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THE MEANING OF MEANING

Paul R. Kroeger. 2018. Analyzing meaning: An introduction to
semantics and pragmatics.

1. Semantics and Pragmatics

The term semantics is often defined as the study of meaning. It might be more
accurate to define it as the study of the relationship between linguistic form and
meaning. The study of meaning in human language is often partitioned into two major
divisions. First is semantics, is concerned with the inherent meaning of words and
sentences as linguistic expressions. Second is pragmatics, is concerned with those
aspects of meaning that depend on or derive from the way in which the words and
sentences are used.

The study of meaning in human language is often partitioned into two major
divisions, and in this context the term semantics is used to refer to one of these
divisions. In this narrower sense, semantics is concerned with the inherent meaning of
words and sentences as linguistic expressions, in and of themselves, while pragmatics
is concerned with those aspects of meaning that depend onor derive from the way in
which the words and sentences are used. In the above mentioned quote attributed to
Mark Twain, the basic or “default” meaning of good (the sense most likely to be listed
in a dictionary) would be its semantic content. The negative meaning which Twain
manages to convey is the result of pragmatic inferences triggered by the peculiar way
in which he uses the word.

2. Three Levels of Meaning

a. Word meaning
A “word” is a string of characters that can have different meanings. Example
(jaguar: car or animal?; driver: one who drives a vehicle or the part of a
computer?; rows, the plural noun or the third singular person of the verb to
row?).

b. Sentence meaning
A “sentence” is a group of words that express a specific thought: to capture it,
we need to understand how words relate to other words. Example (Paul, Jack’s
brother, is married to Linda. Linda is married to Paul, not Jack.).

c. Utterance meaning (speaker meaning)

 A sentence is a linguistic expression, a well-formed string of words, while an
utterance is a speech event by a particular speaker in a specific context. When
a speaker uses a sentence in a specific context, he produces an utterance.
Word is the combination of letters that has meaning. A sentence is a linguistic
expression, a well-formed series of words, while an utterance is an utterance by a
particular speaker in a particular context. The term meaning refers to the semantic
content of a sentence: the meaning that comes from the words themselves, regardless
of their context.1 The term word meaning refers to the semantic content plus the
pragmatic meaning created by the particular way in which the sentence is used. Cruse
(2000:27) defines the meaning of speech as “the totality of what the speaker wants to
convey by making an utterance.”

3. Relation between form and meaning

For most words, the relation between the form (i.e., phonetic shape) of the
word and its meaning is arbitrary. Onomatopoetic words are words whose forms are
intended to be imitations of the sounds which they refer to, e.g. ding-dong for the
sound of a bell, or buzz for the sound of a housefly.

But even in these cases, the phonetic shape of the word is partly conventional.
The sound a dog makes is represented by the English word bow-wow, the Balinese
word kong-kong, the Armenian word haf-haf, and the Korean words mung-mung or
wang-wang. This cross-linguistic variation is presumably not motivated by
differences in the way dogs actually bark in different parts of the world. On the other
hand, as these examples indicate, there is a strong tendency for the corresponding
words in most languages to use labial, velar, or labio-velar consonants and low back
vowels.
The relation between the form of a sentence (or other multi-word expression) and its
meaning is generally not arbitrary, but compositional. This term means that the
meaning of the expression is predictable from the meanings of the words it contains
and the way they are combined. To give a very simple example, suppose we know
that the word yellow can be used to describe a certain class of objects (those that are
yellow in color) and that the word submarine can be used to refer to objects of another
sort (those that belong to the class of submarines).

4. What does mean mean

In the cases under discussion, What does mean mean?. For example, if I know
how your voice normally sounds, I may be able to deduce from hearing you speak that
you have laryngitis, or that you are drunk. These are examples of what the
philosopher Paul Grice called “natural meaning”, rather than linguistic meaning. Just
as smoke “means” fire, and a rainbow “means” rain, a rasping whisper “means”
laryngitis.

An approach which has proven useful for the linguistic analysis of meaning is
to focus on how speakers use language to talk about the world. Similarly, knowing the
 meaning of a sentence will allow us to determine whether that sentence is true in a
particular situation or universe of discourse. When a speaker utters this sentence at a
particular time and place, we can look out the window and determine whether or not
the speaker is telling the truth. The statement is true if its meaning corresponds to the
situation being described: is it raining at that time and place? This approach is
sometimes referred to as the correspondence theory of truth.
We might say that the meaning of a (declarative) sentence is the knowledge or
information which allows speakers and hearers to determine whether it is true in a
particular context. If we know the meaning of a sentence, the principle of
compositionality places an important constraint on the meanings of the words which
the sentence contains: the meaning of individual words (and phrases) must be suitable
to compositionally determine the correct meaning for the sentence as a whole.

5. Saying, meaning, and doing

The same sentence can be used in several contexts, for example in one context a
sentence is used to greet someone and in a different context the same sentence can be
used to ask for information.
In order to fully understand a given utterance, the addressee (= hearer) must try to
answer three fundamental questions:
1. What did the speaker say? i.e., what is the semantic content of the sentence? (The
philosopher Paul Grice used the term “What is said” as a way of referring to
semantic content or sentence meaning.)
2. What did the speaker intend to communicate? (Grice used the term implicature for
intended but unspoken meaning, i.e., aspects of utterance meaning which are not
part of the sentence meaning.)
3. What is the speaker trying to do? i.e., what speech act is being performed?

In this book we attempt to lay a foundation for investigating these three questions
about meaning. For a brief example of why this is an important facet of the study
of meaning, consider the word please in examples.

a. Please pass me the salt.

b. Can you please pass me the salt?

What does please mean? It does not seem to have any real semantic content,
i.e., does not contribute to the sentence meaning; but it makes an important
contribution to the utterance meaning, in fact, two important contributions. First, it
identifies the speech act which is performed by the utterances in which it occurs,
indicating that they are reqests. The word please does not occur naturally in other
kinds of speech acts. Second, this word is a marker of politeness; so it indicates
something about the manner in which the speech act is performed, including the kind
of social relationship which the speaker wishes to maintain with the hearer. So we see
that we cannot understand the meaning of please without referring to the speech act
being performed.
 The claim that the word please does not contribute to sentence meaning is
supported by the observation that misusing the word does not affect the truth of a
sentence. We said that it normally occurs only in requests. If we insert the word into
other kinds of speech acts, e.g. Rather, the use of please in this context is simply
inappropriate (unless there is some contextual factor which makes it possible to
interpret the sentence as a request).

6. “More lies ahead” (a roadmap)

We say that a statement is true if its meaning corresponds to the situation
under discussion. Sometimes the meanings of two statements are related in such a
way that the truth of one will give us reason to believe that the other is also true. For
example:
a. John killed the wasp.
b. The wasp died.
c. John is proud that he killed the wasp.
If I know that the statement in ‘a’ is true, then I can be quite certain that the
statement in ‘b’ is also true, because of the way in which the meanings of the two
sentences are related. A different kind of meaning relation gives us reason to believe
that if a person says ‘c’, he must believe that the statement in ‘a’ is true. These two
types of meaning-based inference, which we will call entailment and presupposition
respectively.

7. Word Meaning
Focuses on word meanings, starting with the observation that a single word
can have more than one meaning. One of the standard ways of demonstrating this fact
is by observing the ambiguity of sentences like the famous headline in (5). Many of
the issues we discuss in Unit II with respect to “content words” (nouns, verbs,
adjectives, etc.), such as ambiguity, vagueness, idiomatic uses, co-occurrence
restrictions, etc., will turn out to be relevant in our later discussions of various kinds
of “function words” and grammatical morphemes as well. (5) Headline: Reagan wins
on budget, but more lies ahead.

8. Pattern of Pragmatic
Deals with a pattern of pragmatic inference known as
conversationalimplicature: meaning which is intended by the speaker to be understood
by the hearer, but is not part of the literal sentence meaning. Many people consider
the identification of this type of inference, by the philosopher Paul Grice in the 1960s,
to be the “birth-date” of pragmatics as a distinct field of study. It is another
foundational concept that we will refer to in many of the subsequent chapters.As
illustrated above in example (3b), an indirect speech act involves a sentence whose
literal meaning seems to perform one kind of speech act (asking a question: Can you
 pass me the salt?) used in a way which implicates a different speech act (request:
Please pass me the salt).

9. Issue of Compositionality
Addresses the issue of compositionality: how the meanings of phrases and
sentences can be predicted based on the meanings of the words they contain and the
way those words are arranged (syntactic structure). It provides a brief introduction to
some basic concepts in set theory, and shows how these concepts can be used to
express the truth conditions of sentences. One topic of special interest is the
interpretation of “quantified” noun phrases such as every person, some animal, or no
student, using set theory to state the meanings of such phrases. In Unit V we will use
this analysis of quantifiers to provide a way of understanding the meanings of modals
(e.g. may, must, should) and if clauses.

10. Present a Framework

Presents a framework for analyzing the meanings of tense and aspect markers. Tense
and aspect both deal with time reference, but in different ways. As we will see, the
use and interpretation of these markers often depends heavily on the type of situation
being described.