Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
This book is an essential resource for all undergraduate students studying linguistics.
Series Editors:
Bernard Comrie, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
Greville Corbett, Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey, UK
Understanding Phonetics
Patricia Ashby
Understanding Pragmatics
Jef Verschueren
Semantics
Second edition
Sebastian Löbner
First published in Great Britain 2002 by Hodder Arnold, an imprint of Hodder Education
The right of Sebastian Löbner to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any
electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only
for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xi
2 Dimensions of meaning 18
2.1 Meanings are concepts 18
2.2 Descriptive meaning 21
2.3 Meaning and social interaction: the dimension of social meaning 28
2.4 Meaning and subjectivity: the dimension of expressive meaning 33
2.5 Connotations 36
2.6 Dimensions of meaning 37
Exercises 39
Further reading 40
3 Ambiguity 41
3.1 Lexemes 41
3.2 Lexical ambiguity 44
3.3 Compositional ambiguity 48
3.4 Contextual ambiguity 49
3.5 Meaning shifts and polysemy 57
Exercises 59
Further reading 60
5 Predication 106
5.1 Predications contained in a sentence 106
5.2 Predicate terms and argument terms, predicates and arguments 108
5.3 Verbs 111
5.4 Nouns and adjectives 115
5.5 Predicate logic notation 120
5.6 Thematic roles 122
5.7 Selectional restrictions 125
5.8 Summary 130
Exercises 131
Further reading 133
6 Verbs 134
6.1 Argument structure, diatheses and alternations 135
6.2 Situation structure 140
6.3 Aspect 150
6.4 Tense 157
6.5 Selected tense and aspect systems 163
6.6 Concluding remark 164
Exercises 165
Further reading 166
Exercises 219
Further reading 220
12 Frames 301
12.1 Barsalou frames 301
12.2 Verbs and frames 311
12.3 Nouns and frames 313
12.4 Frames and composition 319
12.5 Frames and cognition 321
12.6 Conclusion 322
Exercises 323
Further reading 324
References 364
Index 369
Preface
As for many others, my entrance into semantics was formal semantics, about
forty years ago. At present, this is still the standard approach in many linguistics
departments around the world. Working in the field of semantics my entire academic
life, my conviction has grown that formal semantics is not the ideal framework for
working one’s way into the rich and fascinating reality of natural language meaning.
The perspectives allowed by the formal apparatus developed in formal semantics are
far too restrictive. And the aspects of meaning and the semantic phenomena that are
neglected, or are simply problematic to deal with, are far too numerous. Above all,
formal semantics has little to say about lexical meaning – which, after all, provides
the ultimate basis of all linguistic meaning – and, not by chance, it fails to connect
semantic theory to cognition.
In Understanding Semantics, I have taken a different approach. It is driven by
the idea that students of semantics should first grasp the level of meaning which
linguistic semantics aims to describe and how this level is related to higher levels
of interpretation; they should learn that there are different dimensions of meaning,
in addition to descriptive meaning; they should know about ambiguity and about
the existence of meaning shifts that interfere with lexical meaning; they should get
a notion of the rich inventory of indexical means of expression including deixis,
determination and presupposition carriers; they should learn the basics of lexical
semantics of nouns and verbs; they should know that there are different theoretical
approaches to meaning; and they should get a notion of the fact that linguistic
meaning is ultimately a matter of conceptualizing the things we talk about: when we
put things into words, we are not just giving a one-to-one mapping of what the world
is like – we make a choice by putting things in the particular way we do. Meaning is
not just a matter of logical relations and truth conditions. As to sentential meaning,
the students need to know about the basic semantic functions of NP determination
and the verbal categories of aspect and tense, and they should know the basics of
predication. All this should be discussed from a perspective that also takes a look at
other languages. On this complex background, the more advanced students may start
to work their arduous way into the theory and technicalities of formal semantics.
In order to give an idea of the basic notions of this approach, the book offers a
substantial basic introduction in the last chapter, and a critique.
The second edition of Understanding Semantics is not only a more up-to-date
version of the first edition, but is supplied with new sections that considerably
broaden the coverage of the field. These include:
x Preface
Among the many people that directly or indirectly were of help in writing this book
and preparing the second edition, I want to express my gratitude to Daniel Hole,
Berlin, who took the trouble of commenting in detail on substantial new parts of
the second edition. I would also like to thank Rachel Daw and Nadia Seemungal at
Routledge for their kind and competent support and guidance for the second edition.
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1
Semantics is the part of linguistics that is concerned with meaning. This is, of course,
a very superficial definition. The crucial term ‘meaning’ on which the definition
rests has several different readings – a first semantic observation which you will
find at the beginning of almost every textbook on semantics. Among the many
uses of the notion ‘meaning’, only some belong to the field of linguistic semantics.
Meaning is always the meaning of something. Words have meanings, as do phrases
and sentences. But deeds may have meaning too. If a government pursues a certain
policy, we may ask what the meaning is of doing so. The ‘meaning’ of an action or a
policy is what sense it makes or what purpose it serves or what it is good for. More
generally, we apply the notion of meaning to all sorts of phenomena that we try to
make sense of.
The first thing to be stated is that linguistic semantics is exclusively concerned with
the meanings of linguistic expressions such as words, phrases, grammatical forms
and sentences, but not with the meanings of actions or phenomena. We will approach
the problem of linguistic meaning step by step, to arrive at a more precise definition
of semantics at the end of this chapter. A more concrete idea of what semantics is
about will result when you learn about the many facets of this fascinating discipline
in the course of this book.
Even if we restrict the study of meaning to words and sentences, the notion of
meaning has to be further broken down into different levels at which we interpret
words and sentences.
This is an ordinary English sentence. Without even noticing, you have already
recognized it as such, you have interpreted it and you are probably imagining
a situation where you would say it or someone would say it to you. Since you
understand the sentence, you know what it means. But knowing what the sentence
2 Understanding semantics
means is one thing, describing its meaning is another. The situation is similar with
almost all our knowledge. We may exactly know how to get from one place to another,
yet be unable to tell the way to someone else. We may be able to sing a song by heart,
but unable to describe its melody. We are able to recognize tens of thousands of words
when we hear them. But the knowledge that enables us to do so is unconscious.
Uncovering the knowledge of the meanings of words and sentences and revealing its
nature is the central objective of semantics.
Let us now try to determine the meaning of the sentence in (1). We start from the
meanings of the words it contains. The main verb in a sentence occupies a key role. So,
1
what is the meaning of the verb need ? Actually, there are two verbs need: an auxiliary
verb (as in I need not go) and a full verb. In (1) we have the full verb. It is used with
2
a direct object (your bicycle) and roughly means ›require‹. We ‘need’ something if
it is necessary or very important for us. In (1), what is needed is described by an
expression composed of the possessive pronoun your and the noun bicycle. The noun
means some sort of vehicle, usually with two wheels and without a motor.
The words need and bicycle are the main carriers of information in the sentence,
so-called content words. The meanings of most content words are very differentiated
because there are thousands of the same kind. All the other elements in our sentence
are different in that they represent items from a very limited choice of expressions of
the same kind. Such words are called function words and include articles, pronouns,
prepositions, conjunctions and other ‘small’ words. We will examine these elements
one by one.
The subject expression I is one of seven personal pronouns in English (I, you, he, she,
it, we and they). What is the meaning of I ? If Mary says the sentence in (1), it is Mary
who is said not to need the bicycle. If John says (1), it is John. In other words, I is used
for the one who says it; more technically: for the one who produces an occurrence of
this pronoun. The technical term for using an expression for something is reference.
When people use I, they refer to themselves. The entity referred to by an expression
is called its referent. The meaning of the pronoun can thus be described as follows:
I indicates reference to the speaker. Similarly, the pronoun you indicates reference to
the addressee or the addressees.
For each personal pronoun there is a corresponding possessive pronoun: I–my,
you–your, etc. Your in (1) indicates that the bicycle referred to is linked to the
addressee(s). For such a link, there is a broad variety of relations possible. Possession
in the sense of ownership is only one option: the expression your bicycle may also
refer to the bicycle the addressee is just riding or cleaning or repairing, or even the
3
bicycle they have been talking about for the last ten minutes. The meaning of your
can roughly be described as ›linked to the addressee(s)‹.
1 It is common practice in linguistic texts to mark words which are referred to in a sentence, rather
than just used, by using italics. In addition, I use italics for emphasis. Whether a word is referred
to or used emphatically is always clear from context.
2 › … ‹ quotes are used for meanings and concepts.
3 I use they as a gender-neutral 3rd person singular pronoun.
Meaning and semantics 3
The form don’t is a contraction of the auxiliary verb do and the negation particle
not. Don’t contributes two things to the meaning of the sentence. It negates the verb
need and thereby turns its meaning into the contrary. In addition, the form don’t
contributes present tense. Tense is the indication that the sentence refers to a certain
time, e.g. present, past or future time. The actual time referred to depends on when
the sentence is uttered. Due to the present tense in (1), we will by default relate the
situation described to the ‘present’ time, i.e. the time when the sentence is being
uttered. Combining these two components of don’t, we may say: the meaning of don’t
is an indication of reference to the time when the sentence is uttered and it turns the
situation expressed by the main verb into the contrary.
So far this has been an attempt to determine the meaning of each word in the
sentence I don’t need your bicycle. This is typical of the work of a semanticist.
As you will have noticed, it is not trivial. For a content word, the description of
its meaning must be specific enough to distinguish it from all words with other
meanings. It would not suffice to describe the meaning of bicycle merely as ›vehicle
with two wheels‹ because there are other kinds of vehicles with two wheels, such as
motorcycles, kick scooters or kids’ balance bicycles. At the same time, the description
must be general enough to cover all cases in which this word could be used. Since
one usually imagines a particular context when one tries to think of a word and its
meaning, one tends to take the meaning too specifically, disregarding other cases in
which the word can also be used.
As for function words like pronouns and auxiliaries and for grammatical forms
such as present tense, their meanings may at first view seem elusive. But it is possible
to account for them too, as our little discussion may have illustrated.
If we put all the pieces together, we can describe the meaning of the sentence as a
whole. It can be roughly formulated as: ›for the speaker, the two-wheeled vehicle of
the addressee(s) is not required at the time when this is being uttered‹.
It is very important to realize that the sentence leaves open who the speaker and
the addressee(s) are, what particular time is referred to and which bicycle. This is not
part of its meaning. Such questions can only be settled if the sentence is actually used
on a concrete occasion. What is, however, determined by the meaning of the sentence
is how the answers to these questions depend on the occasion when the sentence is
used. First, if it is actually used, it is necessarily used by someone who produces the
sentence. With I in subject position, the sentence ‘tells’ us that it is the speaker who
does not need the bicycle. The use of I functions like an instruction: find out who
produced this sentence, this is the referent of I. Second, the use of your presupposes
that there are one or more addressees. The sentence describes the bicycle as related
to them. Third, if a sentence is uttered, it is necessarily used at a certain time. The
time of utterance serves as the reference time for determining what is present, past or
future. The present tense part of the meaning of the sentence conveys the instruction:
attribute the situation described to the time when the sentence is said. Thus the
meaning of the sentence specifies the way in which its reference is determined if and
when it is used at some occasion.
The meanings of words, phrases and sentences, taken out of any particular context
constitute the level of meaning which will henceforth be called expression meaning.
4 Understanding semantics
Expression is just a cover term for words, phrases and sentences. The term expression
meaning covers in particular word meaning and sentence meaning. As you have
noticed, the determination of expression meaning requires an abstraction from the
use of the expressions in concrete contexts. In this sense, the notion of expression
meaning itself is an abstraction and a theoretical construct. But it is justified in the
way language is conceptualized not only in linguistics but also in common thinking:
we do talk about the meanings of words and complex expressions as such, i.e. we do
address this level of meaning.
SCENARIO 1
1 August 2012, morning. Mary has been planning a trip to town that
afternoon. Two days before, she talked with her neighbour John about the trip
and asked him to lend her his bicycle. She had lent her car to her daughter and
did not know if she would get it back in time. Meanwhile her daughter is back
and has returned Mary’s car. Mary is talking with John on her mobile, telling
him:
I don’t need your bicycle.
Used in this context, the sentence receives a concrete interpretation. References are
fixed: the personal pronoun I refers to Mary, the possessive pronoun your links the
bicycle to her neighbour John and the time reference is fixed, too: in the given context,
the present tense verb will be taken to refer to the afternoon of 1 August 2012. This is
clear from the fact that Mary could have said: I don’t need your bicycle this afternoon,
without changing the meaning of her utterance. Furthermore, the reference of the
grammatical object your bicycle is fixed: it is the bicycle Mary asked John to lend her
two days before.
This is a different level of meaning, called utterance meaning. It comes about
when a sentence with its expression meaning is actually used in a concrete context
and all references get fixed. When this happens, another central notion comes into
play, the notion of truth. If Mary says (1) in scenario 1, the sentence is true. But
in a slightly different scenario it might be false. As long as the sentence (1) is not
actually used with concrete reference, it fails to be true or false. The question of
truth primarily concerns ‘declarative’ sentences such as the one under review. Only
such sentences, when uttered, are true or false. But it matters also for interrogative
and other types of sentences. For example, if John asked Mary Do you need my
bicycle?, the use of the question form would convey that he wants to know from his
addressee whether it is true or false.
Let us now imagine a different scenario:
Meaning and semantics 5
SCENARIO 2
Same time and place. John’s five-year-old daughter Maggie is playing at her
place with her friend Titus. They are playing with a game of cards that display
all kinds of vehicles. Titus holds a card that shows a snowmobile. Maggie
is eager to exchange this card for one of hers and offers Titus a card with a
bicycle. Titus rejects the exchange:
I don’t need your bicycle.
In this scenario, references of I, your and the present tense are fixed accordingly. What
is interesting is that in such a context the word bicycle can be naturally interpreted
as referring not to a real bicycle but to a card carrying the picture of a bicycle. Are
we to conclude that the lexical meaning of bicycle must be taken as covering not only
real bicycles but also pictures of this kind of vehicle and things that display such a
picture? The answer is ‘No’. The word bicycle literally means real bicycles, but when
used in special contexts it can also mean ›picture of a bicycle‹, ›card with a picture
of a bicycle‹, ›toy bicycle‹, ›replica of a bicycle‹, etc. or also ›someone riding on a
bicycle‹ in utterances like ‘Stop, there’s a bicycle coming!’ This, however, is a matter of
utterance meaning. What happens in such cases is that the lexical meaning is shifted
for obtaining an utterance meaning that fits into the given context. Such shifts are
quite common; there are many shifting-patterns at our disposal.
For a general definition of utterance meaning, we need a notion for what was
called ‘occasion’, ‘context’ or ‘scenario’ above. The technical term for this is context of
utterance. The context of utterance, CoU for short, is the sum of circumstances that
bear on reference and truth.
We have seen in connection with (1), how utterance meaning may depend on who
the speaker and addressees of an utterance are and at which time it is produced. The
place where an utterance is made matters for the reference of expressions such as
here, there, upstairs, downtown, etc. as well as for the truth of sentences like It’s raining.
Facts matter principally for truth as well as for reference. For example, Mary can only
refer to John’s bicycle in such CoUs where a certain bicycle is related to John. CoUs
may be real or fictitious. If we read a work of fiction or watch a movie, the relevant
facts and figures are those of the story.
6 Understanding semantics
Against this background, utterance meaning can be defined as the meaning that
results from an expression being used and interpreted in a given CoU. Utterance
meaning derives from expression meaning on the basis of the particulars provided
by the CoU.
The notion of utterance meaning does not include all that an addressee may
make of an utterance in a particular CoU. Addressees usually make all kinds of
inferences. For example, in scenario 1, John may infer that Mary is still planning to
make the trip since otherwise she would have told him; that she would have asked
him to lend her his bicycle if she could not have used her car; that, however, her
daughter is back with the car and that Mary is not going to lend her the car again
on that afternoon; that Mary will take the car for her trip; that she considers herself
able to drive, etc. All this is not explicitly said with that sentence, and it need not be
true under different circumstances. In the given scenario, these inferences can be
considered communicated because Mary can rely upon John’s understanding them.
Although these inferences are triggered in the addressee’s mind by the utterance of
the sentence, it is important to separate what is actually being said from what is only
inferred. The investigation of such inferences, their role in communication and how
they are related to the utterance meaning of what is actually said, is an important
part of pragmatics, the scientific study of the rules that govern the use of language.
Within pragmatics, Grice’s theory of ‘conversational implicatures’ and Relevance
Theory by Sperber and Wilson deal with inferences of this kind.
act of saying that he doesn’t need Maggie’s card with the bicycle and the illocutionary
act of rejecting her offer. The speech act level of interpretation will be referred to as
communicative meaning.
The three levels of interpretation are connected as follows. Expression meaning is the
level of interpretation which results if the only information we use is the mere linguistic
material. Expression meaning forms the basis for utterance meaning, but does not
determine it. For, as we could see, a sentence with its fixed expression meaning will take
on different utterance meanings if it is used in a particular context. Utterance meaning,
in turn, forms the basis of communicative meaning, without, again, determining it. For
utterances with the same utterance meaning can serve the performance of different
types of speech acts, depending on the ongoing social interaction. Table 1.1 gives a
survey of the three levels of meaning and how they are defined.
Table 1.1
Three levels of meaning
Words can also be used to create new words. This is called word formation,
and its products complex words. For example, you could coin the word joggable,
deriving it from the verb jog by adding the suffix -able, which can be added to a very
large number of verbs. Or you could form the compound carp food. The products of
word formation need not all be stored in the lexicon and yet they can be as easily
and straightforwardly understood as sentences. Obviously, the semantics part of the
brain also knows how to interpret new words formed out of stored lexical material.
Crucially, this holds only for products of word formation that follow general patterns.
There are, on the other hand, very many complex words that carry irregular or
special meanings. Such cases have to be stored in the lexicon in order to receive their
proper interpretation. We’ll return to the semantics of word formation in 1.2.5. For
now, I just want to fix in your mind a terminological convention: the notion of ‘lexical
meaning’ is also to be taken to subsume the meanings of complex words, whether
semantically regular or irregular. This is in line with the ‘dynamic’ view of the lexicon
which sees it not just as a store of entries, but also as comprising components for the
formation of new words and their meanings.
Let us now take a closer look at the composition of sentence meaning in order to
see what is involved.
Let us assume that we have assessed the lexical meanings of the words in (2): the, dog,
eat, yellow and socks. There are no larger units in the sentence with lexical meaning;
the rest of the interpretation is composition. The words in (2) occur in particular
grammatical forms. The verb form ate is past tense – more precisely: simple past
tense rather than progressive (was eating); it is in the indicative mood rather than
in the conditional (would eat), it is active rather than passive (was eaten), it is not
negated (did not eat). The noun socks is plural; dog is singular, by absence of plural -s.
The adjective yellow is neither comparative (yellower) nor superlative (yellowest), but
is given in its basic form called ‘positive’. The forms of the words matter directly for
their meaning, and consequently for the meaning of the whole sentence. The singular
noun dog has a different meaning from the plural noun dogs: dog refers to a single
creature of this kind, and dogs to more than one. Likewise, the meaning of present
tense eat(s) is not the same as that of past tense ate, and the meaning of the simple
form ate is different from the meaning of the progressive form was/were eating. The
meaning of the simple past form with verbs such as eat is the combination of past
tense and perfective aspect. (Tense and aspect will be discussed in chapter 6 on
verbs.)
The meanings of different word forms are not all stored in our lexicon. Rather the
lexicon contains the meaning (or meanings, cf. chapter 3) of only one form of the
word. For a verb, this is a tenseless and aspectless active meaning, for a noun it is
Meaning and semantics 9
4
its singular meaning and for an adjective its positive meaning. The meanings of
particular word forms are derived from the basic lexical meanings by general rules.
These are part of the apparatus we use in composition. We will call the meaning of
grammatical forms grammatical meaning. The meaning of a word in a particular
form is the combination of its basic lexical meaning and the grammatical meaning
of its form.
Word forms are often built by adding an affix to the invariable part of the word, its
stem. Affixes appended at the end of the word are called suffixes, those added at the
beginning are prefixes. It must be noted that not all differences in the grammatical
forms of words matter for their meaning. A certain form may be necessary just for
grammatical reasons. For example, a certain verb form may be obligatory depending
on the subject of the sentence (cf. I am vs she is, she sees vs you see). By contrast, the
grammatical number (singular or plural) of the nouns dog and sock in (2) can be
chosen independently of the construction in which they occur. Therefore, differences
in form only matter for meaning if – in a given construction – different forms can be
chosen freely. In addition, the different forms available must have different meanings.
If, for example, a verb has two different admissible past tense forms like spoiled and
spoilt, the choice of the form would not matter for its meaning. Also, it may be that
one form has a neutral meaning which subsumes the meanings of the alternative
forms. For example, in Korean nouns can take a plural suffix; it is, however, not
necessary to make use of this option in order to refer to a multitude of instances.
Therefore, the basic form of the noun without a plural suffix has a neutral meaning
and does not carry grammatical meaning.
We can sum up these considerations in the following definition of grammatical
meaning:
4 In some cases, certain forms of words may have a special lexical meaning, such as glasses as
opposed to glass, or used to as opposed to to use. Some nouns are only used in the plural (trousers);
for certain others the distinction does not matter (logic, logics).
5 See Corbett (2000) for a survey on systems of grammatical number including missing number;
Dryer (2011) offers an online map of forms of number marking for more than 1000 languages
(http://wals.info/chapter/33). For tenseless languages see Comrie (1985: 2.5).
10 Understanding semantics
Figure 1.1
The process of composition
GRAMMAR SEMANTICS
called basic expressions. (Basic expressions are expressions with a lexical meaning.)
The meaning of complex expressions is determined by semantic composition. This
mechanism draws on three sources:
1 The lexical meanings of the basic expressions
The general scheme in Fig. 1.1 shows that semantic composition is thought of as a
so-called bottom-up process: it proceeds from the basic units to the complex ones.
The lexical meanings of the smallest units serve as input for the rules of grammatical
meaning, whose output is the input for the composition rules. The converse of a
bottom-up process is a top-down process. If semantic interpretation were a top-
down process, this would mean that the meanings of words are derived from the
meanings of sentences.
That complex expressions receive their meaning by the process of composition is
the central idea underlying semantics. This is called the Principle of Compositionality.
The principle is attributed to the German philosopher, logician and mathematician
Gottlob Frege (1845–1925), and sometime called Frege’s Principle. Although he
obviously applied the principle, there is no passage in his publications that could
serve as a quotation.
12 Understanding semantics
The principle implies that the meanings of complex expressions are fully determined
by the three sources mentioned, i.e. by the linguistic input alone. The principle,
therefore, does not apply to utterance meaning and communicative meaning because
at these levels non-linguistic context knowledge comes into play.
However, the semantics of word formation is complicated by the fact that there
are often several interpretation rules for the same formation rule. This is a situation
quite different from the composition of sentence meaning where, as a rule, there
is only one composition rule for each syntactic rule. Compounds in particular are
notoriously manifold in how the meanings of the parts are related: a ‘book title’ is
a title that names a book, a ‘book shelf ’ is a shelf for books, a ‘book shop’ is a shop
where books are sold, and so on.
Another reason for the complexity of word formation semantics is the existence
of so many cases with unpredictable, lexicalized meanings. These blur the picture of
the semantic rules of word formation. If you take a look into a standard dictionary
you’ll find that very many entries are complex words. They are listed in the dictionary
because their meanings are irregular – otherwise there would be no need to include
them for explanation. Extreme cases are words like butterfly; the word looks like a
compound of butter and fly, but its meaning has nothing to do with ›butter‹ and
little to do with ›fly‹. Very frequent are complex words with special meanings that
are narrower than their regular meaning, e.g. drinker, which does not just mean
›someone who drinks‹, but rather ›someone who regularly drinks too much alcohol‹.
When two nouns occur in a sentence, like book and shelf or book and shop in (3),
often the sentence tells us how they are to be linked semantically:
In (3a) we see that the shelf is something the book is put onto, in (3b) that the
shop is something where the book was bought. The respective verb specifies a
semantic relation between the two nouns. With compounds, there is nothing like
this to help us to know what the two parts have to do with each other. They are
just jammed together. There are authors who suggest that compounding is a ‘relic
of protolanguage’ (Jackendoff 2009:111). According to the theory of protolanguage
(Bickerton 1992), there was a stage in the evolution of language where there were
words with meanings but not yet grammar. Words were just somehow combined; no
functional elements, no word classes, no rules for sentences. According to Bickerton,
protolanguage still exists, for example as an early stage in language acquisition or
in the speech of aphasics who have lost grammar. Jackendoff adds compounding as
another case.
If the way in which two elements are to be semantically combined is not explicitly
expressed, there is more room for interpretation. Nevertheless, the interpretation of
compounds is not just mere guessing. It cannot be, for we obviously agree on how to
interpret regular compounds. The reason for this is that the way semantically to link
a noun to another noun is often built into their meanings. It is part of the meaning
of shop that a shop is a place where things are sold, and it is part of the meaning of
book that it is some kind of artefact which can be bought. Putting this information
together leads us to the interpretation of book shop. We will turn to the semantics of
word formation in various places in this book (8.2.2, 11.6.2, 12.2.2 and 12.3.3).
14 Understanding semantics
DEFINITION 4 Semantics
Semantics is the study of the meanings of linguistic expressions, either
simple or complex, taken in isolation. It further accounts for the interfaces of
expression meaning with utterance meaning and communicative meaning.
EXERCISES
1. Explain the distinction between the three levels of meaning in your own words.
Part of the exercises will always be to define central terms introduced in the chapter
in your own words. In order to acquire new words, it is very important that you
really make active use of them. Do not copy the definitions from the text, but try to
explain them out of your own understanding. It may be very useful to work on the
answers together with others.
2. Sue tells Martin: ‘I don’t care if you use my microphone.’
Which one of the three levels of meaning is addressed in the following questions?
Give your reasons for the answer.
a. What is the meaning of microphone?
b. Which microphone is meant?
c. Is this an offer?
d. Does the sentence relate to one or several microphones?
Meaning and semantics 17
FURTHER READING
1.1 Lyons (1995, ch. 1) on levels of meaning. Verschueren (1999) ch. 1 on inferences
and speech acts, ch. 3 on the role of context in interpretation. Levinson (1983) on
Austin’s speech act theory and Grice’s theory of implicatures; Huang (2007) on
speech act theory and relevance theory.
1.2 Van Valin (2001) and Tallerman (2011) on elementary syntax. On word formation
see Plag (2003) and ch. 19 by Laurie Bauer and Rodney Huddleston, in Huddleston &
Pullum (2002), Olsen (2012) on the meaning of compounds.
1.3 Isac & Reiss (2008, ch. 1) for an introductory definition of I-language; Huang
(2007, ch. 7) on the distinction between semantics and pragmatics.
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