STUDYING MEANING

 Semantics is the study of the “toolkit” for meaning: knowledge encoded in the vocabulary of the language and in its patterns for building more elaborate meanings, up to the level of sentence meanings.

Pragmatics is concerned with the use of these tools in meaningful communication. Pragmatics is about the interaction of semantic knowledge with our knowledge of the world, taking into account contexts of use. Example: Hold out your arm. That’s it. (11) is going to be used in an initial illustration of the difference between semantics and pragmatics, and to introduce some more terms needed for describing and discussing meanings.

1.1  Pragmatics distinguished from semantics

1.1.1 Utterances and sentences

In our immediate experience as language users, the things that have meaning are utterances, and (1.2) presents three examples.

(1.2) a. “Not so loud.” (Something I said to a student who was speaking rather loudly, in Room 420, in the afternoon on 6 May 2005.)

          b. “In H101.” (I recall hearing a student say this, about seven years ago.)

          c. “People who buy these tickets often don’t have loads of money.” (According to a BBC website report,2 the policy manager of the Rail Passengers Council said this towards the end of 2004.)

Utterances are the raw data of linguistics. Each utterance is unique, having been produced by a particular sender in a specific situation.

The abstract linguistic object on which an utterance is based is a sentence. My recollection is that the utterance “In H101” mentioned in (1.2b) was based on the sentence The class will be in Room H101, because it was said in response to me asking “Where’s the class going to be?” We talk of repetition when two or more utterances are based on the same sentence.

1.1.2 Three stages of interpretation

To illustrate this, the interpretation of “That was the last bus” will be discussed in terms of three distinguishable stages. The first stage is a semantic one: literal meaning. The others are two kinds of pragmatic interpretation: explicature and implicature.

The literal meaning of a sentence is based on just the semantic information that you have from your knowledge of English. Among the things that people who know English should be able to explain about the meaning of “That was the last bus” are the following: something salient (That) is equated, at an earlier time (was is a past tense form), to either the final (last) or the most recent (last) bus. That meaning is available without wondering who might say or write the words, when or where. No consideration of context is involved.

An explicature is a basic interpretation of an utterance, using contextual information and world knowledge to work out what is being referred to and which way to understand ambiguous expressions, such as the word last. Two possible contexts for using an utterance based on the sentence in “That was the last bus” will be considered. They lead to different explicatures.

In working out an implicature, we go further and ask what is hinted at by an utterance in its particular context, what the sender’s “agenda” is.

1.1.3 A first outline of pragmatics

A crucial basis for making pragmatic inferences is the contrast between what might have been uttered and what actually was uttered.

The pragmatic inferences called implicatures and explicatures occur all the time in communication, but they are merely informed guesses. It is one of their defining features that they can be cancelled

1.2 Types of meaning

Sender’s meaning3 is the meaning that the speaker or writer intends to convey by means of an utterance. Sender’s meaning is something that addressees are continually having to make informed guesses about.

Utterance meaning is a necessary fiction that linguists doing semantics and pragmatics have to work with. It is the meaning – explicature and implicatures – that an utterance would likely be understood as conveying when interpreted by people who know the language, are aware of the context, and have whatever background knowledge the sender could reasonably presume to be available to the addressee(s).

Ordinary language users’ access to the meanings of words is less direct. The meaning of a word is the contribution it makes to the meanings of sentences in which it appears. Of course people know the meanings of words in their language in the sense that they know how to use the words, but this knowledge is not immediately available in the form of reliable intuitions. Ask non-linguists whether strong means the same as powerful or whether finish means the same as stop and they might well say Yes. They would be at least partly wrong.

1.2.1 Denotation, sense, reference and deictis

The denotation of an expression is whatever it denotes. For many words, the denotation is a big class of things: the noun arm denotes all the upper limbs there are on the world’s people, monkeys and apes. (Yes, there is a noun arms that has a lot of weapons as its denotation, but it always appears in the plural form.) If expressions did not have denotations, languages would hardly be of much use. It is the fact that they allow us to communicate about the world that makes them almost indispensable.

The central concept is sense: those aspects of the meaning of an expression that give it the denotation it has. Differences in sense therefore make for differences in denotation. That is why the term sense is used of clearly distinct meanings that an expression has.

There are different ways in which one might try to state “recipes”for the denotations of words. One way of doing it is in terms of sense relations, which are semantic relationships between the senses of expressions. Reference is what speakers or writers do when they use expressions to pick out for their audience particular people (“my sister”) or things (“the Parthenon Marbles”) or times (“2007”) or places (“that corner”) or events (“her birthday party”) or ideas (“the plan we were told about”); examples of referring expressions have been given in brackets. The relevant entities outside of language are called the referents of the referring expressions: the person who is my sister, the actual marble frieze, the year itself, and so on. Reference is a pragmatic act performed by senders and interpreted at the explicature stage (see Section 1.1.2). Reference has to be done and interpreted with regard to context.

Deictic expressions are words, phrases and features of grammar that have to be interpreted in relation to the situation in which they are uttered, such as me ‘the sender of this utterance’ or here ‘the place where the sender is’.

Our semantic knowledge of the meanings of deictic expressions guides us on how, pragmatically, to interpret them in context. Thus we have yesterday ‘the day before the day of utterance’, this ‘the obvious-in-context thing near the speaker or coming soon’, she ‘the female individual’ and so on.

1.3 Semantics

Semantics, the study of word meaning and sentence meaning, abstracted away from contexts of use, is a descriptive subject. It is an attempt to describe and understand the nature of the knowledge about meaning in their language that people have from knowing the language. It is not a prescriptive enterprise with an interest in advising or pressuring speakers or writers into abandoning some meanings and adopting others.

Semantic description of language knowledge is different from the encyclopedia maker’s task of cataloguing general knowledge. The words tangerine and clementine illustrate distinctions that are not part of our knowledge of English, but rather a fruiterer’s kind of expertise, which some other people also know, but which most users of English do not have to know.

1.3.1 Propositions

Different sentences can carry the same meaning, as in (1.12a–c).

(1.12)     a. Sharks hunt seals.

          b. Seals are hunted by sharks.

          c. Seals are prey to sharks.

          d. These chase and kill these others.

Proposition is the term for a kind of core sentence meaning, the abstract idea that remains the same in cases such as (1.12a–c). Propositions in this technical sense are very abstract, not tied to particular words or sentences: the proposition carried by (1.12a, b) can be expressed without using the verb hunt, as shown in (1.12c). A young child who is unsure about which are seals and which are sharks could, while watching a (somewhat gory) nature programme, point at sharks and seals, respectively, for the two occurrences of these in (1.12d) and, without using any of the words in (1.12a–c), bring the same proposition into play.

1.3.2 Compositionality

Semanticists, therefore, aim to explain the meaning of each sentence as arising from, on the one hand, the meanings of its parts and, on the other, the manner in which the parts are put together. That is what a compositional theory of meaning amounts to. The meaningful parts of a sentence are clauses, phrases and words; and the meaningful parts of words are morphemes.

Consider an analogy from arithmetic: the numbers that go into a sum affect the answer, as in (1.15a); so do the operations such as addition and multiplication by which we can combine numbers (1.15b). With more than one operation, the order they are performed in can make a difference (1.15c), where round brackets enclose the operation performed first.

(1.15)  a. 3 + 2 = 5                  but 3 + 4 = 7

            b. 3 + 2 = 5                  but 3  x 2 = 6

            c. 3(2 + 4) = 18            but (3 x 2) + 4 = 10

Idioms are exceptions. An expression is an idiom if its meaning is not compositional, that is to say it cannot be worked out from knowledge of the meanings of its parts and the way they have been put together. Come a cropper means ‘fall heavily’ but we cannot derive this meaning from the meanings of come, a, crop and -er. Browned off (meaning ‘disgruntled’), and see eye to eye (meaning ‘agree’) are other examples.

1.3.3 Entailment

Entailment is a centrally important type of inference in semantics. While the pragmatic inferences called explicatures and implicatures are cancellable, an entailment is a guarantee.

Using the notation Þ for entailment, (1.19a) indicates that when The accommodation was excellent is true, we can be sure that it (the same accommodation

at the same point in time) was very good. The statement in (1.19b) signifies that if it was excellent, it was (at least) good; and (1.19c) signifies that it was (at least) OK.

(1.19) a. The accommodation was excellent ⇒ The accommodation was very good

            b. The accommodation was excellent ⇒ The accommodation was good

            c. The accommodation was excellent ⇒ The accommodation was OK

Strictly speaking, entailment holds between propositions. However, explicated utterances based on declarative sentences express propositions and no great harm will come from the shortcut of thinking about a sentence as entailing other sentences (provided each sentence is considered in just one of its meanings, which amounts to it being an explicated utterance).