What is Semantics?

Semantics is the study of meaning in language. We know

that language is used to express meanings which can be
understood by others. But meaning exist in our minds and
we can express what is in our minds through the spoken
and written forms of language. The sound pattern is studied
at level of phonology and the organization of words is
studied at syntax. These are in turn organized in such way
that we can convey meaningful message or receive
messages. How language organized in order to be
meaningful? Meaning is an abstract, since we cannot see or
observe or we can observe and record sounds. Meaning is
related very closely to the human capacity to think logically
and to understand. So when we try to analyze our on
capacity to think and understand our own ability to create
meaning.

What is meaning:

Philosophers have puzzled over this question over 2000

years. Their thinking begins from the questions of the
relationship between words and the objects which words
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represent. e.g., we may ask: what is the meaning of the
word cow? It refers to an animal who has certain
properties, hat distinguished from other animals, who are
called by other name. Where do these name come from and
why it mean only cow and none other? Some thinkers say
there is no essential connection between the words (cow)
and the animal indicated by, but we have established this
connection by convention and thus it continues to be so.
Others would say that there are some essential attributesof
that animal which we perceive in our minds and our
concept of that animal is created for which we create a
corresponding word. According to this idea there is an
essential correspondence between the sounds of words and
their meaning,the sound made by bee. It is easy to
understand this, but not so easy to understand how “cow”
can mean four legged bovine there is nothing in the sound
of the word ‘cow’ to indicate that (children correspond
between sound meaning: call a cow ‘moo-mou’ because
they make that sound).

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The above idea that words in language stand for object
found in Plato’s dialogue. However, it applies only to some
words and not to other.This fact gives rise to the view held
that a word meaning is not the object it refers to, but the
concept of the object that exist in the mind. Moreover,
Saussure point out, the relation between the word
(signifier) and the concept (signified) is an arbitrary one.
I.e. it does not resemble the concept. Also, when we try to
define the meaning of a word we do so by using other
words. Ogden and Richards give the following list of
definitions.

1. An intrinsic property of something.

2. Words related to that word in a dictionary

3. The connotations of a word

4. Things to which the speaker of that word refers……

These definitions refer to different ways in which meaning

is understood. One reason for the ranges of definitions of
meaning is that words or (signs) in a language are of
different types.

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Based on the above definitions, we can discuss the different
aspects of meaning of a word as follows:

1. The logical or denotative meaning: this is the literal

meaning of a word indicating the idea or concept to which
it refers.

2. The connotative meaning. This is the additional meaning

that a concept carries. It is defined as ‘the communicative
value an expression has by virtue of what it refers to our
and above its purely conceptual content.

3. The social meaning: this is the meaning that a word or a

phrase conveys about the circumstances of its use, the
meaning of a words is understood according to the different
style and situation in which the word is used, e.g. though
the words ‘domicile’, ‘residence’, ‘abode’, ‘home’, all refer
to the something, each word belong to particular situation
of use – ‘domicile’ is used in an official context, residence
in formal context, ‘abode’ is a poetic use and ‘home’ is an
ordinary use.

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4. The thematic meaning: this is the meaning which is
communicated by the way in which a speaker or writer
organizes the message in terms of ordering focus, and
emphasis. It’s obvious that an active sentence has a
different meaning from its passive equivalent although its
conceptual meaning seems to be the same, e.g.

Mr. Smith donated the first prize.

The first prize was donated by Mr. Smith

In the first sentence it appears that we know who Mr. Smith

is, so the new information on which the emphasis is laid is
“the first prize’. In the second sentence, however, the
emphasis is laid on ‘Mr. Smith’.

Theories of semantics:

The Componential Theory of Meaning:

This theory based on the structural approach gives an

account of word meaning. The total meaning of a word is
broken up into its basic distinct components. Each

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component of meaning is expressed by a feature symbol
with a + or – mark to indicate the presence or absence of
certain features:

Man: + human + adult + male

Woman: + human +adult – male

Boy: + human – adult-+male

Girl: +human – adult – male

This works only where there is a clear distinction, i.e. of

male or female, human or animal. It can help us to bring
out the logical features which are inherent in a word, and
thus exclude some meanings, for example, if we
characteristic ‘bachelor’ as ‘+male, - male’, the meaning of
“married bachelor” can be excluded.

Componential analysis helps us understand meaning

relations such as synonymy and anatomy. These can be
understood as meaning inclusion (of similar meaning) and
meaning exclusion (contrast relation).

Truth – Conditional theory of Meaning:

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Basic statements relate to other statement in terms of the
following:

1- Synonymy:

He is married “synonymous with “He has a wife.

Entailment: He is married entails ‘He has a wife (Entail &

synonym are similar)

In consistent: Statement x is inconsistent with statement y

when x is true, y is false: He is not married is inconsistent
with ‘He has a wife”!

One of the limitations of this approach is that it takes only

statement into account and does not consider other sentence
– types such as questions. Some semanticists say that even
questions have a basis in condition of truth as they can
elicit either a positive proposition or negative one Yes/No
reply. Another limitation is that is not concerned with
synthetic truth.

3. Generative Theory of Meaning:

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Theory is based on the notion that the deep structure of a
sentence and meaning of words represent the total meaning
of the sentence. At the level of deep structure, lexical item
are inserted into a syntactic forms, with the application of
‘selection restrictions’, and concept such as subject and
object are defined. Selection restrictions are rules regarding
permissible combination of lexical items in language.
These rules prevent the generation of un-meaningful
sentence ‘red hope. Restrictions are also placed at the level
of deep structure on the choice of certain grammatical
items in relation to other grammatical items. e.g.: rule must
indicate whether verb is transitive or not.

4. Contextual Theories of Meaning:

It deals with the meanings of words and sentence not as

isolated entities but as related to situation of occurrence and
use. Field theory: explains the vocabulary or lexicon of the
language as a system of interrelated networks or semantic
fields. e.g.: Flower, bloom, blossom, bud belongs to the
same field. There may be over lapping between fields, e.g.:

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the field of ‘flower’ and ‘tree’ may overlap in relation to
such as “plant, grow”. This is also the ideas of collocation.

Firth (1957) ,context of situation in which meaning is

related on the on hand to the external world or situation and
on the other to level of language such as the sound, syntax,
words.

It is sometimes difficult to demarcate all these categories of

meaning. E.g. it may be difficult to distinguish
betweenconceptual meaning and social meaning in the
following sentence:

He stuck the key in his pocket

He put the key in his pocket

We could argue that these two sentences are conceptually a

like, but different in social meaning – the first one adopts a
casual or informal style, the second adopts a neutral style.
However, we could also say that the two verbs are
conceptually different: ‘stuck’ meaning put carelessly and
quickly, which more precise meaning than simply ‘put’ is.

The scope of semantics

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Naming:
It was suggested that language might be thought of as
communicating system with the signified on one hand and
the signifier on the other hand. But the basic problem is to
establish the nature and relationship of these two is Plato:
the signifier is a word in the language and the signified is
the object in real world that words ‘stand for’ or ‘refer to’.
All languages have expression like: John,Smith. etc. when
function is precisely that of naming. The child learns many
of his word by process of naming. He often gives name to
abject and his first attempts at language will include
‘Dada’.
There are, however, many difficulties with this naming
view. To begin with it seems to apply only to nouns. It is
difficult to extend the theory of naming to include other
part of speech. The color word (adjective) can be regarded
as names, but this is not for most of the other adjectives:
useful, attractive etc. how many of these could be used as a
label to identify something that they denote?
e.g. run. Boy running (either in a still or moving picture) an
obvious problem to begin with, is that some nouns like:
Unicom fairy relates to creatures that do not exist. Even
where the physical objects are identifiable, e.g. the evening
star and morning star, they are hardly referring to a single
object, the planet Venus. Boas noted that Eskimos has four
words for snow: ‘snow on the ground’, ‘falling
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snow’,drifting snow’, and ‘snow drift’ while according to
Whorf, Hopi has only one word to denote ‘flier’ an aero
plane, insect or pilot. Bloomfield: salt as Nacl for ordinary
white substance on table.
Concepts:
According to Desaussure, the linguistics sign consists of
signifier and a signified; these are however, more strictly a
sound image and concept, both baked by a psychological
‘associative’ bond. The noise of something is ‘crash’ to the
indicate so. Ogden and Richard saw the relationship as a
triangle
Thought or reference
/\
Symbol referent
The symbol of course is the linguistic elements: the word,
sentenceetc. and the ‘referent’ the objects, etc. in the world
of experience, while thought or reference is concept.
According to the theory there is no direct link between
symbol and referent (between language& world) the link is
via thought or reference, the concept of our minds e.g.
between the word dog and the feature of dog. Chair refer to
concept chair, this view is totally unsatisfactory. Some
scholars have suggested that we have some kind of image
at a chair when we talk about chairs, but this false.

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This part of a new mentalist to which a key claim is that
intuition and introspection most play part in our
investigation of language. It sees meaning in terms of the
mental entities called concept. This argument must be
rejected for three reasons. First, the ghost –in-the –machine
objection is over whelming – nothing is said by moving
meaning back one step to the brain or mind. Secondly, even
if there were concept in the mind they are in principle in
accessible to anyone but the individual and we are left
therefore, with totally subjective views, since I can never
know what your meaning is. Thirdly, the arguments about
intuition and introspection are irrelevant.
Some linguists argue that the term thought can be a
misleading, for two reasons:
(1) Mental process need not to be conscious:
Sometimes we think about what we are going to say, some
were not aware of
(2)It excluder non rational, Emotion .
They prefer the term psychology .

Sense & reference:

The term reference has already been used to contrast with
Denotation.

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Sense is abstract and de-contextualized, and it refers to the
inherent meaning of the linguistic form .It is concerned
only with intra-linguistic relations. It is the collection of all
semantic features of the linguistic form.
Reference is what a linguistic form points to in the real
world. It deals with the relationship between the linguistic
elements, word, sentence, etc., and the metalinguistic
(discussing, thinking about language) world of
experience.Reference is the essential element of semantics.
Yet some relationships have formed an important part of
the study of language. Consider ram/ewe. There on the one
hand refer to particular kinds of animal and derive their
meaning is this way. But they also belong to pattern in
English that includes: cow/ bull. It was clearly related to
sex, and sex was supposedly a matter of gender. But there
are other kinds of related word e.g. duck/duckling
pig/piglet (involving adult and young), or father/son
uncle/nephew (involving family relationship), and these are
not usually thought to grammatical.
The Word:
The Word .The word is the product of naming. There
are two kinds of words : 1. Full words, e.g : tree, sing, boy,
like, etc. 2. Form words, e.g : it, the, of, and, etc. Look at
the example below:

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The boy likes to play. The girl hates to fight.. Yet there are
difficulties.
To begin with, not all words have the same kind of
meaning as others: some seem to have little or none. E.g.
Boys like to play. It is easy to know the meaning of ‘Boys
Like play, but what is the meaning of to? And we can
replace the word boys like Play by & girls hate fight. So we
can draw distinction between full word and form words.
Full word that we would expect to find in a dictionary. The
form word would belong rather to the grammar and have
only grammatical meaning. Such meaning cannot be stated
in isolation, but only in relation to other words and even
sometimes to the whole sentence. For compound words like
blackbird blue, Bloomfield offered a solution by suggesting
that the word is the “minimum freeform” the smallest form
that may occur in isolation. But this depends on what is
meant by isolation. Bloom also suggested that we should
look for an element smaller than the word-a unit of
meaning – the morpheme e.g.:- are berry in black berry or –
y in Johnny. Linguistics interested in the status of such
word as loved, the morpheme love- and –d. Here two
elements seem clearly to have the distinct meaning of
‘adore’ and past. But problems soon arose with words such
as ‘took’ which appear to be both ‘take’ and past, yet
cannot be segmented in any obvious way into two part each
with its own meaning. Phonaestethic word ( relation

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between sound and word) is which one part, often the
initial cluster of consonant, gives an indication of meaning
of a rather special kind. E.g with sl are (slippery) is some
way. Slide, slip, slice etc. Ullman (1962:80) distinguish
between transparent and opaque words. Transparent words
are those whose meaning can be determined from the
meanings of their parts. Opaque words for which is not
possible. Thus chopper and door man are transparent, but
axe and porter are opaque.
The Sentence:
It is conceived that abstractly string of words put together
by grammatical roles of languages. A sentence can be
thought of as the deal string of words behind various
realizations in utterances and inscriptions.
So each sentence will have a meaning (a literal meaning) or
if it is ambiguous like: I went to the bank.
First, a great deal of meaning to the spoken lang. in carried
by the prosodic and paralinguistic features of language –
intonation – stress etc. features and facial expression are
called Para linguistics. Secondly, there is a variety of what
are today called “speech acts” we warn, threaten, and
Promise, without giving any indication that we are doing
so. e.g.: There is a bull in the field, which could be simply
warning or a piece of information. Thirdly, we can often
say one thing and mean another.

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Lyons (1977: 643) has suggested that we could draw a
distinction between sentence meaning and utterance
meaning, the sentence meaning being directly predictable
from the grammatical and lexical feature of the sentence,
while utterance meaning includes all the various types of
meaning that we have just been discussing.
Blerwisch argues that semantic theory must explain
sentence as:
1- His type writer has bad intentions
2- My unmarried sister is married to bachelor.
3- john was looking for the glasses
1-is of anomalous sentence, 2- contradictory one.
3-Of an ambiguous one.

Lexical Semantics: Field and Collocation

Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic:
De Saussure pointed out that a knight on aches board is a
knight not because of any inherent quality (shape, size), but
because of what it can do in relation to other pieces on the
board. He also argued that sheep in English has a different
value from mouton in French because English has also the
word mutton

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 De Saussure also made the distinction between
Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic relations. The paradigmatic
relations are those into which a linguistic unit enters,
through being contrasted or substitutable, in a particular
environment, with other similar units. The examples we
have been considering are all of a paradigmatic kind.
Syntagmatic relations are those that a unit contracts by
virtue of its occurrence with similar units. Thus, in a red
door and a green door, red and green are in paradigmatic
relation to each other, while each is in syntagmatic relations
with door.
Colour Systems:
Hjelmster was able to place color in order. Yet this
does not seem to be reflected in the language. We have no
adjective to say that Red is more-than orange. Berlin & key
claim that there is a universal inventory of only eleven
color categories, from which all languages derive eleven or
few basic color terms.
English has eleven. Of course, if one language has only two
or three color terms, the range of each term is likely to be
much wider than that of a language with the total of eleven.
‘Black’ will probably include all the dark reds, brown,
green, blues which the other language will distinguish.
Collocation:

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Porzig (1934) argued for the recognition of the importance
of syntagmatic relations, between e.g.: bite and teeth, bark
and dog, blond and hair. Firth argued that “you shall know
a word by the company it keeps” His familiar example.
You silly …, don’t be such an….. with limited set of
adjectives. For Firth this keeping company, which he called
collocation, was a part of the meaning of the word. Nida
for instance, discussed the use of chair in:
1- Sat in a chair. 2- the chair of Philosophy. 3- he accepted
a university chair. Collocation is not simply a matter of
association of ideas. Although milk is white, we should not
often say white milk, though the expression white paint is
common enough. For example: blond hair, we should not
talk about blond door or blond dress. This characteristic of
language is found is the collective words: flock of sheep
,herd of cows, School of whale ,pride of lion. Here we
should also include: dog/park, cat/mew, and horse/neigh.
* Lexical Semantics (Word Meanings):

“There’s glory for you”.

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory’, Alice said

Humpty Dumpty smiled

“Of course you don’t – I’ll tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice
knock –down argument for you”
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“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean a nice knockdown argument”,
Alice objected.

“When I use a word”, Humpty Dumpty said, “it means just

what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less”.

Learning a language includes learning the agree-upon

meanings of certain strings of sounds and learning how to
combine these meaningful units into larger units that also
convey meaning. We are not free to change the meanings
of these words at will, for if we did me would be unable to
communicate with anyone.

Lexical items are of two types: the open class lexical items:
noun, adj. verb. Adv. and the close class items have
meaning only in relations to other words in a sentence: this
is called grammatical meaning.

* Semantic Properties:

E.g. the assassin killed Thowaklehurst

The word assassin in your mental dictionary, it was some

person who murdered some important persons named
Thowaklehurst. Your knowledge of the meaning of assassin
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tell you that it was not an animal that did the killing, and
that Thowaklehurst was not a little old man who owed a
tobacco shop. Knowledge of assassin includes knowing that
the individual to whom that word refer is human, is a
murder, and is a killer of important people. These pieces of
information, then, are some of the semantic properties of
the word on which speakers of the language. Female is a
semantic property that helps to define

Tigress hen aunt maiden

Doe mare debutante widow

Ewe vixen girl woman

The words in the last two columns are also distinguished by

semantic property human, which is also found in: doctor
dean professor parent baby child.

The meaning of the last two of these words is also specified

as young.

Other semantic properties of verbs are shown in the

following:

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 Semantic Property verbs having it

Motion bring, fall, plod, walk

Contact hit, kiss, touch

Creation build, imagine, make

Sense see, hear, feel

Additional semantic properties make for finer and finer

distinction in meaning. Plod is distinguished from walk ‘by
the property ‘slow’ and ‘stalk’ from ‘Plod’ by a property
such as “purposeful”.

* Evidence for Semantic Properties:

One some of such evidence is found in the speech error, or

slips of the tongue, that we produce.

Intend utterance actual utterance” Error”

Bride of the nose bridge of the neck

He came too late he come too early

These errors and thousands others have collected reveal

that the incorrectly substituted words are not random

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substitutions but share some semantic property with the
intended words. Nose, neck, is all body part, or parts of the
‘head’. Yong, early, and late are related to time.

* More Semantic Relationship:

-Nyms:

“Most wonderful of all are words, and how they ……

(relate) One with another” O. Henry.

Words are related to one another in a variety of ways.

These relationships have words to describe them that often
in the found morpheme –nym.

* Homonyms and Polysemy:

“Mine is a long sad tale!” said the mouse, turning to Alice.

“It’s a long tail, certainly”, said Alice, looking with

wonder at the mouse’s tail, “but why do you call it sad?”

Knowing a word means knowing both its sounds

(pronunciation) and its meaning. Both are crucial. In
determining whether words are the same or different.
Words like ‘tale’ and ‘tail’ are called homonyms.

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Homonyms are different words that are pronounced the
same, but may or may not spell the same. To, too, two.
(The term homophone is sometimes used instead of
homonym).

Homonyms can create ambiguity. A word or a

sentence is ambiguous if it can be understood or interpreted
in more than way:

I’ll meet by the bank

Also:

“Howis breadmade?”

“I know that’ Alice cried eagerly

“You take some flour -”

“Where you pick the flower?” the queen asked. “In a

garden-”

“How many acres of grand?” said the queen?

When a word has multiple meanings that are related

conceptually or historically, it is said to be polysemous. In
your dictionary you find words with more than one
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definition. e.g.: guard, music, each of these words is
polysemous because each has several meanings.

Bear is polysemous, with meaning “to tolerate”, “to

carry”, “and to support” among other found in the
dictionary. Bear is also homonym. Homonym generally has
separate dictionary entries, often market with superscripts
“I”, 2. ‘Bare’, which is pronounced the same as bear, is a
third homonym.

A related concept is homograph. Different words are

homograph if they are spelled identically and possibly
pronounce the same; of course if they are pronounced the
same they are also homonyms.

Thus ‘pen’ the writing implement and pen the cage are both
homographs and homonyms ‘lead’ the verb and ‘lead’ the
metal are homographs but not homonyms. ‘Tail’ and ‘tale’
are homonyms but not homographs.

Synonyms:

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Two lexical items can be considered as synonyms if they
have the same denotative, connotative and social meaning
and can replace each other in all contexts of occurrence
e.g.: please do not annoy treatment, harass, and tease,
bother.
It has been said that there are no perfect synonyms - i.e., no
two words ever have exactly the same meaning. Still, the
following pair of sentences has very similar meaning.
He's sitting on the sofa. /He's sitting on the couch.
The degree of semantic similarity between words depends
to a great extent on the number of semantic properties they
share. 'Sofa' and 'couch' refer to the same type of object and
share most of their semantic properties.
Thereare words that are neither synonym nor near
synonyms yet have many semantic properties in common.
'Man' and 'boy' both refer to male humans; the meaning of
'boy' includes the additional semantic property of 'youth',
whereby it differs from the meaning of man.
Apolysemous word may share on of its meaning with
another word, a kind of partial synonymy. For example
'mature' and 'ripe' are polysemous words that are synonyms
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when applied to fruit, but not when applied to animals.
'Deep' and 'profound' mean the same when applied to
thought, but only deep can modify water.
When synonyms occur in other wise identical
sentence, the sentence will be para phase, i.e. they will have
the same meaning (except possibly for minor differences in
emphasis). For example:
She forgets her handbag.
She forgot her handpurse
This use of synonyms creates lexical paraphrase, just as the
use of homonyms creates lexical ambiguity
Antonyms:
As a rule, man is a fool;
When it’s hot, he wants it cool.
When it’s cool, he wants it hot;
Always wanting what is not
The meaning of a word may be partially defined by saying
what is not.
Male means not female.Words that are opposite in meaning
are often called antonyms.

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There are several kinds of antonym. There are
complementary pairs:
A live/dead present/absent
They are complementary in that not a live = dead and not
dead = alive
Gradable pairs of antonyms:
Big/small hot/cold fast/slow happy/sad
The meaning of adjectives in gradable pairs is related to the
object they modify, the words themselves do not provide on
absolute scale. With gradable pairs, the negative of one
word is not synonymous with the other. For example, some
are that is not happy is not necessarily sad.
Another characteristic of certain pairs of gradable
antonyms is that one is marked and the other unmarked.
The unmarked member is the one used in questions of
degree. We ask, ordinarily, “How high is the mountain?”
(nothow low is it?) We answer “10 feet high” but never
low. Thus ‘high’ is the unmarked member of high/low,
tall/short, fast/slow.
Another kind of “opposite” involves pairs like
Give/receive buy/sell teacher/pupil
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They are called ‘relational opposites, and they display
symmetry in their meaning. If X give Y to Z then z receives
Y form X. if X is Y’s teacher, then y is X’s pupil. Pairs of
words ending in – er and – eeare usually relational
opposites. If john is Bill’s employer, then Bill is john’s
employee.
Hyponyms:
The relationship of hyponymy is between the more general
term such as ‘color’ and more specific instances of such as
red etc. thus red is a hyponym of color.
Metonyms:
Is a word used in place of another word or expression to
convey the same meaning?Crownis a metonym for a
monarchy.
Proper Names:
“My name is Alice…”
“It’s a stupid name enough!” Humpty Said.
“What does it mean?”
“Must a name mean something?” Alice asked
doubtfully.

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 “Of course it must,” Humpty Dumpty said with a
short laugh.
“My name means the shape I am – and a good
handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you
might be any shape, almost”
Proper names are a language’s short cut. Imagine if we
couldn’t name people, places, etc. How would you describe
yourself uniquely without use of proper names?
You can’t say: “Eldest daughter of John and Mary,” How
about the young woman who lives at 5 Oak Street?”
Proper names are different from most words in the
language in that they refer to a specific object or entity, but
usually havelittle meaning , or sense,beyond the power of
referral proper names refer to unique object or entities. The
objects may be extant, such as those designated by:
The Empire State Building
Or extinct, such as Socrates, tray or even fictional:
Sherlock Holmes.
Proper names are definite, which means they refer to
unique object inso far as the speaker and listener are
concerned. If I say
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Mary Smith is coming to dinner
May spouse understand Mary refer to or friend Mary,and
not to one of the dozens of Mary in Phone book.
Because they are inherently definite, proper name in
English are not in general preceded by the:
-The john Smith
-the California.
There are some exceptions, such as the names of rivers,
ship, and erected structures:
The Mississippi – the queen Mary – the Eiffel Tower.
Proper names cannot usually be pluralized, though they can
be plural, like the Great lakes. There are exceptions, like:
the linguistics Department has three Bobs, meaning three
people named Bob, but they are special locutions used in
particular circumstances.
For the same reason, proper names cannot in general be
preceded by adjectives. Many adjectives have the semantic
effect of narrowing down the field of references. So that the
noun phrase a ‘red house’ is a more specific description
than simple a house; but what proper names refer to is
already completely narrowed down, so modification by
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adjectives seems peculiar. Again, as in all these cases,
extenuating circumstances give rise to exceptions. We find
expressions such as ‘young john’ to discriminate between
two people named john. We also find adjectives applied to
emphasize some quality of the object referred to, such as
“the brilliant professor Einstein’.
Phraseand Sentence Meaning:
“Then you should say what you mean”, the March
Hore went on
“I do,” Alice replied, “at least – I mean what I say –
that’s the something, you know,”
“Not the same thing a bit” said the Hatter. “you might just
as well say that’ I see what I eat” is the something as “I eat
what I see!”
“You might just as well as,” added the March Hore,
“that ‘I like what I get’ is the something as ‘I get what I
like’!”
Words and morphemes are the smallest meaningful units in
language. We studied them as lexical semantics. For the
most part, however, we communicate in phrases and
sentences. The meaning of a phrase or sentence depends on
31
both the meaning of its words and how those words are
combined structurally.
Some of the semantic relationships we observed
between words are also sound between sentences. For
example, two words may be synonyms; two sentences may
be Paraphrases. They may be paraphrased because they
contain synonymous words, but they may also paraphrase
because of structural differences that donot affect meaning,
such as
They ran the billup. /They ran up the bill.
Similarly, words may be homonyms, then ambiguous when
spoken. Sentence may be ambiguous due to their structure:
the boy saw the man with the telescope.
Adistinction may be drawn between sentence – meaning
and utterance – meaning. This is because a speaker may use
a sentence to mean something other than what is normally
stated in the sentence itself. As we noted earlier, sentence
meaning is a combination of lexical and grammatical
meaning, beside, intonation may also affect sentence
meaning. For example, I don’t like coffee’ means the
speaker does not like coffee, but he may like other drink.
32
Noun – Centered Meaning:
We know the meaning of’ red’ and’ balloon’. The semantic
rule to interpret the combination ‘redballoon’ adds the
property “redness’ to the properties of balloon. The phrase
“the red balloon”, because of the presence of the definite
articles the, means “a particular instance of redress and
balloons. A semantic rule for the interpretation of ‘the’
accounts for this.
The phrase “large balloon” would be interpreted by a
different semantic rule, because part of the meaning of
‘large’ is that it is a relative concept. ‘Largeballoon’ means
“large for a balloon. What is large for a balloon may be
small for a house.
The semantic rules for adjective – noun combinations
are complex. ‘A good Friend’ is a kind of friend, just as “a
red balloon’ is a kind of balloon. But a ‘false friend’ is not
any kind of a friend at all. The semantic properties of
“friendness” are “cancelled out” by the adjective “false”.
Thus semantic rules for noun phrases containing ‘good’and
‘false’ are quite different. A third kind of rule governs
adjectives like “alleged”; the meaning of ‘alleged
33
murderer’ is someone accused of murder, but the semantic
rules in this case do not tell us whether an alleged is or is
not a murder.
In prepositional phrases, semantic rules are needed for
such expressions such as ‘the house with the white fence’.
We have seen how the rules account for ‘the house’, and
the ‘white fence’. The semantic rules for prepositions
indicate that two objects stand in a certain relationship are
determined by the meaning of particular prepositions. For
‘with’ that relationship is “accompanies” or “is part of”
The structure of a phrase is important to its meaning. ‘Red
brick’ is a noun phrase, with the head noun ‘brick’.
Therefore, ‘red brick’ indicates a kind of brick. The head of
the phrase determines its principle meaning.
In noun compound the final noun is generally the
head, so a “dog house” is a kind of a house namely are
suitable for dogs, where a ‘house dog’ is a kind of dog.

Verb- Centered Meaning:

In all languages, the verb plays a central role in the
meaning and structure of most sentences. In English the
34
verb determines the number of objects and limits the
semantic properties of both its subject and its objects. For
example ‘find’ requires an animate subject and is sub
categorized for one object.
Language of the world may be classified according to
whether the verb occurs initially, medially, or finally in
their basic sentences.
Thematic Roles:
The noun phrase subject a sentence and the constituents of
the verb phrase are semantically related in various ways to
the verb. The relations depend on the meaning of the
particular verb. For example the NP “the boy” in “the boy
found a red brick” is called the “Agent” or “doer”, of the
action of finding. The NP “a red brick” is the “theme” and
undergoes the action.
Other thematic roles are location: it rains in Spain, Source:
He flow from Canda to India.Causative: the wind damaged
the roof, instrument: he cut hair with a razor.
Thematic roles are the same in sentence that are
paraphrases, in both sentences
The dog bit the stick
35
The stick was bitten by the dog. The dog is the agent and
the stick is the theme.
Thematic roles may remained the same in sentences that
are not paraphrase, as in:
The boy opened the door.
The door opened.
The key opened the door
In all three of these sentences, ‘the door’ is the theme, thing
that gets opened. In the first two sentences, ‘the key
‘despite its different structural positions retains thematic
role of instrument.

The three examples illustrate the fact that English allows

many different thematic roles to be the subject of the
sentence (i.e. the first NP under the S). These sentences had
as subjects an agent (the boy), an instrument (the key), ad a
theme (the door).
Czech linguist interested in functional sentence perspective
or FSP. They distinguished in the sentence between theme
and rheme. Or what has in most other schools of linguistics
been called topic and comment. The terms from the idea
that we can distinguish between what we are talking about
36
(the topic) and what we are saying about it (the comment)
in Czech where the theme, what is being talked about, is
placed in initial position in the sentence. If a language has
clear markers of topic and comment, the linguistic
description raises few problems. But English and many
other languages have no simple formal category and it is
then no clear what might be meant by topic and comment.
Indeed in English there seem to be at least four features that
can be related to the notion. First, it is possible in English
to place a word at beginning of a sentence when this is not
it’s around syntactic position as in: the man over there I do
not like very much. This is a device for indicating first what
we are going to talk about, and is thus reasonably treated as
an example of topicalisation.But it is a fairly rare
phenomenon in English. Secondly, we can often choose
alternative syntactic construction whose chief difference
lies in what is the subject. An obvious example is active
and passive. John hit bill and bill was hit by john.
Thirdly, English has clear devices for dealing with the
given and the new, the information that is already known in
the discourse and the information that is being freshly
stated. English has several ways of making the distinctions.
We can avoid restating in detail what is given by using
pronoun: he/she it instead of he already mentioned: the
little boy, the man on the corner. There also proverb: e.g.
do as in: john come early and so did Fred, and there are,
37
similarly,proform adjectives, adverbs and conjunctions,
such, so, therefore, etc. All of these refer back to something
already stated, which is not, therefore, to be stated in full
again. We also use sentence stress accent for similar
purpose, fourthly, we often use accent for contrast in John
hit Bill an one of the three words may be accented. But this
is not merely to topicalise, but to contrast. We are not
merely talking about john, hitting or bill, but we are saying
that it was john and not someone else, hitting and not
something else, Bill and not someone else.
The “Truth” of Sentence:
“ ………… Having occasion to talk of lying and false
representation, it was with much difficulty that he
comprehended what I meant …. For he arguedthus: that
the use of speech was to make us understand one another
and to receive information of facts; now if any one said the
thing which was not, these ends were defeated; because I
cannot properly be said to understand him … and these
were all the notions he had concerning that faculty of lying,
so perfectly well understood, and so universally practiced a
monghumans creatures”. Jonathan Swift.
The sense of a decorative sentence permits you to know
under what circumstances that sentence is true. Those
38
“circumstances” are called the truth conditions of the
sentence. The truth conditions of decorativesentence are the
same as the sense of the sentence. In the world as we know
it, the sentence.
The Declaration of independence was signed in 1976
The Declaration of independence was signed in 1776

Is false, we know the meaning of both sentence equally

well, and knowing their meaning means knowing their
sense or truth conditions. We compare their truth
conditions with “the real world” or historical fact, and can
thus say which one is true and which one is false. The truth
ofthese sentences is their references. Knowing the truth
condition is not the same as knowing the actual facts.
Rather, the truth conditions – the sense – permit you to
examine the world and learn the actual facts.
Paraphrase:
We can now give a formal definition of paraphrase:
Two sentences are paraphrases if they have the some truth
conditions. The following sets of sentence are paraphrased.

39
Despite subtle differences in emphasis, they share the same
truth conditions:
The horse threw the rider.
The rider was thrown by the horse.
It is early to play sonatas on this piano
This piano is easy to play sonatas on.
On this piano it is easy to play sonatas.
Sonatas are easy to play on this piano.

Booth assassinated Lincoln

It was booth who assassinated Lincoln
It was Lincoln who was assassinated by Booth
The person who assassinated Lincoln was Booth.
The students gave money to the beggar.
The student gave the beggar money.

Entailment and Presupposition:

One sentence may entail other sentence – i.e., including the
meaning of other sentence in its meaning, just as hyponymy
includes the meaning of other word. e.g., the sentence “the

40
earth goes round the Sun” entails (includes) the meaning
“the earth moves”.
A sentence presupposes other sentence ‘Shiva’s son is
named Qanesh’ presupposes the sentence ‘Shiva has a
son’. Presupposition is the previously known meaning
which is implied in the sentence. While entailment is
alogical meaning inherent in the sentences, presupposition
may depend on the knowledge of the facts, shared by the
speaker and the hearer. e. g.
a- have you stopped hugging your sheepdog?
b. John doesn’twrite poems anymore?
a. the speaker is said to presuppose, or assume the truth of
the fact that the listener has at some past time hugged their
sheepdog.
b. it is assumed that john once wrote poetry.
Philosophers have been concerned for some time with the
status of sentence such as the king of France is bald. The
question is whether, if there is, no king of France, such a
sentence can be said to be false.
One view, suggested by Russell (1905),this sentence assert
both that there is a king of France and that he is bald, and,

41
therefore, if there is no king of France, infact,the sentence
must be false.
There is an alternative solution, associated with Strawson
(1946), which says that, in using expressions like the king
of France (Referring Expressions), the speaker assumes that
the hearer can identify the person or things being spoken
about. He doesn’t, therefore, assert that the person or thing
exists, but merely presupposes his or its existence. If the
person or things does not exist there is ‘presupposition
failure’ and the sentence is not false; it neither true nor
false, and there is a ‘truth – value gap’.
It has been further claimed that presupposition can be
defined logically: they are logically implied by both
apositivesentences and its negative counterpart, and we
have already seen that both the king of France is bald and
the king of France isn’t bald are said to presuppose that
there is a king of France.
This problem of negation does not arise with the other view
of presupposition. This maintains, quite simply, that the
king of France is bold asserts both that these is a king of
France and that he is bold. If either of these two assertions
is false, then the whole sentence must be false.
Strawson also points out that although the king of France is
bald may be neither true nor false, the essential issue here
appears to be that of topic and comment, for the king of

42
France is bald can be either as saying of the king of France
(the topic) that is bald (the comment) , or of saying about
bald people (the topic ) that they include the king of France
on the first interpretation, where the king of France is the
topic, it would seem more reasonable to talk about truth
value gap: the king of France can hardly be said to be bald
if he doesn’t exist. On the second, it would seem equally
reasonable to say that the sentence is false: bald people do
not include the king of France, if there is no king of France.
The range of discussion shows that we have two major
problems, neither of them easily solved. The first is
whether we can draw a distinction between what is asserted
and what is presupposed. The second is what phenomena
should be brought under the heading of presupposition
Semantics and linguistics:
Speaking, we can describe the operations of the vocal
organs but there is no similar, simple way of dealing with
semantics. A further difficulty with semantics is that
meanings do not seem to be stable but to depend upon
speakers, hearers and context. An individual’s meaning is
not part of the general study of semantics; of course, it is
interesting for some purpose to see how and why an
individual diverges from normal pattern.
Semantics in other disciplines:
43
Some philosophers have suggested that many, if not all,
philosophical problems can be solved by study of ordinary
language. For instance, the problems of the nature of good
and evil right and wrong. An older and more traditional
area of philosophy that has interested linguists is that of
logic. The idea have ranged from the comparatively simple
syllogism of all men are mortal, Socrates is a man,
therefore, Socrates is mortal, to highly complex logical
syntax .Logic makes use of concepts that re found in
ordinary language e.g. ‘and’ (‘or’).
Anthropologists are concerned with language as an
essential part of the cultural and behavioral patterns of the
people they study. The linguist would be unwise to ignore
the fact that language functions within such patterns. The
relation between psychology and Linguistics is judged an
important that it has given rice to subject called psycho
linguistics. Essentially the psychological approach to
language lies in attempt to understand how we process
language both in its production and receptions.
Semantics and Grammar
Formal Grammar:
Most of the traditional grammarians assumed that
grammatical categories were essentially Semantic. Nouns
were defined as a name of things, gender concerned with
sex. One the other hand, many linguists have argued that

44
grammar must be kept distinct from semantics and that
grammatical categories must be wholly defined in terms of
the form of a language.
There are two good arguments for excluding meaning
from grammar, i.e. in favor of formal grammar. The first is
that meaning is often very vague and meaning categories
are not easily delineated. A second argument for formal
grammar is that, even when we can establish semantic and
grammatical categories independently, they often do not
coincide e.g. “wheat and oaks”, where there is a clear lack
of correspondence between grammatical number, singular
and plural.
As we get into more details, we find the correlation
between grammar and semantic become closer and closer,
until we reach stage where it is difficult to declare whether
the categories are formal Semantics: E.g:John is seeming
happy, we could say that is ungrammatical. Ungrammatical
on the ground on the ground that the verb seems does not
occur in the progressive form. But is this in fact a
grammatical rule or is it the case that for Semantic reason
John cannot be in a continuous state of seeming? There is
not clear answer. The line between grammar and semantic
is not a clear one.
There are two puzzling aspects of the relations between
grammar and meaning. First, although we can, and must set
up formal categories, they will be found to have some
45
correlation, but not one to one, with Semantics. Secondly,
we find that here is a difficult border line area.
e.g. john played the piano, is analyzed in terms of john,
play, past tense, while the piano was played by John, to be
analyzed in terms of John ,play ,past tense, the piano and
the passive.
In these examples the surface structures are very different
but the deep structures are similar and differ only is the
presence or absence of a single elements. As Chomsky
(1965 : 16) had argued that there is a syntactic deep
structure and that it is at this level that we can related active
and passive sentences, and that the only difference between
active and its related passive sentence would be the absence
or presence of an element.
The information contained in the deep structures will allow
us to do two things. First, we can generate the surface
structures. Secondly, we can arrive at the semantics from
the deep structure by rules of semantics interpretation.
Grammatical Categories:
We shall not expect to find an exact correlation between
gender and sex. There is no real problem in English for
English has, strictly, no grammatical gender at all. It has
the pronouns he/she. More important, is the need to
distinguish between individual and mass. In English it is
quite clear. The semantics difference between these classes
46
is clear enough. The counts nouns “individual” they
indicate individual specimens, while the mass nouns to a
quantity that is not individuate in this way. But the
distinction does not correspond closely to any semantic
distinction is the world of experience.
There is no explanation in semantic terms why Butter is a
mass noun while Jelly is count as well as mass.
The definite article ‘the’ is used to refer to a single
identifiable item in the context, where it is apparent to
speaker and hearer precisely what the item is e.g. the
government will usually refer for our government.
Grammar and Lexicon
We noted the distinction made by Sweet in terms of full
words and form words. Fries recognized only four part of
speech but fifteen sets of function words: the –may- at – do
– etc.
In modern linguistics the problems of the distinction
between the grammar and the lexicon is often passed in
terms of the distinction between sentences that are un
acceptable or ‘deviant’ for grammatical reasons, and those
that are excluded on lexical ground.
Grammatical relations:
Traditional grammars make great use of the notions of
subject and object-E.g:
47
1- he played the piano and the piano was played by john.
Piano – is object in first and subject in second.
For the action verb there still some difficulties if we
attempt to define them in semantics terms. One important
characteristic of the linguistic approach towards the study
of language is that it is not concerned merely with the
written language, but also with the spoken. There are least
four ways in which the spoken language is ‘prior to’, or
more basic than, the written:
1- The human race had speech long before it had writing
and there are still many languages that have no written
form.
2- The child learns to speak long before he learns to write.
3- speech play far more time speaking than writing or
reading.
4- Written language can, to large extent, be converted into
speech without loss. But the converse is not true; if we
write down what is said we lose a great deal..
The fourth point, there are some features of the written
form that are not easily represented in speech. For instance,
the use of’ italics’ in this book to refer to examples would
not be indicated if it were read aloud. Nor would the
paragraphs, though that might not be a great loss. But the
spoken language has far more striking character tics that
48
cannot be easily shown in the written form. In particular, it
has prosodic and paralinguistic features. The prosodic
features include primarily what is usually handled under
intonation and stress.
A very simple, view of stress and intonation in English sees
the international pattern of a stretch of speech as consisting
of a number of intonation tone groups, each of which has
audios in which there is a considerable movement of pitch,
largely within a single syllable of a word. The direction of
the pitch movement varies and this allows us to recognize
different basic intonation, fall,f all-rise, rise. the tone or
tone group will sometimes correspond with the clause in
English, and we should normally expect two tone group in
a sentence such as if john comes, I shall not be here. In any
case here is no absolute rule; the tone group is probably
determined primarily by what the speaker regards as an
information unit, and this may overrule the grammatical
consideration; that create mismatch between the
grammatical and intonation units. Different tones may, as
we have already seen, be associated with different
functions – arise with a questions and the fall-rise with the
implication. Falls are associated more with statements,
though a more casual or tentative statement can occur with
arise.
Concentration on the written language has misled
grammarians they have often failed to see that the spoken
49
language is different from the written and have misleading,
attempted to describe the spoken language in terms
appropriate to the written.
When Semantics and Syntax Meet:
Syntax is concerned with how words are combined to form
phrases and sentences; Semantics is concerned with what
these combinations mean.
- Words versus Phrases:
We have seen throughout this chapter and previous
one that the same meaning may be expressed syntactically
in more than one way – the phenomenon of paraphrase.
The semantic property of possession maybe expressed by a
word in the genitive case such as England’s king, or by an
“of” construct such as the king of England.
A similar situation arises with certain semantic
concept such as “ability’ permission’ or “obligation”. These
may be expressed through auxiliary verbs:
He can go
He may go
He must go

50
They may also be expressed phrasally, without the
auxiliaries:
He is able to go. He has the ability to go.
He is permitted to go. He has permission to go
He is obliged to go. He has an obligation to go.
- When passives do not Work:
Active- passive constitute another common type of
paraphrase:
The child fond the puppy
The puppy was found by the child.
This relationship between actives and passives is based on
syntactic structure. However, some active sentences do not
have a well – formed passive counterpart. e.g.:
John resembles Bill.
The book cast ten dollars
Cannot undergo the passive transformation to give
• Bill was resembled by john.
• Ten dollar was cost by the book.
Semantically, when the subject of on active sentence is in a
state described by the verb and direct object, there is no
passive paraphrase. Since john is in a state of resembling
51
Bill – John doesn’t do anything – the sentences fail to
passives. This shows how the semantics of verbal
relationships ma affect syntactic relationship.
Passives are usually paraphrases of their active
counterpart, but there are exceptions when “quantifiers;
every, each, some, two, many, several, few” words having
to do with mounts – get involved. e.g.:
Every person in this room speaks two languages
Two language are spoken by every person in this room
These two sentences do not have the same truth conditions.
Suppose there are three people in the room, Tom, Dick, and
Harry. Tom, speaks English and Russian, Dick speaks
French and Italian, and Harry Speak Chinese and Thai.
Then the first sentences is true. The second, however, is
false because there are no two languages that every one
speaks.
Pronouns and Core ferentiality:
Another example of how syntax and semantics interact has
to do with reflexive pronouns, such as her or themselves.
The meaning of a reflexive pronoun always refers book to
some antecedent. In Jane bit herself, herself refers to Jane.
52
 Sentence structure also plays a role in determining
when a pronoun and a noun phrase in different clause can
be coreferential, i.e. refer to the some object e.g.:
John believes that he is a genius.
The pronoun he can be interpreted as John or as some
person other than john. However in:
He believes that john is a genius.
The co referential intereptation is impossible. John and he
cannot refer to the same person. It appears that a pronoun
antecedent cannot occur to the left of its noun phrase if the
two are to be co referential
When Rules Are Broken:
For all a rhetorician’s rules
Teach noting but the name his tools.
Samuel Butler
The rules of languages are not laws of nature. Only by a
“miracle” can the laws of nature be broken, but the rules of
language are broken every day by everybody. There are
three kinds of rule violation that we will discuss anomaly, a
violation of semantic rules to create “nonsense”;
metaphor, or non literal meaning; and idioms, in which the
53
meaning of on expression may be unrelated to the meaning
of its parts.
Anomaly: Nonsense:
E.g. the bachelor is pregnant
Is anomalous for similar reasons; the word bachelor
contains the semantic property “male” whereas the word
“pregnant” has semantic property “female”. This clash of
semantic properties makes the sentence anomalous. The
anomaly arises from trying to equate sth. That is [+male]
with sth. That is [-male]
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously:
The sentence seems to obey all the syntactic rules of
English. The subject is colorless green ideas and the
predicate is sleep furiously but there is sth. with the
sentence. The meaning of colorless indicate semantic
property “without color”, but it is combined with the
adjective green, which has the property “green in color”.
How can sth.be both ‘without color’ and “green in color”.
Metaphor:
Walls have ears

54
Sometimes the breaking of semantics rules can be used to
convey particular ideas. Walls have ears is certainly
anomalous, but it can be interpreted as
Meaning “you can be overheard even when you think
nobody is listening”

In some sense the sentence is ambiguous, but the literal

meaning is so unlikely that listeners stretch their
imagination for another interpretation. That “stretching” is
based on semantic properties that are inferred or that
provide some kind of resemblance. Such non literal
interpretations of sentences are called metaphor.

Idioms:

Knowing a language includes knowing the morphemes,

simple words, compound words and their meanings. In
addition it means knowing fixed phrases, consisting of
more than one word, with meanings that cannot be inferred
from the meaning of individual words. The usual semantic
rules for combining meanings do not apply. Such
expressions are called idioms. E.g. eat my hat/sell down the
river.
55
Pragmatics:

Pragmatics is concern with the interpretation of linguistic

meaning in context. Two kinds of contexts are relevant.
The first is the linguistic context, the discourse that
precedes the phrases or sentence to be interpreted. Taken
by it, the sentence:

Amazingly, he already loves her.

Is essentially un-interpretable. There are no referents for he

and her, and the reason for amazingly is vague. But if the
sentence preceding it were john met Mary yesterday, it
interpretation would be clearer.

The discourse suggests the second kind of context –

situational, or knowledge of the world. To fully interpret
the sentences the listener must know the real – world
referent, of john Mary.

Situational context, then, includes the speaker, hearer,

and any third parties present, along with their beliefs and
their beliefs about what other believe. It includes the

56
physical environment, the subject of conversation, and the
time of day and so on.

Pragmatics is also about language use. It tells that calling

someone a son of a bitch is not a zoological opinion, it’s an
insult.

Linguistic relativity: Context and Reference

Sapir (1949: 160) suggested that the world in which we live
is to large extent unconsciously built on the language habits
of the group. This led him to a new principle of relativity
which holds that all observers are not led by the same
physical evidence to the same picture of the universe,
unless their linguistic background are similar or in some
way can be calibrated. Whorf produces evidence of several
kinds for his view. First, he suggests that these are no
division in reality corresponding to English Nouns and
verbs. For why do we use nouns for lighting, spark, wave
etc? In the American Indian language Hopi all events of
brief duration (mostly included in the English nouns above)
are represented by verbs. Secondly, Hopi has one word for
insect, pilot and plane while Eskimo has four words for
snow. Thirdly, Whorf argued, their language shows that the
Hopi have no notion of time.

57
It is not clear whether Sapir and Whorf thought that the
shape of the world was totally determined by our language,
that without language it has no shape at all.
Much of Whorf, argument, is invalid in that he argues from
certain formal observable grammatical characteristics to (a
model of the universes). His Hopi model is largely based
upon the verbal system. But by a similar argument we
could argue that English too has no concept of time. If we
define tense in terms of forms of verbs, English has two
tense only, present & past (Palmer 1974: 36) all other so-
called tenses involve the use of auxiliary verbs ..was – will
– etc.
In spite of these objections, the Sapir – Whorf hypothesis
serves a useful purpose in reminding us that the categories
we employ do not simply exist in the world of experience,
at least we cannot distinguish clearly between what is in the
world and what is in language.

The Exclusion of Context:

Some linguistics exclude context from the study of
semantics. The real reason, no doubt, for this exclusion is
that there are extremely great theoretical and practical
difficulties in handling context satisfactorily.

58
First, it is argued that the meaning of a sentence, or the fact
that it is ambiguous or anomalous can be known in
isolation from any context, and that as speaker of language
we must know the meaning of a sentence before we can use
it in any given context: meaning is thus shown to be
independent of context and linguistic can study it without
reference to context. A second and, at first sight, rather
more plausible argument is that the world of experience
must of necessity include the sum of human knowledge.
Context of Situation:
It is associated with two scholars, first an anthropologist
Malinowski, and later a linguist, Firth.
Malinowski’ s arguments were primarily based on his
observation of the way in which the language of the people
he was studying fitted into their everyday activities, and
was thus an inseparable part of them.
He noted, too, that the child right from the stage of
babbling uses word as ‘active force’ with which to
manipulate the world around him. Malinowski remarks
about language as a mode of action are useful in reminding
us that language is not simply a matter of stating
information. But there are two reasons why we cannot
wholly accept his argument. First, he believed that the
mode of action aspect of language was most clearly seen in
the basic needs of man illustrated in the languages of the

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child or o primitive man. Secondly, Malinowski’s views do
not provide the basic of any workable semantic theory. He
does not even discuss the ways in which context can be
handled in a systematic way, to provide a statement of
meaning. For Malinowski’s context of situation was a bit of
the social process which can be considered a part ‘or’ an
ordered series of events in rebuses. Firth preferred to see
context of situation as part of the linguist apparatus in the
same way as are the grammatical categories that he uses.
Firth suggested the following categories:
A- The relevant features of the participants: persons,
personalities
(i) The verbal action of the participants.
(ii) The non-verbal action of the participants.
B- The relevant objects.
C- The effects of the verbal action.
In this way context of situation can be grouped and
classified: this is essential if it is to be part of the linguistic
analysis of language.
A more serious criticism of Firth’s view is that it has very
limited value.
Context Culture and Style:

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To begin with, most, and perhaps all, language has deictic,
which identify object, persons and events in term; of their
relation to the speakers is space and time.
There are three main types of deictic:
First, the speaker must be able to identify the participants in
the discourse. The forms with which he achieves this are
the first & second person pronoun I/we and you. Secondly,
English has here and there, this and that to distinguish
between the position of the speaker or closeness to it and
other positions or greater distances. Thirdly, time relations
are indicated in English not only by general adverbs such as
now and then but also more specific ones such as yesterday
and tomorrow.
Deictic cannot be ignored in the study of meaning, for
ordinary lang. is full of their use. But, they raise problems
for any kind of analysis that treats propositions or
statements as somehow basic to semantics. For deictic are
always subjective in the sense that they can be interpreted
only with reference to the speaker, which propositions are,
by their definition, wholly objective and independent of
speakers.
Linguistic Content: Discourse:

Put your discourse into some frame, and start not so wieldy
from my affair. Shakespeare, Hamlet

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Linguistics knowledge accounts for speakers’ ability to
combine phoneme into morpheme, morpheme into words,
and words into sentences. Knowing a language also permits
combining sentences together to express complex thoughts
and ideas.

These larger linguistics units are called discourse.

The study of discourse, or discourse analysis, is

concerned with many aspects of linguistic performance as
well as linguistic competence. Discourse analysis involves
questions of style, appropriateness, cohesiveness,
difference between written and spoken discourse, and so
on.

Our immediate concern is to point out a few aspects of

discourse that bear on the interpretation of linguistic
meaning.

Pronouns:

Pronouns may be used in place of noun phrases or may be

used to refer to an entity presumably known to the

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discourse participants. When that presumption fails,
miscommunication may result.

Pronominalizationoccurs both in sentences and across

the sentence of a discourse .Within a sentence, the
sentences structure limits the choke of pronoun.

In a discourse, prior linguistic context plays a primary role

in pronoun interpretation e.g.:

It seems that the man loves the woman

Many people think he loves her

The most natural interpretation of her is “the women”

referred to in the first sentence, who ever she happens to
be.

Anaphora:

The process of replacing a longer expression by pronoun or

another kind of “pro form” is called anaphora. Here are
several example of a variety of anaphora in English:

John saw the boy with the telescope

Dan also saw him (the boy with the telescope)

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Missing Parts: Ellipsis:

The process of anaphora replaces whole phrases with pro-

form. Sometimes in discourse, or even within sentence,
entire phrases may be omitted and not replaced by a pro-
form but still understood because of context

My aunt washed the dishes

My uncle dried.

The Articles The andA:

There are discourse rules that apply regularly, such as

those that determine the occurrence of the article the/and
/a/. The article the is used to indicate that referent of a noun
phrase is agreed upon by speaker and listener. e.g.:

I saw the boy.

It is assumed that a certain boy is being discussed. No

such assumption accompanies.

I saw a boy

Which is more of a description of what was seen than

a reference to a particular individual?
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Often a discourse will begin with the use of indefinite
articles, and once everyone agrees on the referents, definite
article start to appear. A short example illustrates this
transition:

I saw a boy and a girl holding hand and kissing.

Oh, it sounds lovely.

Yes. The boy was quite tall and handsome, and

he seemed to like the girl a lot.

These examples show that some rules of discourse are

similar to grammatical rules in that a violation produces
unacceptable results. If the final sentence of this discourse
were.

Yes, a boy was quite tall and handsome, and he

seemed to like a girl a lot.Most speaker would find it
unacceptable.

Maxims of Conversation:

Grice, 1975 explains that all communication take place in a

situation where people are co-operative. When people

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communicate, they assume the other person will be co-
operative and they themselves wish to co-operate. Grice
calls this the “cooperative principle” Under this principle,
the following maxims are followed:

(1) Maxim of quantity: Give the right amount of

information, neither less nor more than required
(2) Maxim of quality: make your contribution such
that it is true: do not say what you know is false or for
which you do not have adequate evidence.
(3) Maxim of relation: be relevant.
(4) Maxim of manner: Avoid obscurity and
ambiguity; be brief. These maxims are different from
rules in that while rules can’t be violated, maxims are
often violated. I.e. people often give more or less
information than required, or make irrelevant
contributions. e.g.:
a. Where’s my box of chocolates?
b. The children were in your room this morning.

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b- Violates the maxim of relation because the replay is
apparently not relevant to A’s question. Similarly, in this
interaction:

A. I failed in my test today.

B. Wonderful!
In this case, B’s response violates the maxim of quality in
that the expression “wonderful” here is not an expression of
actual wonder. A’s statement is not such that would
demand a response of exclamation of delight.

Per formatives and Speech:

Austin (1962) pointed out that there are a number of
utterances that do not report or constate any things and are
not therefore (true/false), but rather that the uttering at the
sentence is, or is part of, action- Example are: I name this
ship Queen Elizabeth, I bet you six pence, it will rain
tomorrow. By uttering such sentences the speaker actually
names any kind of statement that can be regarded as true or
false.
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The sentence that he is concerned with here are
grammatically all statements, but they are not constative,
they are performative.Austin includes along with the per
formative sentences: I promise – apologies, thank, approve,
congratulate with all of these a sentence with I and present
tense verb will be an example of a per formative.
He proceeds to distinguish these per formatives as explicit
per formatives in contrast with the implicit per formative
which do not contain an expression naming the act: go as
with I order you to go and similarly there is a bull in the
field may (or may not) be a warning, while: I shall be there
may or may not be promise. This leads to the distinction
between alocutionaryacts we are ‘say something’ but we
may also use the illocution for a particular purposes - to
answer a question, to announce, to give a warning etc.
Austin (1962: 133) suggests that statements, i.e. constative,
are merely one kind of speech acts, for he argues, to state is
‘as much to perform an illocutionary act, as say, to warn or
pronounce. Never the less, linguistically, the notion of per
formative (in such sentences as / promise …etc.) and of
speech act (in there is a bull in the field as a warning) are
very different. Per formatives are formally marked and
easily identifiable; speech act are not.
Austin e.g. I name this ship queen Elizabeth has two clear
characteristics. To begin with this part of an action, that of
christening a ship; further, it begins with I plus a present
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tense verb, which names the action while performing it.
Austin mentions: I shall come tomorrow as an example of
an implicit per formative. The status of these is a little
problematic. We could argue that, since you shall have it
tomorrow and you can go now, are already and
unambiguously a promise and granting of permission, shall
and can are essentially per formative verbs.
Per formatives cannot be true or false, but they can ‘go
wrong’ or be ‘unhappy’ or infelicitous. Saying l name this
ship Queen Elizabeth will not name the ship if the speaker
has no authority to do so.
Searle (1969) suggest that speech acts can be
characterized in terms of ‘felicity conditions’ and that there
are three kinds of conditions that speech act must meet.
First, there are the preparatory conditions. For a promise,
these are (roughly) that the hearer would like the action
done and that speaker knows this, but that it is not obvious
to either the speaker will perform the action in the normal
course of events. Secondly, there are the sincerity
conditions: for a promise that the speaker intend to act: for
request, that he wants hearer to acts, and for an assertion,
that he believes what he says. Thirdly, the essential
conditions are that the speaker intends that his utterance
will ‘count as promise, etc, and that the hearer should be
informed of that intention.

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It would be no less difficult to determine un ambiguously
what is the speech act being performed in each utterance.
The main difficulty here is that there seems to be no very
direct relations between speech act and the form of the
words used. We cannot identify speech act with sentence
type, as we have already seen, but further we cannot even
identify speech acts with sentences containing per
formative verbs. A sentence beginning I promise could be a
warning, while one can make a tentative judgment with I
bet (I bet he won’t come).

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