Lecture Nine: Semantics Part I
By answering the question ‘what is semantics?’ we immediately raise
another question. For, if semantics is the study of ‘meaning’, how do we define
‘meaning’? Before we can even begin to look at what semantics studies, we need
to have a clearer understanding of what is meant by ‘meaning’; a lexeme which
has yet to be defined fully by the very linguists who attempt to define everything
else in the English lexicon! Nevertheless, let’s begin with some views on what
‘meaning’ could be.
The ‘naming’ theory
This theory goes back at least as far as Plato, who said that a word in a
language is a ‘form’ and that ‘meaning’ is the object the form denotes. So, for
example, ‘dog’ is a form which denotes the four-legged creature which barks.
Unfortunately, how can ‘love’ or ‘beauty’ or ‘admiration’ denote meanings when
the objects themselves are not physically anywhere? And what about ‘fairy’ or
‘elf’ or ‘goblin’ that do not even exist? Clearly this theory is unsuitable, and at
best, limited in usefulness and scope.
Concepts
The theory of ‘concepts’ is a somewhat more advanced theory. It states
that ‘words’ and ‘things’ are related by ‘concepts’ in the mind. It can be pictured
in this way by means of the semiotic triangle (Odgen and Richards, 1923):
Thought or reference
(i.e. the concept)
Symbol
(i.e. the word)
Referent
(i.e. the thing)
---- = indicates no direct connection.
However, this theory is not perfect either. What is the exact connection
between a ‘symbol’ and ‘thought’? When we use words we rarely think of a
concept at all; we simply speak. And there are some words which are almost
impossible to conceptualise, like ‘the’. This theory, then, is also unsatisfactory.
Context and Behaviourism
In the middle of the 20th century yet another theory developed among the
behaviourist school led by Firth. Now linguists focused on observation more than
theorising when trying to understand meaning. Meaning came to be based on
context. This enabled linguists to view ‘meaning’ from a more objective and
scientific standpoint, looking at meaning in the context of language behaviour
(situation, context, use…). They said that , “We shall know a word by the
company it keeps” (From, ‘A Concise Course On Linguistics For Students of
English’). When Bloomfield joined in the research, he developed the theory
further saying that the meaning of a word depends on “the situation in which the
speaker utters it, and the response which it calls forth in the hearer” (ibid.).
Bloomfield’s own model (1933) is helpful here:
S -------- r ………s -------- R
S = a physical stimulus
r = a linguistic response to the stimulus
s = a linguistic stimulus
R = a response
E.g. ‘Jill is hungry. She sees an apple and gets Jack to fetch it for her by
speaking to him.’ (Ibid.).
However, this theory also has its drawbacks. In order to interpret the
meaning of words in relation to physical events, more needs to be known about
the speaker and hearer.
Mentalism
Yet another school of thought was developed by the Chomsky school in
the 1960s. They held that the main function of language is for the purpose of
communication of ideas and they assume moreover that data can be acquired by
intuition. This stems from two beliefs:  Looking on a range of data is better
than being restrictive and  most researchers agree anyway ‘intuitively’
regarding ‘which sentences are synonymous, which sentences are ambiguous,
which sentences are ill-formed or absurd’ (ibid.). Their theory can be represented
as a diagram like this:
Intuition supplies data
Validate theories


 Or

Either
Construct theories to support data


Test theories
Conclusions
Semantics, then, despite all the confusion over ‘meaning’, can be said to
be the ‘study of the communication of meaning through language’, to follow
Chomsky’s line of reasoning. The more we understand what language items
‘mean’ and how they relate to a ‘referent’, the closer we can come to
understanding the human mind itself. It is clearly no easy task, and will be an
on-going process in the decades to come.
Types of Meaning
We have so far discussed what ‘meaning’ may generally mean, but not
what specific forms it takes. Leech (1981)1 provides a useful framework for this
purpose. He highlights seven kinds of meaning:
 Conceptual meaning: logical, cognitive, denotative. E.g.   ‘flower’ (i.e.
there is a direct physical referent).
 Associative meaning: what is communicated by virtue of what language
refers to. E.g. ‘love’ (i.e. thoughts, ideas, experiences, emotions…).
 Social meaning: what is communicated of the social circumstances of
language use. E.g. ‘You’re a monkey!’ cf. ‘¡Eres mono!’ [Spanish] (i.e. ‘monkey’
gives an English-speaker the feeling of someone ‘cheeky’ in a childlike way,
Refer to the textbook ‘A Concise Course On Linguistics For Students of English’ Ch5.3.1 to get a
further set of examples and a breakdown of ‘sense’ and ‘meaning’.
1
whereas ‘mono’ gives a Spanish-speaker the feeling of someone ‘good looking’ in a
colloquial way).
 Affective meaning: what is communicated of the feelings and attitudes of
the speaker/writer. E.g. ‘I really hate Monday mornings!’ (i.e. a sense of ‘bad
mood’ or ‘disgruntlement’).
 Reflected meaning: what is communicated through association with another
sense of the same expression, i.e. puns and connotations.
 Collocative meaning: what is communicated through association with words
that tend to occur in the environment of another word. E.g. ‘pride’ + ‘prejudice’ or
+ ‘fall’ [as in ‘pride comes before a fall’] (i.e. something negative), ‘sea’ + ‘sand’
(i.e. holidays, a pleasant experience).
 Thematic meaning: what is communicated by the way in which the message
is organised in terms of order and emphasis. E.g. ‘On looking up from behind his
newspaper, and while still pondering the grim tone of the article he had been
reading before he was suddenly broken off by a loud dull thud, he spotted what
he thought to be the lifeless form of a feline creature at the bottom of the stairs
to his right, just behind the lamp in the corner…’ (i.e. suspense, a sense of
foreboding).
Now, let’s look at some specific details of interest to the semanticist.
Synonymy
‘Synonymy’ really means ‘the state of possessing identical meaning’, so
two words that are synonymous must be fully interchangeable in all situations clearly this is almost (if not) impossible. Fox defines synonymy as ‘sameness of
meaning’, but this is also an absolute definition that does not work well in
practice.
The problem with many so-called synonyms is the fundamental attributes
most words have, namely ‘denotation’ and ‘connotation’.
Denotation means fundamental, or basic meaning: e.g. ‘man’ and ‘chap’
share the same denotation, because both refer to an adult male person.
Connotation implies extra sociolinguistic meaning of a word: e.g. ‘man’ is
a generic lexeme for any adult male person, but ‘chap’ has the added possible
implication of ‘youth’, ‘regional dialect’ and may be considered ‘humorous’ in
certain contexts.
So, between ‘man’ and ‘chap’ there exists the same denotation but
different connotations. Thus the two words cannot be classed as absolute
synonyms.
Similarly, two lexemes may mean exactly the same under certain equal
conditions, but in other contexts only one of the lexemes is acceptable. For
example, ‘range’ and ‘selection’ are synonymous in the sentence ‘what a nice
_____ of furnishings’, but in the sentence ‘what a nice mountain _____’ only
‘range’ is possible. Sets of lexemes like ‘range’ and ‘selection’ are called
collocationally-restricted synonyms.
There are other types of synonymy, also, as follows.
1. Dialectal synonyms are many in English due to the large number of
independent English-speaking communities throughout the world. For
example, in Standard American English you would say hood, pavement,
sidewalk, diaper, fall, which correspond with bonnet, road surface, footpath,
nappy, autumn in Standard English English.
2. Stylistic differences are found in many ‘synonymous pairs’. Compare ‘one
should’ and ‘you should’, ‘football’ and ‘footy’, and ‘insane’ and ‘nuts’, for
example.
3. Differences according to register happen especially in the development of
scientific, legal and academic English. Indeed of any specialist field. Here the
difference is between a ‘technical term’ applied to something and the ‘popular
term’ that non-specialists would employ. For example, a chemist would say
‘sodium nitrate’ but everyone else would say ‘salt’. Zoologists would talk about
‘bovine mammals’ when everyone else would say ‘cows’.
4. Near synonyms are often found in dictionaries and thesauruses in the form of
lists of words with similar meanings (i.e. sharing the same denotation), but
only mean exactly the same thing as another lexeme of the same set under
certain circumstances. E.g. ‘pleasant’ can have the meaning of ‘nice’, ‘kind’,
‘good’, ‘friendly’, ‘likeable’ and ‘fine’ as in these example sentences:
It’s nice/pleasant weather.
He’s a kind/pleasant man.
It’s a good/pleasant day.
It’s a friendly/pleasant place.
He’s a likeable/pleasant chap.
It’s a fine/pleasant summer.
But you could not say pleasant in this sentence: ‘It’s a fine/*pleasant dish’. Here
only ‘fine’ has the meaning of ‘(the food) tastes very good’.
Polysemy
‘Polysemy’ describes a lexeme that has more than one meaning. For
example, the lexeme ‘set’ in ‘The Concise English Dictionary’ (1994) is listed as
having 16 transitive verb meanings, 9 intransitive verb meanings, 6 adjectival
meanings and 17 meanings as a noun! All those in only a concise dictionary! There are even more if you consult the OED!
Homonymy
These synonyms can be homophones, having the same pronunciation but
different orthographic representation, as in great-grate, red-read, so-sew, toetow, threw-through and two-to-too.
Incidentally, homophones make great jokes: ‘What is black and white and
/red/ all over?’ Answer: ‘A newspaper.’ (/red/ = ‘red’ and ‘read’).
They can also be homographs, having the same orthographic
representation but different pronunciation, as in wind-wind and tear-tear.
Hyponymy
This describes the paradigmatic relationship between two lexemes.
‘Paradigmatic’ means that a specific lexeme is subordinate (= hyponymous) to a
more general lexeme which is, in turn, superordinate to it:
For example,
ANIMATE
PLANT
ANIMAL
HUMAN
ANIMAL
MALE FEMALE COW DOG
BULL COW CALF
In the above example ‘bull’ is hyponymous (or subordinate) to ‘cow’ which is
again subordinate to ‘animal’. The higher up the paradigm you move, the more
general the term becomes. As you move down the paradigm the lexemes become
ever more specific variants of the more general term above. Also, lexemes which
belong to the same superordinate lexeme (like ‘animal’ and ‘plant’ [both belong to
‘animate’], or ‘bull’, ‘cow’ and ‘calf’ [all belong to ‘cow’]) are called co-hyponyms,
because they are all immediately subordinate to the same lexeme.
Antonymy
This is just as confusing as ‘synonymy’. It is often taken to mean
‘oppositeness of meaning’, but there are no words which could usually be called
true opposites, for the same reasons that there can be no really true synonyms.
However, we can talk of various degrees of antonymy.
1. Gradable opposites are opposites of degree and can be preceeded by ‘very +
_____’ or ‘quite + _____’. For example, tall/short, old/young, fat/thin, near/far,
dark/light, good/evil, hungry/full and dry/wet.
2. Complementary (non-gradable) opposites are terms which complement each
other. The test is: ‘If A is not x then it’s y. If A is y, then it’s not x’. For
example, single/married, man/woman, boy/girl and grandmother/grandfather.
3. Relational (converse) opposites express the reversal of a relationship between
two things. The test is: ‘x presupposes y and y presupposes x’. For example,
sun/moon, day/night, buy/sell, give/take, eat/drink, temporal/permanent,
here/there, dress/undress, come/go, love/hate.