Department of Linguistics
University of Cambridge
Academic year 2010/2011
Dr. Luna Filipović
Li2 Paper
Lecture 2
Meaning Relations
I.
Meaning in Major Linguistic Approaches (a very short historical
reminder)
a) Structuralism (European: de Saussure; American: Bloomfield; Sense is
created between words, not in isolation; syntagmatic and paradigmatic
relations)
b) Generativism (Meaning is generated from a universal deep structure into
language-specific surface structures; generative syntax and generative
semantics)
c) Cognitivism (not a unified approach; explores the dynamics between
language and other cognitive structures; Pinker’s language instinct vs.
Fodor’s modularity vs. Levinson’s biocultural symbiosis)
d) Typological approaches to language will be tackled separately in Lecture4.
II.
Traditional view of meaning relations: sense relations
a)
synonymy (e.g. glasses/spectacles)
b)
antonymy (e.g. old/new)
c)
homonymy(e.g.light1/light2);homography(bow1/bow2);
homophony(tail/tale)
d)
polysemy (e.g. foot of the mountain)
e)
metonymy (e.g. Kant is hard to understand.)
f)
metaphor (e.g. Richard is a wolf.)
g)
hyponymy (fruit/apple)
III.
Theoretical approaches to word meaning and meaning relations
a)
CA (traditional: crunching lexical items down to basic meaning
components; no hierarchy of components; however, components are
not necessarily more basic than the whole item: kill vs. cause to be not
alive)
b)
Field theory (lexemes are of the same word class and their meanings
have something in common; e.g. furniture, colour, etc.)
c)
Prototype Theory (prototypes are ‘better members’; graded
membership in a category; If robin is a prototype bird, what is a
prototype of robin?; makes more sense to assume that the prototype is
an abstract case defined by a concept that fixes certain features and
leaves others open; however: flexible category boundaries suggest
inherent vagueness, which is not a negative quality!)
d)
Semantic Primitives (Wierzbicka’s NSM – Natural Semantic
Metalanguage; set of primitives and syntax for their combination; a
semantic primitive is indefinable and universal; X feels
envy=sometimes a person thinks something like this: something good
happened to this other person, it did not happen to me, I want things
like this to happen to me, because of this, this person feels something
bad, X feels something like this)
IV.
Recent developments (in cognitively-oriented theories)
a) Jackendoff’s universals (1995, 1997, 2003)
THING, PLACE, DIRECTION, EVENT, MANNER, PATH, AMOUNT
E-language (“real world”) vs. I-language (“projected world”)
1. A tiger has stripes (true or false? Does not matter because it is of no concern for
the understanding what the sentence means.)
2. The lamp is standing on the floor.
[THING] occupies [PLACE]
3. The dog went into the room.
[Event GO ([Thing DOG], [Path TO ([Place IN ([Thing ROOM])])])]
(Jackendoff 1995: 183)
Central hypothesis: The grammatical aspects of language make reference only to
Conceptual Structure (CS), not to Spatial Structure (SpS) and that nothing in grammar
depends on, for example, detailed shapes of objects (Jackendoff 2003). However,
some examples to the contrary can be found, such as languages that have classifier
systems that depend on coarse object shapes (e.g. the Japanese classifier hon which is
used for skinny objects.
Furthermore, empirical studies do indeed exist and they provide evidence that there is
a persistent reliance on lexicalized language-specific concepts even in tasks that are
not explicitly linguistic (cf. Levinson 2003a, 2003b; Lucy 1992; Lucy and Gaskins
2003). For example, Lucy (1992) explained how Yukatek Mayan speakers classify
objects according to material rather than to shape as preferred by English speakers as
a consequence of categories of grammatical number and of numeral classifiers
available in that language.
b) Levinson’s (2003a, b) Neo-Whorfian proposal
IN spatial scene is not a universal
Shape discriminations: Karuk postposition ‘though a tube’, Nishga locative
proclitics encoding ‘on something horizontal’ (Levinson 2003a). Some locative
verbs make contrastive pairs based on shape, as in the Tzeltal contrast between ‘be
in a hemispherical container’ and ‘be in a cylindrical container’ (cf. Brown 1994).
IN cannot be a universal concept and should not be annotated as such. Japanese
conflates OVER and ON, Tzeltal has just one preposition to cover the scenes of
OVER, UNDER, ON, IN and THROUGH, while some languages have no
adpositions at all (Jaminjung or Arrernte). Yélî Dnye has two IN concepts (i.e.
forms dedicated to containment) and six forms to cover the semantic space
subsumed by the English ON or ABOVE (Levinson 2006).
Basically “no agreement as to what constitutes an IN spatial scene, a spatial
relation of containment or any other basic topological relation”.
There are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all
languages exhibit them” (Evans and Levinson 2009: 429)
V.
What the make of the universal vs. language-specific dynamics?
Jackendoff’s Conceptual Structure Hypothesis proposes a single universal level of
mental representations (Jackendoff 1995). What follows directly from this
isomorphism between the semantic and the conceptual level of representation is that if
languages differ in crucial aspects of lexicalization in a cognitive domain (e.g. space),
then so does the corresponding conceptualization of relations within that domain. This
is certainly not something that Jackendoff advocates, but it is a possible consequence
of such an isomorphism between the two levels of representation. In essence, the role
of semantics as a language-specific intermediate level is something that is of no
consequence for conceptualization, which is universal.
Levinson (2003a) and Levinson and Wilkins (2006) argue that the ways in which
languages organise spatial notions are based on atomic concepts such as contact,
vertical relation, adhesion, containment, not molar (complex) concepts like ON or IN.
Simple conflation of semantics and conceptual structure is not defensible, but if we
assume a kind of partial isomorphism, decompositional theories can explain how it is
possible to learn a language by building up complex constructs from more elementary
concepts. However, it need not be an either-or issue and Levinson argues along these
lines that there are two levels of representation: decompositional and noncompositional.
See Filipović (in press) for more details
And remember: Habitual processing happens on the molar level (Levinson
2003a,b)
References (with Advanced Reading in bold):
Bohnemeyer, J and Stolz, C. 2006. Spatial reference in Yukatek Maya: A survey. In
S. C. Levinson and D. Wilkins (eds.), (pp. 273-310). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Bowerman, M. and Choi, S. 2003. Space under construction: Language-specific
spatial categorization in first language acquisition. In D. Gentner and S. GoldinMeadow (eds.), Language in Mind (pp. 387-427). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Brown, P. 1994. The INs and ONs of Tzeltal locative expressions: The semantics of
static descriptions of location. Linguistics 32: 743-790.
Evans, N. and Levinson, S. C. 2009. The myth of language universals: Language
diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain
Sciences 32(5): 429-492.
Filipović, L. (in press) Spatial reference in discourse. In Jaszczolt, K. and Allan, K.
(Eds.) Handbook of Pragmatics. Cambridge: CUP.
Jackendoff, R. 1995. Semantics and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Jackendoff, R. 1997. The Architecture of the Language Faculty. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Jackendoff, R. 2003. Foundations of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Levinson, S.C. 2003a. Space in Language and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Levinson, S. C. 2003b. Language and Mind: Let’s get the issues straight! In D.
Gentner and S. Goldin-Meadow (eds.), Language in Mind (pp. 25-45). Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Levinson, S. C. 2006. The language of space in Ye´lıˆ Dnye. In Levinson, S.C. and
Wilkins, D. (eds.), (pp. 157-205). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Levinson, S.C. and Wilkins, D. 2006. Towards a semantic typology of spatial
description. In Levinson, S.C. and Wilkins, D. (eds.), (pp. 512-552). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Levinson, S.C. and Wilkins, D. (eds.) 2006. Grammars of Space. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Lucy, J. 1992. Language Diversity and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Lucy, J. and Gaskins, S. 2003. Interaction of language type and referent type in the
development of nonverbal communication. In D. Gentner and S. Goldin-Meadow
(eds.), Language in Mind (pp. 465-492). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Vandeliose, C. 2003. Containment, support and linguistic relativity. In H.
Cuykens, R. Dirven and J. Taylor (eds.), Cognitive Approaches to Lexical
Semantics (pp. 393-425). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Vandeliose, C. 2006. Are there spatial prepositions? In M. Hickman and S.
Robert (eds.), Space in Languages: Linguistic Systems and Cognitive Categories
(pp. 149-154). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.