The word "meaning" 3
"meaning" has many senses. - intend: I mean to be there tomorrow - signifier of a sign: That cloud means thunder, or A red light means 'stop'. - simpler paraphrase: what does calligraphy mean? it means 'beautiful writing' words to define other words; usually simpler words in the explanation. Thus, what does chat mean in French? cat, but the inverse is "what is French for cat, maybe because answer is no longer "simpler". p.3non-literal (pragmatic intent): "It wasn't what he said, but what he meant."e.g. (p.4): `Why is a raven like a writing-desk?' [said the Hatter] `Come, we shall have some fun now!' thought Alice. `I'm glad they've begun asking riddles.--I believe I can guess that,' she added aloud. `Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?' said the March Hare. `Exactly so,' said Alice. `Then you should say what you mean,' the March Hare went on. `I do,' Alice hastily replied; `at least at least I mean what I say that's the same thing, you know.' `Not the same thing a bit!' said the Hatter. `Why, you might just as well say that `I see what I eat' is the same thing as `I eat what I see'!' -- Lewis Carrolloften words have other than 'literal' meanings - suggested with intonationor gestures. [or poetry?] e.g. the fall-rise tone in English - theintonation falls and rises on the 'accented' word in a sentence - suggests"but...". She's very clever - may be positive in plain intonation, butwith rise-fall it becomes pejorative - she's not very honest, or not veryattractive, etc. similarly I think so - may be that I don't know, butwith a diff intonation that I am pretty sure. That's very clever canmean that's very stupid; and if I wink while saying that's mine - then itprobably isn't.what we say often presupposes a lot - classic e.g. When did you stop beating your wife?1.2 Semantics and linguistics 5
Nearly all linguists have explicitly or implicitly assumed a model in whichsemantics is at one 'end' and phonetics at the other, with grammarsomewhere in the middle...de Saussure: signifiant (signifier) - for sounds of language, and signfié (signified) for the meaning. he unfortunately used the term SIGN for the association of these [today's "symbol"], but some of his followers, more reasonably, used sign for the signifier alone. 6Lg does not always contain a 'message' or a piece of information - part ofits function is w social relationships. (even in animal communicn)it has been convincingly argued that human lg differs in kind rather than indegree from other 'languages' 6[ messages can be described in terms of language, but how to describe language itself? ]we cannot define meaning (the "message") independently of language. p.6Linguistics is the scientific study of language. One essential requirementis that it should be empirical. What is meant by 'scientific' or'empirical' is a matter of some debate. Must be possible to test andverify statements within it.Difficult in semantics, for unlike phonetics, we cannot observe what isbeing meant.de saussure: langue (language) and parole ("speaking", indiv language werrors); the distinction reappeared in Chomsky 1965:4 as COMPETENCE andPERFORMANCE. (Chomsky differs greatly in what "competence" is, but thedistinction is the same). Both for Chomsky and de Saussure, langue orcompetence excludes accidental individual variations - some kind ofidealized system without any clear empiricalbasis. p.7-8 [see Bouquet, Simon, below]can we make a similar distinction in semantics? We can't be concerned withcompletely idiosyncratic usage, e.g. `When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'There are variations - e.g. the poet's or the madman's - but neither would bepossible without the generalized "normal" patterns to make comparisonswith. 8need to distinguish usual meaning of word w meaning in specialcircumstances. --> distinction between semantics and PRAGMATICS. 8Utterance vs Sentence 8
An UTTERANCE is an event in time - produced by some one under certaincircumstances. A SENTENCE has no existence in time, but is part of thelinguistic system of a language. The distinction is related to performanceand competence.utterances as objects of study:may be ok if you use a voice recording, but becomes v difficult iftranscribed - e.g. words are already sophisticated linguistic constructsand not the result of direct observation.Even if written in IPA it has already have acquired some of thecharacteristics of a sentence.It follows from this that semanticists will not be (and cannot really everbe) concerned w the meaning of utterances but only with the meaning ofsentences.[AM: however, surely they can consider the social context in which thesentence was uttered!]However, a lot of meaning lost when we throw outthe prosody and other paralinguistic aspects? ]1.4 Historical semantics
Synchronic study of lg must precede diachronic - cannot study change unlesswe know what it was like that is changing. so too in semantics. 12