University of Salahaddin
M.A Studies Programme of Applied Linguistics
Semantics
Language and Meaning
Written by Christopher Beedham
Reveiwed by M.A Student:Muhammed Bakir Suleiman
2011-2012
About the Book
This book which is entitled “Language and Meaning” is written by
Christopher Beedham and published by John Benjamins Publishing
Company in Amsterdam in 2005.This book brings in the auther’s research in
the linguistics of modern English, German and Russian languages over the
last 30 years.This book comprises of an introduction and seven chapters
and it is about 217 pages.
Some Information About the Author
Dr Beedham graduated with a B.Sc. in German and Russian from the
University of Salford, England, in 1976, which included 6 months working as
a translator for Intertext, Berlin, GDR, a 3-month study period in Voronezh,
Russia, and 3 months studying Russian at the Internat St Georges, Meudon,
Paris. In 1979 he graduated with a PhD on the passive in English, German,
and Russian – in which he used the ‘method of lexical exceptions’ for the
first time - from Salford, whereby he spent the first two years as a research
student in the Sektion TAS (Theoretische und Angewandte
Sprachwissenschaft) at the University of Leipzig, GDR. From 1979-1981 he
worked as a Research Assistant on English for Special Purposes, with some
German teaching, at the University of Aston, Birmingham, England. From
1982-1984 he was a Language Teaching Assistant in the English Dept. of the
Philological Faculty at Moscow State University (a British Council post).
Since 1984 he has worked as a lecturer in the German Dept. in the School of
Modern Languages at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, teaching the
linguistics of modern German, general linguistics, German history 1919 to
the present day, 20th century German literature, and German language.
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Introduction
The author describes language as “the most human of all human attributes”
and he thinks that langage is such a powerful tool for communiacton that it
impinges on every aspect of our life including all the science from physics
through sociology to literry criticism.Therefotre, according to the auther
“Linguistics” is the most scintific discipline and within linguistics the most
importan question of all concerns meaning.The author emphasies that to
get the answer of the queston “how does langauge mean , how do words
and morphems what they mean?”, one has to use the Sausserain terms
.The authero poses another question about langauege and thought.
This book explores controversial areas such as 'langue' versus 'parole' as
the proper object of linguistic investigation, formal versus semantic
analysis, what constitutes formal analysis, and the question of whether
reality creates language or the other way around. In the introduction, the
author states, ''language is the most human of all human attributes. More
than just a means of communication it is our vehicle of thought.'' He
purports to answer the questions, ''What is the relationship between
language and thought/perception? How does language influence
thought/perception? Does language come first and then thought and
perception, or do thought and perception come first, and then language?''
Throughout the book, Beedham contends that 'langue' should be the
fundamental object of linguistic analysis, that formal rather than semantic
analyses (but not in the Chomskyan sense) are the essence of Saussurean
structuralism, and that language creates reality. As evidence of his
arguments, the author offers a re-interpretation of the passive construction
in English and the irregular past tense verbs. He illustrates his position
throughout with English examples complemented by examples from his
work in German and Russian. This book is intended for a diverse audience:
from the layperson to the linguistic researcher.
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Chapter one
In this chapter the author deals with Saussuaren structaulism and
Saussuarein defenition of langauge that language is a sysyetm whose units
are determined by their place in the system, not by some outside point of
reference such as reality.Saussure initially dealt with phonems which are
not meniang-bearing, but menaing menaing-distinguishing, but later on he
soon moved to menaing-bearing units such as morphems and syntagms.
Suasserian structralism is a theory of meaning, which opposes the
referential account of meaing.Accoridng to the referetnial theary raelity
pre-exists language-so langauge comes long later and labels the already
existing bits of reality. Acoording to the auther, there are tow processes
thaikng place at once.One is that realty takes shape under the influence of
language , the other is that language takes shape under the influence of
reality.
The referential theory of meaning, in author’s veiw, can be easily knocked
down.This theory is logical whne there are only concrete objects, but what
about abstract concepts such as ‘love, hate, socialism,…’
The author concludes that the referential theory of meaning with its idea
that there is such a thing as objective reality which pre-exixts language is
plain wrong and in dire need of replacement.
Reagarding the debate of whethr to go from form to meaning or vice versa,
the autjor believs that as the basic tenets of structralism, one should statr
with form and move from there to meaning. Te authro thinks that language
is a list of names of things, and words are signs with a value in a system.The
sign consists of two parts; signifier and signified “form and meaning”.
The author talks about Saussrean dichotomy which is the distiction
between synchrony and diachronomy.Diachronic approach means historical
and a synchornoc approach to language is one which makes a cut in the
passage of time and analyses language as if it were in a steady state.The
auther thinks that in order to pursue historical linguistics.One must first
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analyse a language synchronologically in two stages an earlier one and a
later one, and then follow the changes which led from the ealier stage to
the later stage.
Chapter 1 reviews key points of Saussurean structuralism. Based on
Saussure's premise that language is a system whose units are determined
by their place in the system, Beedham contends that form rather than
meaning should be the point of departure in linguistic analysis and that
there should be no exceptions to accurate rules. If there are exceptions to
descriptive rules, it can only mean that the rules are not valid. Beedham's
form-to-meaning approach equates 'langue' with sentence grammar, which
equates with formal linguistics. He contends that the study of 'langue,' as
Saussure intended, is in decline, which he attributes to three major
historical events: (1) the division of structuralism into European and
American structuralism; (2) the advent of generative grammar and
Chomsky's competence-performance distinction; and (3) a disinterest in
descriptive linguistics as generative grammar became the state-of-the-art
of formal linguistics. Additionally in Chapter 1, Beedham begins to make the
case for language creating reality by evoking abstract concepts such as
'love', 'hate', etc., function words such as 'the', 'and', 'of', etc., the
nominative case, and the suffix '–tion' that supposedly do not correspond
to reality. Although having previously stated that there are two
simultaneous processes (language influences reality while reality influences
language), he contends that even concrete entities are constructs of
language and the human perceptual apparatus, ''...there is no such thing
objective, non-linguistic, pre-linguistic reality anyway (because reality only
takes shape under the influence of language.)''
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Aspect is the general topic of Chapter 2, in which the author examines
how
aspect may be expressed either by 1) auxiliary + participle; 2) lexically; or 3)
compositionally (as manifested by combined elements of a sentence). He
notes that, in spite of the widely accepted voice analysis that maintains the
passive voice is derived from and a paraphrase of the active voice (provided
that the active construction contains a transitive verb to be passivized),
there are non-passivizable transitives; thus, he concludes that the voice
analysis needs re-examining. The conclusion arrived at based on a reanalysis is that the lexical aspect of those non-passivizable transitives
makes them incompatible with the passive. Sections on lexical b aspect of
both Russian and German support the author's aspect analysis. The
supposed meanings of the tenses are reflected in their names. The past
tense means past time, the present tense means present time, and the
future tense, for those who still think of it as a tense, means future time.
The practice of calling grammatical categories after their meanings is an
invidious one and goes against the grain of structuralism, not to mention
common sense.20 The reason is that, as we said in Chapter 1, linguistics is a
search for meanings, and if we commit ourselves to a meaning for a given
form by naming the form after its supposed meaning, it makes it difficult to
change our mind about its meaning in the light of further research, unless
we change its name every time. Moreover, it is irksome and impractical
Language andMeaning when different nscholars give their own names
to a form reflecting their particular view of its meaning, thus multiplying
terminology. We are now ready to deal with aspect, and we will again
distinguish clearly between formal realization and meaning. Aspect is
formally realized in three different ways in the world’s languages: (i)
Auxiliary + Participle; (ii) lexical aspect (also known as Aktionsart); (iii)
compositional aspect. If we take each of these in turn, English has two
recognised Auxiliary + Participle aspects, the progressive and the perfect.
The progressive is formed with the auxiliary be and the 1st participle ending
in -ing, as in the sentence She is reading a book. Turning to meaning, the
progressive portrays an action as on-going or continuous. The perfect is
formed with the auxiliary have and the 2nd participle in -ed, as in the
sentence She has read the book. Although there are several sub-meanings
of the perfect, itsmost general meaning is ‘past action with current
relevance.Turning to our second formal type of aspect, lexical aspect,
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although English n does not have morphological lexical aspect like Russian,
i.e. lexical aspect realized by specific morphemes which attach to words,
it does have syntactic lexical aspect, viz. one can see the lexical aspect a
verb has by the way it reacts to being combined with the progressive and
the perfect.25 For example, it is well known that some verbs, e.g. to know,
cannot combine with the progressive, or at least, they resist it, thus the
sentence *She is knowing the truth is under normal conditions
ungrammatical. It is common practice amongst grammarians to infer from
this fact that verbs like to know have a special lexical aspect, usually called
stative. Stative verbs, as their name implies, express a state. Although an
action can readily be expressed as on-going or continuous a state cannot –
hence stative verbs are incompatible with the progressive Thus stative
verbs in English are an example of lexical aspect, formally recognisable by
virtue of the fact that they are incompatible with the progressive. It is
important to emphasise that, although because we have formal proof of
their existence (viz. their
incompatibility with the progressive) it makes sense to give them a
meaning and say they are stative, it would not do to attempt to identify a
class of stative verb solely on the basis of meaning. If such a class of verb
had no formal consequences in the language it would be pointless. But
there is a formal consequence, incompatibility with the progressive, and on
the basis of that formal evidence we can proceed to posit a class of verb,
stative.
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Chapter 3 deals with passives. The most widespread analysis of the
passive today, in traditional, pedagogical, descriptive, generative and every
other kind of grammar, is that passives and actives are (cognitively)
synonymous, in line with which passives are derived from their underlying
actives. This is the voice analysis of the passive. It will be shown in this
chapter, however, that passives and actives are not synonymous – the socalled actional passive has its own independent meaning, viz. the
expression of a new state on the subject as the result of a preceding action
(hence the subject is patient) – and passives are not derived from an
underlying active, rather, they are an aspect of the type Auxiliary +
Participle, like the perfect and the progressive in English. Passivizability
depends not on transitivity but on the lexical aspect of the verb and the
compositional aspect of the sentence. But all that comes in the second half
of the chapter. Let us begin with the commonly accepted voice analysis of
the passive.
Beedham elaborates on the advantages of the aspect analysis over the
voice analysis and notes that the voice analysis, in addition to the
exceptions of the non-passivizable transitives, spawns many unanswered
questions such as: if 'actives' and 'passives' are formally/structurally so
different, how is it there is no semantic difference between the two?
Furthermore, if four-fifths of passive sentences appear without the 'BYphrase,' as sustained by corpus analyses, can it make sense that passives
might be derived from active constructions? The author dispenses with all
the above shortcomings with the 'aspect analysis': be + V-ed represents an
aspect of the verb that signifies a resultant state of an action performed on
the subject functioning as patient. The lexical aspect of the verb and the
compositional aspect of each sentence determine which verbs form
passives. Verbs and sentences that do not potentially contain an end-point
cannot passivize. The by-phrase is an optional prepositional phrase in which
'by' indicates agency or instrumentality. Accepting the aspect theory of the
passive would implicate a change in the 'auxiliary + participle' paradigm of
English leaving us with:
be + V-ing (progressive)
have + V-ed (perfect)
be + V-ed (passive/ action + state)
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Thus, Beedham declares that the structuralist tenet of ''form determines
meaning'' is born out by the similarity in form and meaning of the perfect
and passive. As before, the author supplies data from German and Russian
to support his argument.
The concept ''form determines meaning'' has methodological implications,
according to Beedham, in that it applies to the researcher's perceptions;
i.e., the formal-grammatical analysis that one is committed to creates the
meaning that one sees. ''The same principle applies to our perception of
the universe generally. The things and actions, houses and trees, love and
hate, beauty and ugliness that we see in the universe are not objectively
there, they are created by the perceptual apparatus that we bring to bear
in seeing them: by mind, language, the five senses, plus other biological
and physical properties which humans happen to possess'' .
The question of non-passivizable transitive verbs is the most important
and most intractable problem of the passive.Most grammars do not
attempt to explain why they exist, but simply note their existence and list
them.43 A similar problem is presented by prepositional verbs, which are
sometimes passivizable and sometimes not. The nearest that grammarians
have come to an explanation for this phenomenon within the voice analysis
is to say that it depends on whether the sentence produces an observable
result or a noticeable effect. For example, They wrote on the page can lead
to The page was written on, but They sat on the bench cannot easily lead to
?The bench was sat on.Whilst ?The bridge waswalked under by the dog
sounds strange.
The bridge has been walked under by generations of lovers sounds
acceptable. Attempts have also been made within theme-rheme analysis to
explain such examples. But these are vague and intuitive criteria – no one
has ever found a grammatical, i.e. morpho-syntactic explanation within the
voice analysis for why some prepositional verbs or sentences forma passive
and others do not.
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Chapter four is devoted, in part, to generative grammar due to the
passive's role in the development of generative grammar, and given the
domination of generative grammar in theoretical linguistics. According to
Beedham, understanding the shortcomings of generative grammar will help
make a case for descriptive grammar. As opposed to generative grammar,
descriptive grammar provides analyses, theories, and explanations in
addition to description. Chapter four summarizes Chomsky's current
version of generative grammar, Minimalism, as well as derivatives of
generative grammar (Joan Bresnan's Lexical-Functional Grammar, Pollard
and Sag's Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, and Formal Semantics).
The author contends that all are inadequate given their reliance on formal
notation instead formal analysis. Connectionism (Parallel Distributed
Processing) is also considered since it claims to compete with generative
grammar. After deconstructing connectionism, however, Beedham
concludes that ''connectionism's double misinterpretation of the already
misguided generative grammar'' makes irrelevant any claim to compete
with generative grammar. The inclusion of connectionism seems to be
motivated by its contribution regarding patterning of vowels and
consonants in irregular past tense verbs in English since that is the topic of
the next chapter. Chapter four concludes with a discussion of how Steven
Pinker is really more of a descriptivist than a Chomskyan and how the
mathematical, model-building approach employed in generative grammar
can be counterproductive to conducting real science.
Regarding the Generative grammar, the authror says that “the passive”
is the most important construction in the development of generative
grammar and he mentions that linguistics are didveded into two camps ,
descriptive and generative. Descrptive linguistics is tradddtional and
pedagogical grammar, the kind of grammar the one encounters at school,
particularly when learning a forign language. Gnereative grammar was an
approach to language which was initiated by Noam Chomsky.Gnereative
grammar is considered by its practioners to be a revolutionary new way of
analysing language.
Generative grammarians believe that it is the job of the linguist to
construct formal models/theories/grammars of language which explain
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how it is that speakers produce grammatically correct sentences, how they
interpret sentences correctly, and how children acquire language so rapidly
and efficiently.
Regarding Minimalism the author writes that Minimalism is the latest
stage in a series of changes made to the originalmodels of Chomsky 1957
and 1965, and incorporates a number of additions and adjustments which
have been made on the way, such as X’ (pronounced X-bar) syntax, traces,
government and binding theory, principles and parameters, and the θcriterion (theta-criterion). The name Minimalism expresses Chomsky’s
desire to have as few categories and principles as possible, in keeping both
with a general scientific aim of covering as much data as possible with as
few statements as possible, and with the specific rationale of generative
grammar that the child is born with the template of language, known as
Universal Grammar or UG for short, in its head, i.e. language is innate, and
the simpler or more minimal the grammar is the closer it is likely to be to
UG.
Regarding Formal semantics the author thinks that it is based on an even
more disastrous equivocation of form and notation, as well as on a
complete misunderstanding of the relationship between form and
meaning. It takes meanings and ‘formalizes’ them, i.e. expresses them in a
notation. In doing so it is aware that form and meaning are inextricably
linked, but it believes that by expressing meanings in a notation it has
captured those meanings formally and thus explained themscientifically. It
is, of course, sheer folly. Notations are not forms, they are mere notations;
and the relationship between form and meaning in natural language is that
form creates meaning – natural language is itself a formalization of the
universe. The meanings we perceive are determined by the forms through
which we see them. And by scrutinising those forms carefully and
scientifically we can gain greater insight into the meanings which they
create/express. But to translate meanings into a notation is a trivial and
senseless activity.
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Chapter five, Tense and irregular verbs, deals with contradictions and
anomalies in the verbal system of English. Beedham notes the mismatch
between the names for tenses and the time reference their names imply.
Subsequently, he delves into the area of his own research: finding the
meaning behind the forms of the strong or irregular past tense verbs. Again
citing Saussurean structuralism, Beedham insists that no linguistic form can
be without a relation to the rest of the relevant linguistic system. He
explains his methodology and his findings to date, reporting that strong
verbs and monosyllabic function words share to a certain degree the same
vowel-consonant patterns. He conducted the same experiments for
German and Russian and reports having obtained the same results.
However, the question of meaning is left unresolved.
So much for the form of tense; now to its meaning. The commonly
accepted view is that tense locates an event in time relative to the moment
of speech, i.e. relative to the time at which an utterance ismade. The
accepted wisdomis that the past tense refers to past time relative to the
moment of speech, the present tense refers to present time – and the
future tense – be it a tense or a modal construction – refers to future time.
The most striking examples of a mismatch between tense and time are
those instances in which the present tense refers to something other than
present time, the past tense to something other than past time, and the
future tense to something other than future time.
Regarding the all three tenses, the author thinks that the present tense
can refer to future time, past time, an imagined time, and no time at all; it
cannot refer to present time. The past tense can refer to future time,
present time, and imagined time, in addition to its supposed basic meaning
of past time. And the future tense can refer to present time and no time at
all, in addition to its supposed basic meaning of future time. Thus it can be
seen that the time-based theory of tense could hardly be more wrong – the
only contradictory use that we have not found is the future tense used to
mean past time. All the other theoretically possible uses which might
contradict a time-based analysis of tense have been shown to exist: the
present tense referring to the past and future, the past tense referring to
the present and the future, the future tense referring to the present.
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Regarding the meaning the author depends on both Tobin and Quirk.
Tobin (1993: 327) claims that the English irregular verbs are resultative, in
contrast to a process orientation of the regular verbs.88 Quirk (1970) and
Quirk et al. (1985: 106) claim that the irregular burnt, smellt, dreamt etc.
are perfective, whilst the regular burned, smelled, dreamed etc. are
durative, based on informants’ reactions to these forms in perfective-type
and durative-type contexts. These two accounts by two scholars working
completely independently are very close to each other, whereby resultative
= perfective, and process-oriented = durative. Both scholars claim that the
semantic difference between strong and weak verbs is of an aspectual
nature, and I believe they are right. But we need proof of any meaning we
might suppose is there, formal proof from langue, i.e. sentence-grammar.
We need morpho-phonemic or morphological or syntactic or phonotactic
proof of our semantic claims, because that is where the meaning comes
from in the first place – every form has a meaning, and form determines
meaning.
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In Chapter six, Beedham discusses 'parole' versus 'langue,' alleging that
text-grammar is different from sentence grammar (not superior or inferior)
and that the types of meaning conveyed in texts are different to those
conveyed in sentences (different but not more or less important). The areas
of speech acts / communicative functions, what he refers to as 'themerheme' analysis, styles and registers, and corpus studies are given as
examples of approaches to text-grammar. He suggests that sentencegrammar and text-grammar are interdependent or complementary and
refers to how he used the corpus linguistic approach in support of his
aspect analysis of the passive construction. Having said all that, Beedham
concludes the chapter with a defense of sentence-grammar and criticism of
those who say that only text grammar is valid:
The sentence-grammarian analyses words and forms by deliberately
abstracting away from their specific contexts in order to arrive at
generalizations. This is the essence of science. If one did not abstract away
from specific instances generalizations would be impossible. Such ancient,
familiar, and incontrovertible concepts of sentence-grammar as word,
clause, noun, and subject are generalizations of this kind. They exist on the
sentence, not on the text.
In this chapter the author briefly talks about four areas of text grammar:
speechacts/communicative functions, theme-rheme analysis, styles and
registers, and corpus studies.. The author thinks that, however, that text
grammar is simply different to sentencegrammar, and that the types of
meaning displayed in texts is different to the types of meaning displayed in
sentences, but that is all. They are different, but a full understanding of
language requires the study of both, both (abstract) sentences and
(concrete) texts. Moreover, the author shows – using the passive as an
example – that langue and parole, sentence-grammar and text grammar,
are in a dialectical relationship with each other, such that they can help
each other to solve each other’s problems: text grammar can provide facts
and observations which help us arrive at better sentence-grammatical
analyses; and new sentence-grammatical analyses can solve certain
problems of text grammar. Thus text grammar is justified both in its own
right and as a means to assist research into sentence-grammar.
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According to the author another interesting area of text grammar is
theme-rheme analysis (also known as Functional Sentence Perspective, or
Topic-Comment), which is concerned with the way in which a
speaker/writer’s desire to organise information in the sentence according
to its importance or newness influences word order. The theme of a
sentence is old information or less important information, rheme is new
information or more important information. Linguists disagree on how
theme-rheme is realized formally in language. Some linguists claim that
word order realizes theme-rheme, whereby the theme usually occurs
initially and the rheme second. Other linguists claim that theme-rheme is
realized by stress and intonation, whereby the rheme of the sentence
receives primary stress. Obviously, since primary stress can occur anywhere
in a sentence the rheme can occur anywhere in the sentence, and hence
also the theme, i.e. the two mooted realizations of theme-rheme contradict
each other. Still another group of linguists define the theme as the first
item in the sentence, which is yet a third way of looking at it. So there is a
long way to go before we fully understand theme-rheme, but it is still a
useful and necessary complement to a purely syntactic (i.e. sentencegrammatical) approach to word order – i.e. the first item in the stylistically
neutral sentence is the subject, the second item is the verb, the third item
is the object, etc. (necessary because the first item in a sentence/utterance
is often precisely not the subject) – and a welcome refinement to what we
used to say, which was simply and crudely that word order could change
because of emphasis.
Concerning the speech acts the author writes that communicative
meaning and (sentence-)grammatical meaning are different kinds of
meaning, and speakers need and use both in the interpretation of texts.
Communicative meaning arises as much from general intelligence and
knowledge of the world as it does frompurely linguistic knowledge. The
notion that text grammar might obliterate sentence-grammar is, of course,
ridiculous. The study of language will always require such basic notions as
word, suffix, morpheme, clause, subject and object, nouns and verbs,
tense, aspect, number, gender, agreement, etc., all of which exist quite
independently of texts.
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Chapter seven highlights what Beedham calls ''The method of lexical
exceptions;'' i.e., the methodology he used in his research on the passive
construction and the phonological shape of the strong verbs. In pursuing
this method, one identifies an area of grammar in which there are many
unexplained exceptions to a general rule (an indication of faulty analysis),
considers the commonly accepted explanation, analyzes the contradictions
or exceptions, and offers a new analysis that eliminates the contradictions.
He claims that the method of lexical exceptions allows the sentencegrammarian to carry out research as defined by the natural sciences. ''It is
the methodological corollary that linguistics is a search for meanings,
whereby the meanings that we are looking for are determined by the form
of language'' .
A commonly held view is that in grammar (unexplained) exceptions to
rules are inevitable and unavoidable, and we just have to put up with them.
But that seems to me a misguided view. If a language really is systematic it
should not allow any exceptions at all, i.e. items which stand outside the
system, not a part of it. Yet exceptions do exist, so how do they arise? It
seems tome that they arise to the extent that we, the grammarians, have
got it wrong. We introduce them from outside with rules that are not quite
right. If a rule is 100% correct it will have no (unexplained) exceptions
whatsoever, if it is almost exactly right it will have a small number of
exceptions, and if it is badly wrong it will have lots of exception.
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Conclusion
This is an intersting and very benefiacial for every one especially for the
students of linguistics.I think the author has used a very successful style by
stimulating some questions in the introduction like “What is the
relationship between language and thought?, Does language come first,
then thought and perceptuion, whether language creates reality or vice
virsa?, etc..
Throughout the book, the author tries to prove and convince the reader
regarding the following topics:
A-Lnaguage should be the fundamnetal object of linguistics analysis.
B-Formal rather than semantic analyses are the essence of Saussurean
structuaralism.
C-Language creates reality and not vice versa.
My further points of this book are the following:
1-This book is readable and easy to understand.
2-It is very useful for novice students to get good insights into the
descrptive, and generative grammar.
3-The author successfully presents language and meaning by giving two
arguementative questions whether language takes shape under the
influence of reality or reality takes shape under the influence of language.
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