Introduction 1,1 Semantics and pragmatics ‘The study of linguistic meaning is generally divided in practice into two main fields, semantics and pragmatics. Semantics deals with the literal meaning of words and the meaning of the way they are combined, which taken together form the core of meaning, or the starting point from which the whole mean- ing of a particular utterance is constructed. Pragmatics deals with all the ways in which literal meaning must be refined, enriched or extended to arrive at an understanding of what a speaker meant in uttering a particular expression. This division can be roughly illustrated with (1) below: (1) [forgot the paper. Semantics provides the literal meaning of the elements J, forget, past tense, the and paper, and the meaning drawn from the order of the words, giving very approximately ‘The person who is speaking at some time before the time of speaking forgot a particular item which is a paper’. Pragmatic considerations flesh this out to a more complete communication. Suppose that it is Sunday morning. Anna, the speaker, has just returned to her flat from the local shops where she went to buy croissants and the Sunday newspaper, In this context her flatmate Frances understands Anna to say that she forgot to buy a copy of the Sunday newspaper for that morning, and the time of her forgetting was while she was at the shops ~ she presumably remem- bered her intention to buy a paper when she set out and has obviously remem- bered it on returning, If the shops are nearby, Anna might also intend Frances to infer that Anna will go back for the paper. Suppose, alternatively, that a man has been found murdered in the fields near a farmhouse, Two nights before the body was found the farmhouse was broken into, although nothing was reported missing. The owners of the house are renovating a small upstairs room, and the floor of this room is currently lit- tered with sticky scraps of stripped wallpaper. The dead man was found with a scrap of the wallpaper on the sole of his shoe, ‘Two detectives are discussing the2 INTRODUCTION case, One has just finished speculating that the murder is connected to another set of recent events in the nearby town, and is not related to the break-in at the farmhouse. She then stops and says ‘I forgot the paper’ In this context her col- league understands her to mean that while she was working through her alter- native scenario she forgot the wallpaper scrap on the dead man’s shoe. Given the background assumption that the scrap of paper proves the man's presence upstairs in the farmhouse at some stage, her utterance is also understood to mean that she withdraws her speculative alternative scenario, which is probably not correct. Examples like these demonstrate the enormous contribution of pragmatic information to communication. On the other hand, the starting point from which we arrive at both fleshed-out meanings is the constant contribution of the literal meaning of I forgot the paper. This book will mainly concentrate on literal meaning, the content of words and expressions which is fairly constant from one occasion of use to another. The next part of this chapter will review some of the main issues in the analysis of literal meaning. After that, we will consider some important kinds of pragmatic meaning which may be difficult to distinguish from literal meaning. 1.2 Kinds of meaning 1.2.1 Denotation and Sense There are two most basic ways of giving the meaning of words or longer expres- sions. The first and most simple way is to present examples of what the word denotes. For example, the word cow can be defined by pointing to a cow and saying ‘That is a cow’, or the word blue can be defined by pointing to a blue object and saying “That colour is blue’. Definition by pointing to an object of the kind in question, called ostensive definition, appeals directly to the denotations of the words defined. The word blue denotes the colour blue, or blue objects in the world, and the word cow denotes cows. The general point is that linguistic expressions are linked in virtue of their meaning to parts of the world around us, which is the basis of our use of language to convey informa- tion about reality, The denotation of an expression is the part of reality the expression is linked to, The second way of giving the meaning of a word, commonly used in dic- tionaries, is to paraphrase it, as illustrated in (2): (2) forensic ‘pertaining to courts of law and court procedures’ export ‘to send out from one country to another, usually of com- modities’ This kind of definition attempts to match the expression to be defined with another expression having the same sense, or content, The clearest kind of sense-for-sense matching is translation from one language to another. To sayKINDS OF MEANING 3 that /e train bleu means ‘the blue train’ is to say that the French expression and the English expression have the same sense, The most widely discussed form of the sense/denotation distinction is the sense/reference distinction. An expression which denotes just one individ- ual is said to refer to that individual. Titles and proper names are common referring expressions. Suppose, for example, that some of the previous win- ners of the Mr Muscle Beach Contest are Wade Rodriguez (1934), Denzel Lucas (1987), Josh Minamoto (2001) and Rob Cabot (2009). The expression ‘Mr Muscle Beach has a constant sense which one might paraphrase as ‘(Citle of) the winner of an annual body-building competition called the Mr Muscle Beach Contest’, but depending on the year in which, or about which, the expression is used it refers to Rodriguez, Lucas, Minamoto or Cabot. This general pattern of a constant sense allied with changeable reference is dis- cussed in more detail in Chapter 7. Sense and denotation do not have parallel status. In the context of the anec- dote above the expression refers at different times to Wade Rodriguez, Denzel Lucas, Josh Minamoto and Rob Cabot. The fact that the expression refers to one of these men at a given time depends on, and follows from, the sense of the expression. It is only because the expression has the sense ‘(title of) the winner ofan annual body-building competition called the Mr Muscle Beach Contest’ and Lucas won the competition in 1987 that the expression refers to Lucas in 1987. And given the sense of the expression, it cannot denote anyone who has not won the competition in question. So sense is more basic than denotation, and denotation is dependent on sense. Sense and denotation are the fundamental aspects of meaning in general. ‘The next two sections review different ways of partitioning complex meanings in terms of their components. 1.2.2. Lexical and structural meaning The meaning of a complex expression such as a sentence is composed of lexical meaning, which is the meaning of the individual words, and structural mean- ing, which is the meaning of the way the words are combined. Structural meaning mainly comprises the meaning derived from the syntac- tic structure of an expression, for example: (3) a The rat that bit the dog chased the cat b. The cat that chased the dog bie the rat c. The rat that chased the cat bit the dog d. The dog that chased the rat bit the cat ©. The dog that bit the rat chased the cat £. The dog that chased the cat bit the rat gg, The dog that bit the cat chased the rat F. The dog that chased the cat chased the rat i. The dog that chased the rat chased the cat wwand s0 On...4 INTRODUCTION From a vocabulary of seven words (the, that; rat, dog, cat, chased, bit) we can construct a large number of different sentences with different meanings, all based on a single syntactic structure with a common ‘meaning template’: (The A [that B-ed the C]] D-ed the E xisanA x performed the D action yisanE y undergoes the D action x performed the B action zisaC zis the undergoer of the B action ‘The meaning components outlined in (4) are examples of syntactic meaning. ‘Any theory of human language has to be compatible with the fact that human languages are instantiated in human minds, which have a finite cap- acity, Although the language known by any one person ata given point in time contains a fixed number of words, it can in principle produce, ot generate, infinitely many sentences, because the syntax is recursive. Recursiveness is the property of embedding a phrase inside another phrase of the same kind, which allows for sentences to be extended in length indefinitely. The examples below illustrate two kinds of recursion many times repeated: (5) a. The car broke down because Tom forgot to fill the tank because he was running late because Bill rang him just when he was leaving because Bill wanted to sell John a home gym because he doesn’t use the home gym anymore and he needs the money because he spent too much money last month because he went for a quick holiday because he needed a break... b. This is the maiden all forlorn that milked the cow with the crum- pled horn that tossed the dog that chased the cat that killed the rat that ate the male that lay in the house that Jack built. ‘The examples in (5) show that recursion can be used to lengthen a sentence by adding to it. For example, the sentence The car broke down can be lengthened by adding because Tom forgot to fill the tank, giving two sentences, the original one and the longer one. In principle, any sentence can be used to form a new sentence by using a recursive addition, and so the number of sentences is infin- ite, Given that the language has infinitely many sentences, our knowing a lan- guage cannot possibly amount to memorizing its expressions: Rather, we know the vocabulary and the syntactic rules for generating sentences. The syntactic rules themselves are a finite number, probably a fairly small number. ‘We can also match meanings to these infinitely many sentences, and again, we cant possibly do this by memorizing sentence/meaning pairs, Most of the sentences we hear and understand are heard for the first time, and could not have been learned ahead. It must be that along with the syntactic rules for form- ing phrases and sentences, we also know interpretation rules which combineKINDS OF MEANING 5 meanings just as syntactic rules combine forms. Accordingly, linguistic mean- ing is compositional. Compositionality is the property of being composed from parts. Compositionality in semantic analysis is discussed in Chapter 4. Structural meaning also overlaps with the meaning of syncategorematic expressions, introduced in the next section. 1.2.3 Categorematic and syncategorematic expressions The distinction between categorematic and syncategorematic expressions applies to individual words, rather than phrases. Meaningful inflections can also be included here, as they are syncategorematic. Categorematic expressions, which include the vast majority of words, are the descriptive words such as nouns, adjectives and verbs. These words are termed categorematic because their descriptive content, or sense, provides a basis for categorization, For example, the descriptive content of the word chim- ney provides the basis for forming the category of chimneys, the sense of blue provides the basis for the category of blue things, the senses of the words domes- tic, professional, commercial, and so on provide the basis for categories of things and activities, and so on. Syncategorematic words are all the rest, including the examples here: ©) as, some, because, for, to, although, if since, and, most, all, . What syncategorematic words have in common is that they do not have independent, easily paraphraseable meanings on their own, and we can only describe their meanings by placing them in a context. Unlike the categorematic words, they are not themselves descriptive of reality, and do not denote parts of reality. Rather, they serve to modify categorematic expressions or to combine them in certain patterns, Examples of modifying expressions are tense, illustrated in (7a-c), and modality, illustrated in (7d). (Modality and tense are discussed further in Chapters 5 and 9.) (7) a. He believed us. b. He believes us. c. He will believe us. d. He might believe us. In (7a-c) the tense endings -ed and -s and the future auxiliary will are com- bined with the same base sentence form He believe us, The basic sentence form describes a state of affairs, and semantic tense locates this state of affairs in the past, present or future. The past, present or future content of the tense expres sions (-ed, -s, will) doesn’t stand alone, but must combine with a base sentence form to be given a particular interpretation, The same base sentence He believe us appears in (7d), but here the state of affairs of his believing us is not located in the past, present or future. Rather, the modal verb might expresses the pos- sibility of such a state of affairs existing.