Meaning in the Empirical

Study of Language

F O U N D AT I O N S O F T H E S T U D Y O F
LINGUISTIC MEANING
 Meaning and Semantics

Meaning without language is just like lungs

without air.
Meaning is the heart of language.
But it is not language only that has meaning.
Semantics is a subfield of linguistics that is
devoted to the study of meaning.
 Questions

 What are meanings — definitions? ideas in our heads? sets of objects in

the world?
 Can all meanings be precisely defined?
 What explains relations between meanings, like synonymy, antonymy
 (oppositeness), and so on?
 How do the meanings of words combine to create the meanings of
sentences?
 What is the difference between literal and non-literal meaning?
 How do meanings relate to the minds of language users, and to the
things words refer to?
 What is the connection between what a word means, and the contexts in
which it is used?
 How do the meanings of words interact with syntactic rules and
principles?
 Do all languages express the same meanings?
 How do meanings change?
 Linguistic Approach to Meaning

We want to account for the linguistic

contribution to meaning
 Competence-based approach:
 we aim to characterise the knowledge that
language users have (just as in syntax).
 …specifically, knowledge of how language
contributes to meaning
 This may involve several kinds of knowledge:
 knowledge of what the language itself provides

(≈ semantics)
 knowledge of how to use this (≈ pragmatics)
 Semantics and Pragmatics

Two senses for semantics

1. Semantics is, generally defined, as the study of

meaning of linguistic expressions.
2. Semantics is, more narrowly defined, the study of
the meaning of linguistic expressions apart from
consideration of the effect that pragmatic factors,
such as the following, have on the meaning of
language in use:

Features of the context

Conventions of language use
The goals of the speaker
 Semantics & Pragmatics

 Semantics broad : the study of linguistic

meaning
 Semantics narrow: the study of linguistic
meaning that is (more or less) independent of
context

 Pragmatics: the study of linguistic meaning

in context

Semantics narrow + Pragmatics = Semantics

 Semantics & pragmatics

 (1) I will come to you tonight!

Context 1: Romeo speaks to Juliette

 (2) I will come to you tonight!

Context 2: Dracula speaks to a victim

 The (narrow) semantic meaning (content) in (1) and

(2) is the same, but not their pragmatic meaning.

 Question: Which differences in pragmatic meaning

between (1) and (2) can you point out?
 Semantics vs. Pragmatics

SEMANTICS PRAGMATICS
 Language Internal  Language External
 Linguistic Meaning  Communication
 What expressions  What speakers mean
mean  What is implied
 What is Said  Use of language
 Language itself
 Meaning: A Vague Term

 In ordinary English, the word ‘meaning’ is used to refer to such

different things as the idea or intention lying behind a piece of
language, as in (1), the thing referred to by a piece of language (2),
and the translations of words between languages (3).

(1) ‘I don’t quite understand what you’re getting at by saying “meat

is murder”: do you mean that everyone should be a vegetarian?’

(2) ‘I meant the second street on the left, not the first one.’

(3) ‘Seiketsu means “clean” in Japanese.’

 Linguistic semantics is to distinguish between these different types

of meaning, and to make it clear exactly what place each of them
has within a principled theory of language
 Semantics: The Origins
 Although the study of meaning is extremely ancient,
the name semantics was only coined in the late
nineteenth century by the French linguist Michel
Bréal.

 The word semantics reflects the origins of the

Western tradition of linguistic analysis in the writings
of Greek thinkers from the fifth century BC onwards.

 Semantics comes from the ancient Greek word

semantikos, an adjective meaning ‘relating to signs’,
based on the noun sēmeion ‘sign’. In Ancient Greek,
one of the original uses of sēmeion was as a medical
term for the symptoms that were the signs of
 Semantics: The Background

In the twentieth century, the general study of

signs became particularly important.

New discipline of semiotics was created

especially as the result of the work of the
Charles Sanders Peirce and of Bréal’s
student, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913),
often considered as the founder of modern
linguistics.
 Meaning, Communication and Significance

 The meanings we can express through language are infinitely

more numerous, detailed and precise than those expressible
through other semiotic media.

 The meaningfulness of language can be seen as just one

instance of the meaningfulness of human behaviour and
communication in general, and is one of the systems of
structured meaningfulness studied in semiotics

 Many types of intentional human behavior can be seen as

having a significance, or a meaning, in the (broad) sense of the
word, since they both express, and allow observers to draw
conclusions about, the nature and intentions of the
participants.
 Meaningfulness of Language

Intention to communicate involves a

structured set of symbols. however, the use
of language is only one of a number of ways
in which the intention can be fulfilled.
Meaning, Communication and
Significance
 ‘Meaning’ is a very vague term

‘Meaning’ is a very vague term: in English as

we saw, it refers to a variety of different
relations between the world, language and
speakers. Most languages do not have precise
equivalents for the English term ‘meaning’,
and some use a very different stock of lexical
resources to talk about meaning-like
phenomena.
 Meaning In English

 When I said ‘Dublin has lots of attractions’ I meant Dublin,

Ireland, not Dublin, Virginia.
A three-way relation between a piece of language, a mind and
the world
 In Sydney, ‘the bridge’ means the Harbour Bridge.
A relation between language and world, without any specific
reference to people’s intentions
 ‘Stout’ means ‘short and fat’.
No explicit reference to either people’s minds or to the world.
The sentence reports an equivalence between two linguistic
items.
 By turning off the music I didn’t mean that you should go.
A mind–world relation
 Trees mean water.
A world–world relationship
 Meaning In English

A. Judy: Cutlery?! We’ve got lots of cutlery! You mean you got more
crockery!
Alastair: Oh yeah, crockery.
B. Judy: Cutlery?! Why did you say cutlery instead of crockery?
Alastair: Oh yeah, crockery.
C. Judy: Cutlery?! You did not! You got more crockery!
Alastair: Oh yeah, crockery.

 In (A) Judy uses the category of meaning to describe Alastair’s

language.
 In (B) she talks about what Alastair ‘says’. Here, she could be
described as talking not about language meaning, but language use
 In (C) she is applying the categories of truth and falsity to Alastair’s
utterance
The semiotic triangle: language, mind,
world and meaning
 The semiotic triangle

For the purposes of linguistics, we can isolate

three particularly important factors relevant
to the study of meaning:
1. the psychology of speakers, which creates
and interprets language,
2. the referent of the language expression as
projected by the language user’s psychology,
3. and the linguistic expression itself
these three points constitute the
semiotic triangle.
The semiotic triangle,
re-labelled.
 Some initial concepts

Lexemes
Sense/reference/denotation/connotation
Compositionality
Levels of meaning
 Lexemes

To linguists and non-linguists alike, the word is

the most basic and obvious unit of language. But
in many languages, units which we would want to
recognize as a single word can appear in many
different morphological forms.
In providing a semantic description of a language,
we do not need to treat all the variant
morphological forms of a single word separately.
Instead, we describe the meanings of a language’s
lexemes, or the abstract units which unite all
the morphological variants of a single word.
 Sense, Reference, Denotation and
Connotation
The sense of a lexeme may be defined as the
general meaning or the concept underlying
the word. The notion of sense can be made
more explicit through contrast with the
category of referent.
A word’s referent is the object which it
stands for on a specific occasion of use.
An expression’s denotation is the class of
possible objects, situations, etc. to which the
word can refer.
 Sense, Reference, Denotation and Connotation

 A word’s referent is the particular thing, person, place, etc. which an

expression stands for on a particular occasion of use, and it changes
each time the word is applied to a different object or situation in the
world.

 By contrast, a word’s sense does not change every time the word
takes on a new referent.

 Words have the referents they have by virtue of a certain act on the
part of the speaker, which we will call the act of reference.

 The term reference has two distinct uses:

1. As the name of the act by which a speaker refers to a referent;
2. As a synonym of referent, i.e. as the term for the object(s) to which
an expression refers on a particular instance of use.
 Sense, Reference, Denotation and Connotation

 Sense, reference and denotation are three aspects of what is commonly

conveyed by the loose term ‘meaning’.

 A fourth, very important aspect of meaning is connotation.

 Connotation names those aspects of meaning which do not affect a

word’s sense, reference or denotation, but which have to do with
secondary factors such as its emotional force, its level of formality, its
character as a euphemism.
Consider the following pairs:
 brat and child
 toilet and rest room
 country town and regional centre
 underprivileged area and slum
 doctor and quack
 incident and accident
 Compositionality and Productivity

We can create novel meaningful sentences.

S1 and S2 is a sentence where S1 and S2 are
sentences (and S1 and S2 is true when both S1
and S2 are true).
 Sa = Pat left Sb = Tracy cried
 Sc = Chris ate a sandwich
 S1 = Sa and Sb = Pat left and Tracy cried
 S2 = S1 and Sc =
Pat left and Tracy cried and Chris ate a sandwich
 Compositionality

In order to be able to do this it must be the

case that meaning is compositional.

Compositionality Principle
The meaning of the whole is determined by
the meaning of the parts and how those parts
are arranged.
Lexical and Compositional Semantics

 Both the individual words and combinations of words

are meaningful.
 Based on the distinction between the meanings of
words and the meanings of sentences, we can
recognize two main divisions in the study of
semantics:
 Lexical semantics and Compositional semantics.
 Lexical semantics is the study of word meaning,
whereas compositional semantics is the study of
the principles which govern the construction of the
meaning of phrases and of sentence meaning out of
compositional combinations of individual
 Levels of Meaning

Sentence meaning is the compositional meaning

of the sentence as constructed out of the meanings of
its individual component lexemes.
Utterance meaning is the meaning which the
words have on a particular
occasion of use in the particular context in which they
occur. Semantics studies sentence meaning,
whereas pragmatics studies utterance meaning and
other aspects of language use.
 A sentence is based on a more abstract pattern called
proposition.
 A proposition is “a complete thought.” The sentences Pat ate
the sandwich and The sandwich was eaten by Pat express the
same proposition. One is true if and only if the other is true.
 More on Propositions

A proposition can be true or false,

depending on the situation it is being
considered with respect to.
A proposition is generally a combination of a
predicate (a verb or a property) and one or
more arguments (referential expressions).
 grilled (Pat, the sandwich)
Propositions can often be expressed in more
than one way (Pat grilled the sandwich, The
sandwich was grilled by Pat), so they are
more abstract than sentences.
 Object language and Metalanguage

 In order to accurately describe the

meaning of a word, sentence, morpheme,
etc., we need a language in which to couch
our description.
 If we try to describe the meaning of English in
English, we run into trouble with circularity.
 Instead, we will often work with a formal
metalanguage, with which we can
describe the meanings and meaning
relations in English and in other languages
equally.
 Definitional Circularity

Proposing a metalanguage description of the

meaning of an object language expression,
we are using one type of meaning (the
meaning of the metalanguage expression) to
explain another kind (the meaning of the
object language expression).
 Definitional Circularity

Dirk is groot, maar Lou is klein.

‘Dirk is tall, but Lou is short.’

 The object language expression groot is here defined by the

metalanguage expression ‘tall’. But note that not all aspects of the
word ‘tall’ are relevant to this definition: it is completely irrelevant to
the definition of groot that the metalanguage definition we have
chosen, ‘tall’, has four letters, or is a monosyllable, or starts with the
consonant /t/.
 All these phonetic and orthographic details are irrelevant to
semantics, since the only thing that matters for the purpose of defining
groot is what ‘tall’ means.
 To tell someone that groot means ‘tall’ is to make a statement about
two meanings, and to say that these two meanings are the same.

 This is called DEFINITION

 Definitional Circularity

 We remain within the circle of definitions by

substituting one word or phrase as the definition of
another, we remain confined within language.

The lexical resources of any language are limited.

With this task we will not have provided any account

of what the meanings we are defining actually are,
nor of how they relate to any of the three points of the
semiotic triangle.
Next week we will find some ways to get out of this
vicious circle of definition