It is very important to realize that the sentence leaves open who the speaker and the addressee(s) are, what particular time is referred to and which bicycle. This is not part of its meaning. Such questions can only be settled if the sentence is actually used on a concrete occasion. What is, however, determined by the meaning of the sentence is how the answers to these questions depend on the occasion when the sentence is used. First, if it is actually used, it is necessarily used by someone who produces the sentence. With I in subject position, the sentence ‘tells’ us that it is the speaker who does not need the bicycle. The use of I functions like an instruction: find out who produced this sentence, this is the referent of I . Second, the use of your presupposes that there are one or more addressees. The sentence describes the bicycle as related to them. Third, if a sentence is uttered, it is necessarily used at a certain time. The time of utterance serves as the reference time for determining what is present, past or future. The present tense part of the meaning of the sentence conveys the instruction: attribute the situation described to the time when the sentence is said. Thus the meaning of the sentence specifies the way in which its reference is determined if and when it is used at some occasion. The meanings of words, phrases and sentences, taken out of any particular context constitute the level of meaning which will henceforth be called expression meaning .

4


Expression is just a cover term for words, phrases and sentences. The term expression meaning covers in particular word meaning and sentence meaning. As you have noticed, the determination of expression meaning requires an abstraction from the use of the expressions in concrete contexts. In this sense, the notion of expression meaning itself is an abstraction and a theoretical construct. But it is justified in the way language is conceptualized not only in linguistics but also in common thinking: we do talk about the meanings of words and complex expressions as such, i.e. we do address this level of meaning. 1.1.2 Utterance meaning 7 1 0 2 t s u g u A 6 1 3 0 : 6 0 t a 2 1 . 1 4 2 . 2 4 . 0 9 1 y b d e d a o l n w o D

Let us now examine what happens when the sentence in (1) is actually used. We will consider two scenarios. SCENARIO 1

1 August 2012, morning. Mary has been planning a trip to town that afternoon. Two days before, she talked with her neighbour John about the trip and asked him to lend her his bicycle. She had lent her car to her daughter and did not know if she would get it back in time. Meanwhile her daughter is back and has returned Mary’s car. Mary is talking with John on her mobile, telling him:

I don’t need your bicycle. Used in this context, the sentence receives a concrete interpretation. References are fixed: the personal pronoun I refers to Mary, the possessive pronoun your links the bicycle to her neighbour John and the time reference is fixed, too: in the given context, the present tense verb will be taken to refer to the afternoon of 1 August 2012. This is clear from the fact that Mary could have said: I don’t need your bicycle this afternoon , without changing the meaning of her utterance. Furthermore, the reference of the grammatical object your bicycle is fixed: it is the bicycle Mary asked John to lend her two days before. This is a different level of meaning, called utterance meaning. It comes about when a sentence with its expression meaning is actually used in a concrete context and all references get fixed. When this happens, another central notion comes into play, the notion of truth. If Mary says (1) in scenario 1, the sentence is true. But in a slightly different scenario it might be false. As long as the sentence (1) is not actually used with concrete reference, it fails to be true or false. The question of truth primarily concerns ‘declarative’ sentences such as the one under review. Only such sentences, when uttered, are true or false. But it matters also for interrogative and other types of sentences. For example, if John asked Mary Do you need my bicycle? , the use of the question form would convey that he wants to know from his addressee whether it is true or false. Let us now imagine a different scenario:


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SCENARIO 2

Same time and place. John’s five-year-old daughter Maggie is playing at her place with her friend Titus. They are playing with a game of cards that display all kinds of vehicles. Titus holds a card that shows a snowmobile. Maggie is eager to exchange this card for one of hers and offers Titus a card with a bicycle. Titus rejects the exchange:

I don’t need your bicycle.


In this scenario, references of I , your and the present tense are fixed accordingly. What is interesting is that in such a context the word bicycle can be naturally interpreted as referring not to a real bicycle but to a card carrying the picture of a bicycle. Are we to conclude that the lexical meaning of bicycle must be taken as covering not only real bicycles but also pictures of this kind of vehicle and things that display such a picture? The answer is ‘No’. The word bicycle literally means real bicycles, but when used in special contexts it can also mean ›picture of a bicycle‹, ›card with a picture of a bicycle‹, ›toy bicycle‹, ›replica of a bicycle‹, etc. or also ›someone riding on a bicycle‹ in utterances like ‘Stop, there’s a bicycle coming!’ This, however, is a matter of utterance meaning. What happens in such cases is that the lexical meaning is shifted for obtaining an utterance meaning that fits into the given context. Such shifts are quite common; there are many shifting-patterns at our disposal. For a general definition of utterance meaning, we need a notion for what was called ‘occasion’, ‘context’ or ‘scenario’ above. The technical term for this is context of utterance. The context of utterance, CoU for short, is the sum of circumstances that bear on reference and truth.

DEFINITION 1

Context of utterance The context of utterance (CoU) comprises the following aspects of the situation in which an utterance is produced: the speaker (or producer) of the utterance the addressee(s) (or recipient(s)) of the utterance the time at which the utterance is produced and/or received the place where the utterance is produced and/or received the facts given when the utterance is produced and/or received ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑

We have seen in connection with (1), how utterance meaning may depend on who the speaker and addressees of an utterance are and at which time it is produced. The place where an utterance is made matters for the reference of expressions such as here, there, upstairs , downtown, etc. as well as for the truth of sentences like It’s raining . Facts matter principally for truth as well as for reference. For example, Mary can only refer to John’s bicycle in such CoUs where a certain bicycle is related to John. CoUs may be real or fictitious. If we read a work of fiction or watch a movie, the relevant facts and figures are those of the story.

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Against this background, utterance meaning can be defined as the meaning that results from an expression being used and interpreted in a given CoU. Utterance meaning derives from expression meaning on the basis of the particulars provided by the CoU. The notion of utterance meaning does not include all that an addressee may make of an utterance in a particular CoU. Addressees usually make all kinds of inferences. For example, in scenario 1, John may infer that Mary is still planning to make the trip since otherwise she would have told him; that she would have asked him to lend her his bicycle if she could not have used her car; that, however, her daughter is back with the car and that Mary is not going to lend her the car again on that afternoon; that Mary will take the car for her trip; that she considers herself able to drive, etc. All this is not explicitly said with that sentence, and it need not be true under different circumstances. In the given scenario, these inferences can be considered communicated because Mary can rely upon John’s understanding them. Although these inferences are triggered in the addressee’s mind by the utterance of the sentence, it is important to separate what is actually being said from what is only inferred. The investigation of such inferences, their role in communication and how they are related to the utterance meaning of what is actually said, is an important part of pragmatics, the scientific study of the rules that govern the use of language. Within pragmatics, Grice’s theory of ‘conversational implicatures’ and Relevance Theory by Sperber and Wilson deal with inferences of this kind.

1.1.3 Communicative meaning

Neither the level of expression meaning nor that of utterance meaning is the final and crucial level of interpretation. In an actual exchange, our main concern inevitably is this: what does the speaker intend – in particular, what does the speaker want from me? Conversely, when we say something, we choose our words in pursuit of a certain communicational intention. Verbal exchanges are a very important form of social interaction. They will always be interpreted as part of the whole social exchange and relationship entertained with the speaker. One and the same sentence can be uttered with quite different communicative results. The utterance of (1) in scenario 1 will be taken as a withdrawal of a former request. In scenario 2, the utterance of the same sentence constitutes the rejection of an offer. In other CoUs, uttering the sentence could serve still other communicative ends. A theory that addresses this level of interpretation is speech act theory , introduced in the 1950s by the philosopher John L. Austin (1911–60) and developed further by others, in particular John R. Searle. The central idea of speech act theory is that whenever we make an utterance in a verbal exchange we act on several levels. One level is what Austin calls the ‘locutionary act’, defined as the act of saying an expression with a certain utterance meaning in the given CoU. In doing so, we also perform an ‘illocutionary act’, i.e. a certain type of ‘speech act’: a statement, a question, a request, a promise, an offer, a refusal, a confirmation, a warning, etc. When Titus in scenario 2 says I don’t need your bicycle , he performs the locutionary



7

act of saying that he doesn’t need Maggie’s card with the bicycle and the illocutionary act of rejecting her offer. The speech act level of interpretation will be referred to as communicative meaning. The three levels of interpretation are connected as follows. Expression meaning is the level of interpretation which results if the only information we use is the mere linguistic material. Expression meaning forms the basis for utterance meaning, but does not determine it. For, as we could see, a sentence with its fixed expression meaning will take on different utterance meanings if it is used in a particular context. Utterance meaning, in turn, forms the basis of communicative meaning, without, again, determining it. For utterances with the same utterance meaning can serve the performance of different types of speech acts, depending on the ongoing social interaction. Table 1.1 gives a survey of the three levels of meaning and how they are defined. Table 1.1

Three levels of meaning Level of meaning

Definition

expression meaning

the meaning of a simple or complex expression taken in isolation

utterance meaning

the meaning of an expression when used in a given context of utterance resulting from fixing reference

communicative meaning

the meaning of an utterance as a communicative act in a given social setting

1.2 SENTENCE MEANING AND COMPOSITIONALITY 1.2.1 Lexical vs compositional meaning

We will now take a closer look at sentence meaning. It is a trivial fact that the meanings of words and sentences differ in one important point. Meanings of words must simply be known and therefore learned. In our minds, we host a huge lexicon where all the words we know and their meanings are stored and at our disposition. Stored meanings are therefore called lexical meanings . Words can be combined into sentences. We are usually able to understand the expression meaning of a sentence without any conscious effort. Nevertheless, this ability is based on complex cognitive processes which take place in our minds automatically and unconsciously. The process by which we calculate the meaning of a sentence is called composition, and the resulting meaning is known as compositional meaning. In some cases, sentences may have lexical meaning, for example proverbs such as The early bird catches the worm. This does not mean that their meanings are merely non-compositional. Rather, such sentences have a regular compositional non-proverbial meaning plus a special meaning which we have to learn and store in our lexicon.


8


Words can also be used to create new words. This is called word formation, and its products complex words. For example, you could coin the word joggable, deriving it from the verb jog by adding the suffix -able, which can be added to a very large number of verbs. Or you could form the compound carp food . The products of word formation need not all be stored in the lexicon and yet they can be as easily and straightforwardly understood as sentences. Obviously, the semantics part of the brain also knows how to interpret new words formed out of stored lexical material. Crucially, this holds only for products of word formation that follow general patterns. There are, on the other hand, very many complex words that carry irregular or special meanings. Such cases have to be stored in the lexicon in order to receive their proper interpretation. We’ll return to the semantics of word formation in 1.2.5. For now, I just want to fix in your mind a terminological convention: the notion of ‘lexical meaning’ is also to be taken to subsume the meanings of complex words, whether semantically regular or irregular. This is in line with the ‘dynamic’ view of the lexicon which sees it not just as a store of entries, but also as comprising components for the formation of new words and their meanings. Let us now take a closer look at the composition of sentence meaning in order to see what is involved. 1.2.2 Grammatical meaning

For a change, we will consider a new example. (2)

The dog ate the yellow socks.

Let us assume that we have assessed the lexical meanings of the words in (2): the, dog , eat , yellow and socks. There are no larger units in the sentence with lexical meaning; the rest of the interpretation is composition. The words in (2) occur in particular grammatical forms. The verb form ate is past tense – more precisely: simple past tense rather than progressive ( was eating ); it is in the indicative mood rather than in the conditional (would eat ), it is active rather than passive ( was eaten), it is not negated (did not eat ). The noun socks is plural; dog is singular, by absence of plural - s. The adjective yellow is neither comparative ( yellower ) nor superlative ( yellowest ), but is given in its basic form called ‘positive’. The forms of the words matter directly for their meaning, and consequently for the meaning of the whole sentence. The singular noun dog has a different meaning from the plural noun dogs: dog refers to a single creature of this kind, and dogs to more than one. Likewise, the meaning of present tense eat(s) is not the same as that of past tense ate, and the meaning of the simple form ate is different from the meaning of the progressive form was/were eating . The meaning of the simple past form with verbs such as eat is the combination of past tense and perfective aspect. (Tense and aspect will be discussed in chapter 6 on verbs.) The meanings of different word forms are not all stored in our lexicon. Rather the lexicon contains the meaning (or meanings, cf. chapter 3) of only one form of the word. For a verb, this is a tenseless and aspectless active meaning, for a noun it is


9

4


its singular meaning and for an adjective its positive meaning. The meanings of particular word forms are derived from the basic lexical meanings by general rules. These are part of the apparatus we use in composition. We will call the meaning of grammatical forms grammatical meaning . The meaning of a word in a particular form is the combination of its basic lexical meaning and the grammatical meaning of its form. Word forms are often built by adding an affix to the invariable part of the word, its stem. Affixes appended at the end of the word are called suffixes, those added at the beginning are prefixes. It must be noted that not all differences in the grammatical forms of words matter for their meaning. A certain form may be necessary just for grammatical reasons. For example, a certain verb form may be obligatory depending on the subject of the sentence (cf. I am vs she is, she sees vs you see). By contrast, the grammatical number (singular or plural) of the nouns dog and sock in (2) can be chosen independently of the construction in which they occur. Therefore, differences in form only matter for meaning if – in a given construction – different forms can be chosen freely. In addition, the different forms available must have different meanings. If, for example, a verb has two different admissible past tense forms like spoiled and spoilt , the choice of the form would not matter for its meaning. Also, it may be that one form has a neutral meaning which subsumes the meanings of the alternative forms. For example, in Korean nouns can take a plural suffix; it is, however, not necessary to make use of this option in order to refer to a multitude of instances. Therefore, the basic form of the noun without a plural suffix has a neutral meaning and does not carry grammatical meaning. We can sum up these considerations in the following definition of grammatical meaning: DEFINITION 2

Grammatical meaning The form of a word carries grammatical meaning, if (i) in the given construction alternative forms are admissible (ii) different forms yield different meanings (iii) the form chosen does not have a neutral meaning.

Languages differ considerably in what meanings they encode in grammatical forms. Many languages do not obligatorily mark number on all nouns; others do not have 5 non-positive forms of adjectives or lack tense.

4 In some cases, certain forms of words may have a special lexical meaning, such as glasses as opposed to glass, or used to as opposed to to use. Some nouns are only used in the plural ( trousers); for certain others the distinction does not matter ( logic , logics). 5 See Corbett (2000) for a survey on systems of grammatical number including missing number; Dryer (2011) offers an online map of forms of number marking for more than 1000 languages (http://wals.info/chapter/33). For tenseless languages see Comrie (1985: 2.5).

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1.2.3 Syntactic structure


As the last step of composition, the meanings of the words in their given forms are combined into a whole, the meaning of the sentence. This process is guided by the syntactic structure of the sentence (this is, for the most part, what grammar is good for: to guide the interpretation of complex expressions). Let us first determine which words in (2) belong together. The words the dog form a syntactic unit, a constituent in syntactic terminology. This kind of constituent is called a noun phrase, NP for short. The words the yellow socks form another NP; it contains an adjective in addition to the article and the noun. Actually, the adjective and the noun form another constituent within the NP. The combination of words into larger syntactic constituents is governed by the rules of grammar. There is a rule for combining adjectives with nouns, and another rule for combining a noun, or an adjective-noun combination, with an article (the article comes first). Given such rules for forming larger syntactic units we need corresponding composition rules, in this case: ∑

∑

a rule for deriving the meaning of an adjective-noun combination ( yellow socks) from the meaning of the adjective and the meaning of the noun a rule for deriving the meaning of an article with a noun ( the + dog ) or a noun with adjective(s) (the + yellow socks) from the meaning of the article and the meaning of the noun, or the noun with an adjective

We will not try to specify such rules now; they will be dealt with in chapters 4, 5 and 13. Having assessed the dog and the yellow socks as complex constituents, we turn to the total structure of the sentence. It consists of these two NPs and the verb ate. These three parts are grammatically related as follows: the verb is the predicate of the sentence, the NP the dog is its subject and the yellow socks its direct object. The verb and the direct object form a constituent, known as verb phrase, or VP, which is then combined with the subject NP to form the complete sentence. We therefore need two more composition rules: ∑

∑

a rule for deriving the meaning of a VP (ate + the yellow socks) from the meaning of the verb and the meaning of the direct object NP a rule for deriving the meaning of a sentence ( the dog + ate the yellow socks) from the meaning of the subject NP and the meaning of the VP

Again, these rules are not trivial. Roughly speaking, the composition works as follows: the verb eat in its given ‘active’ form means an event which necessarily involves two elements, an eater and something that is eaten; the direct object NP contributes a description of the object that is eaten, and the subject NP a description of the eater. 1.2.4 The Principle of Compositionality

Let us sum up the general results we can draw from this example. The syntactic rules of a language allow the formation of complex expressions from what will be


11

Figure 1.1

The process of composition


GRAMMAR

SEMANTICS

complex expression

compositional meaning of the complex

combine expressions

compose meanings

basic expressions in a particular form

compositional meanings of the basic expressions in their given forms

choose grammatical forms

add grammatical meaning

basic expressions

lexical meanings of basic expressions

called basic expressions. (Basic expressions are expressions with a lexical meaning.) The meaning of complex expressions is determined by semantic composition. This mechanism draws on three sources: 1 The lexical meanings of the basic expressions 2 The grammatical forms of the basic expressions 3 The syntactic structure of the complex expression The general scheme in Fig. 1.1 shows that semantic composition is thought of as a so-called bottom-up process: it proceeds from the basic units to the complex ones. The lexical meanings of the smallest units serve as input for the rules of grammatical meaning, whose output is the input for the composition rules. The converse of a bottom-up process is a top-down process. If semantic interpretation were a topdown process, this would mean that the meanings of words are derived from the meanings of sentences. That complex expressions receive their meaning by the process of composition is the central idea underlying semantics. This is called the Principle of Compositionality. The principle is attributed to the German philosopher, logician and mathematician Gottlob Frege (1845–1925), and sometime called Frege’s Principle. Although he obviously applied the principle, there is no passage in his publications that could serve as a quotation.

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DEFINITION 3

Principle of Compositionality The meaning of a complex expression is determined by the lexical meanings of its components, their grammatical meanings and the syntactic structure of the whole.

The principle implies that the meanings of complex expressions are fully determined by the three sources mentioned, i.e. by the linguistic input alone. The principle, therefore, does not apply to utterance meaning and communicative meaning because at these levels non-linguistic context knowledge comes into play. 7 1 0 2 t s u g u A 6 1 3 0 : 6 0 t a 2 1 . 1 4 2 . 2 4 . 0 9 1 y b d e d a o l n w o D

1.2.5 The semantics of word formation

Just like sentence formation, word formation has two sides: a form side and a meaning side. Along with the formation of grammatical word forms, the form side of word formation belongs to the domain of morphology, the area of linguistics concerned with the forms of words. The two main mechanisms of word formation are derivation and compounding. In the case of derivation, a given word is modified, usually by adding an affix. Examples are the adjective drink-able, the noun drink-er or the verb en-slave. There is also conversion – the use of a word in a different word class without changing its form, for example the noun drink converted from the verb drink or the verb bottle converted from the noun bottle. In English, conversion is very frequent. The other major mechanism, compounding, is the combination of two or more words into one. Some examples in this chapter are word meaning , content word , speech act and composition rule. The products of word formation are called complex words, including the products of conversion, even though nothing is added to the word form. The semantics of word formation is a field that is much less clear than sentence semantics. There certainly are patterns, however: certain conversions, derivations and compounds are regularly interpreted in a particular way. Let me just give four examples: ∑

∑

∑

∑

suffixing a verb V with - able produces an adjective meaning ›one can V it‹: drinkable, read-able, compar-able, deriv-able suffixing a verb V with - er produces a noun meaning ›someone who Vs‹ : driv-er , los-er , speak-er , bak-er prefixing a verb V with un- produces a verb which denotes the reversal of what is done by V-ing: un-do, un-zip, un-plug , un-tie prefixing a verb V with out produces a verb which means ›doing V better, or more‹: out-run, out-play, out-number , out-weigh

Such patterns can be defined as pairings of formation rules and corresponding interpretation rules. If they can be applied to an open input class, they are called productive. Productive patterns crucially rely on the fact that there is a general interpretation rule for their productions; otherwise they could not be freely applied.



13

However, the semantics of word formation is complicated by the fact that there are often several interpretation rules for the same formation rule. This is a situation quite different from the composition of sentence meaning where, as a rule, there is only one composition rule for each syntactic rule. Compounds in particular are notoriously manifold in how the meanings of the parts are related: a ‘book title’ is a title that names a book, a ‘book shelf’ is a shelf for books, a ‘book shop’ is a shop where books are sold, and so on. Another reason for the complexity of word formation semantics is the existence of so many cases with unpredictable, lexicalized meanings. These blur the picture of the semantic rules of word formation. If you take a look into a standard dictionary you’ll find that very many entries are complex words. They are listed in the dictionary because their meanings are irregular – otherwise there would be no need to include them for explanation. Extreme cases are words like butterfly; the word looks like a compound of butter and fly, but its meaning has nothing to do with ›butter‹ and little to do with ›fly‹. Very frequent are complex words with special meanings that are narrower than their regular meaning, e.g. drinker , which does not just mean ›someone who drinks‹, but rather ›someone who regularly drinks too much alcohol‹. When two nouns occur in a sentence, like book and shelf or book and shop in (3), often the sentence tells us how they are to be linked semantically: (3)

a.

Ann put the book onto the shelf.

b.

She had bought it in the shop around the corner.

In (3a) we see that the shelf is something the book is put onto, in (3b) that the shop is something where the book was bought. The respective verb specifies a semantic relation between the two nouns. With compounds, there is nothing like this to help us to know what the two parts have to do with each other. They are just jammed together. There are authors who suggest that compounding is a ‘relic of protolanguage’ (Jackendoff 2009:111). According to the theory of protolanguage (Bickerton 1992), there was a stage in the evolution of language where there were words with meanings but not yet grammar. Words were just somehow combined; no functional elements, no word classes, no rules for sentences. According to Bickerton, protolanguage still exists, for example as an early stage in language acquisition or in the speech of aphasics who have lost grammar. Jackendoff adds compounding as another case. If the way in which two elements are to be semantically combined is not explicitly expressed, there is more room for interpretation. Nevertheless, the interpretation of compounds is not just mere guessing. It cannot be, for we obviously agree on how to interpret regular compounds. The reason for this is that the way semantically to link a noun to another noun is often built into their meanings. It is part of the meaning of shop that a shop is a place where things are sold, and it is part of the meaning of book that it is some kind of artefact which can be bought. Putting this information together leads us to the interpretation of book shop. We will turn to the semantics of word formation in various places in this book (8.2.2, 11.6.2, 12.2.2 and 12.3.3).

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1.3 SEMANTICS: ITS SCOPE AND LIMITS


Obviously, we are able to understand sentences in isolation, for example if we find them written on a piece of paper or appearing on a screen of our computer. We know word meanings; we know the meanings of grammatical forms; we know how to combine the meanings of the words in a complex expression. We need not have a concrete CoU in order to interpret a sentence. We can just stop interpreting at the meaning level of expression meaning. One way of explaining what semantics is about is to say that it describes this part of our linguistic knowledge: the cognitive equipment that enables us to interpret regular linguistic expressions out of context, simply as linguistic forms. We acquire this cognitive equipment along with grammar when we learn our native language. And we have practical evidence for assuming that this equipment is, by and large, uniform among our speech community. We normally understand what others say and we are normally understood – at least at the level of expression meaning. Of course, there are considerable differences in lexical knowledge among speakers of the same language. Other people may know certain words and their meanings which we don’t, and vice versa, and sometimes people disagree on word meanings. But even so, we know that these differences can be removed by explaining or discussing word meanings. As to grammatical meanings and composition rules, we very rarely seem to disagree with others. The cognitive equipment for interpreting linguistic expressions is essentially shared within a speech community. Agreement within the community is the result of a permanent synchronization of language usage, and thereby linguistic knowledge. This mentalist approach to semantics is adopted here. It takes the so-called ‘I-language’ as its essential object. ‘I-language’ means the mental language apparatus of the individual speakers of a language. Making I-language the point of departure allows one to pose the relevant questions: What are the meanings which we have stored in our minds or compute compositionally? What kind of semantic operations do we apply to meanings, such as the combination of meanings, or meaning shifts? Which kind of information is involved at the three levels of interpretation? Such questions help to say more precisely what belongs to the scope of semantics and what is beyond its scope.

1.3.1 The scope of semantics 1.3.1.1 Explaining sentence meaning

According to the Principle of Compositionality, the following sub-disciplines of semantics are required in order to account for our ability to interpret sentences in isolation: ∑

lexical semantics: the investigation of expression meanings stored in the mental lexicon (dog , sock)

Meaning and semantics ∑

∑

∑


15

semantics of regular word formation: the investigation of the regular meanings of words that are formed by the productive rules of word formation ( joggable, carp food ) semantics of grammatical forms: the investigation of the meaning contribution of grammatical forms compositional sentence semantics: the investigation of the rules that determine how the meanings of the components of a complex expression interact and combine

Often semantics is subdivided into two sub-disciplines only: lexical semantics is then understood as also comprising regular word semantics, and the semantics of grammatical forms is subsumed under sentence semantics. 1.3.1.2 Interfaces of expression meaning with other levels of interpretation

The domain of semantics is not confined to sentence meaning. It also concerns the links of sentence meaning to utterance meaning and communicative meaning. The example in (1) illustrated two things that we do with the meaning of a sentence when we try to make sense of an utterance of it. First, we will try to fix references for those elements of the sentence that require this. Elements such as the pronoun I call for fixing their reference and guide us in doing so. Remember that the meaning of I is an instruction for determining the referent of the pronoun as the one who has produced the utterance of this particular ‘I’. One can think of such an element as an ‘anchor’ in the sentence meaning which tries to find a purchase in the context for anchoring the sentence meaning in the CoU. Other such anchors are provided by definite articles, by tense or by specifications of time or location like here and then. It is a task for semantics to investigate the nature and function of such anchors. These anchors are technically called indexicals . They will be dealt with in more detail in chapter 4. Indexicals are part of what is called the interface between expression meaning and utterance meaning. This interface consists of those components which link the level of sentence meaning to the level of utterance meaning. It, too, belongs to the domain of semantics. Second, there is the aspect of what expressions can mean when used in context, in addition to what they literally mean. It may happen that we are led to shift lexical meanings when we try to fix the reference of a sentence in a satisfactory way. This is what we saw happen to the word bicycle in the second scenario, where it was taken in the sense ›card with a picture of a bicycle‹. Such shifts take place before the reference is fixed. They, too, belong to our cognitive semantic equipment. They constitute another component of the interface between expression meaning and utterance meaning. We will deal with them in the second part of chapter 3. There is also an interface of expression meaning with communicative meaning. It is constituted by elements that guide the interpretation of an utterance as a speech act. These elements include grammatical means of indicating different types of sentences such as declarative, interrogative or imperative. Also to be included are

16


elements such as the indication of formality or politeness or elements that directly serve certain speech acts, like please or goodbye (see 2.3 on social meaning). We can now define the discipline of semantics much more precisely: DEFINITION 4

Semantics Semantics is the study of the meanings of linguistic expressions, either simple or complex, taken in isolation. It further accounts for the interfaces of expression meaning with utterance meaning and communicative meaning. 7 1 0 2 t s u g u A 6 1 3 0 : 6 0 t a 2 1 . 1 4 2 . 2 4 . 0 9 1 y b d e d a o l n w o D

1.3.2 Beyond semantics

The approach to semantics taken here draws a clear boundary. Semantics ends where contextual knowledge comes in. Thus, utterance meaning and communicative meaning are beyond semantics; they fall into the domain of pragmatics. Another important point of demarcation concerns the lexical meaning of content words. Obviously, people vary greatly in how much knowledge they have about certain things. Is all we can know about avocados, for instance, to be considered the lexical meaning of the word avocado? This cannot be. Otherwise the lexical knowledge of most content words would vary too much between experts and plain language users. Rather, the meaning of a word is something like the common denominator of the content shared in a speech community. The actual conventional meaning is a lean bundle of information, just enough to secure efficient communication. Therefore, word meaning needs to be distinguished from general world knowledge. This issue will be taken up when we discuss connotations in the next chapter (2.5), and later in 11.6, when we will distinguish between semantic knowledge and cultural knowledge, in the context of cognitive semantics.

EXERCISES 1. Explain the distinction between the three levels of meaning in your own words. Part of the exercises will always be to define central terms introduced in the chapter in your own words. In order to acquire new words, it is very important that you really make active use of them. Do not copy the definitions from the text, but try to explain them out of your own understanding. It may be very useful to work on the answers together with others. 2. Sue tells Martin: ‘I don’t care if you use my microphone.’ Which one of the three levels of meaning is addressed in the following questions? Give your reasons for the answer. a. What is the meaning of microphone ? b. Which microphone is meant? c. Is this an offer? d. Does the sentence relate to one or several microphones?

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