7. SEMANTICS
7.1 Introduction: The autonomy of linguistic meaning
The typical attitude prevailing in most of modern theoretical linguistics is that language can be studied as an autonomous structure without any direct consideration of conditions of use. This applies most straightforwardly to the outer form, the expression side, of language (5.4), but many scholars treat meaning, the content side, in the same way. In short, meanings are held to be
objective, i.e. they are not dependent on the ways any given persons happen to understand them, - autonomous and disembodied, i.e. they can and should be treated as independent of what human beings do in speaking, understanding, and acting,
compositional, i.e. they are abstract objects with well defined inherent properties, and can be analyzed in terms of components, i.e. "smaller" objects more "primitive" concepts and the like). (Lakoff & Johnson 1980).
Furthermore, it is assumed that words, sentences, texts, and discourses have meanings "in themselves, as linguistic objects as it is often put. They are said to "carry meanings" with them (IX.1). The meaning of a given linguistic object can be unearthed by means of a sophisticated linguistic analysis which aims at finding the correct interpretation or the semantic representation inherent in it (note the singular forms which are used here)(c.f. V.5).
The view just sketched is utterly misconceived, at least if we are interested in the meanings or interpretations relevant in actual communication, or, for that matter, in thinking. The interpretation of an utterance, a discourse or a text is never (I will argue) completely inferable from the linguistic objects alone. It is not inherent in the linguistic signs (the "sound-meaning correspondences") taken as situation-independent entities. In practice, there is always a need for different kinds of background knowledge, i.e., knowledge which is extrinsic to language but usually more or less available to senders and receivers in communication. Consider (1) as a simple example:
(1) He is dangerous.
Such a sentence can never be understood without several types of background knowledge. The listener (or reader) must be able to tackle a number of questions whose answers are in no way inherent in the semantic representation of the sentence as such (however this is conceived): Who is he? (referential specification; note that this is still necessary, even if we use a common noun ('that man') or a proper name ('Ronald Reagan') instead of a pronoun). In which way, to what extent, is he dangerous? To whom and what, when and where is he a threat?(determination of standards of comparison and precision, referential specification, intensional precisation, elimination of vagueness and ambiguity). Who uttered (1), when did he (or she) do it, and why? (assignment of intentions and reasons to the sender). These latter questions are concerned with the so-called why of communication (Ducrot 1972) which is always relevant for the addressee. A reasonable situational interpretation [1] can only be the result of a complex interplay between various situation-specific factors and the inherent meaning potentials (Rommetveit & Blakar,1978) of the linguistic units and constructions.
The contribution of the linguistic expressions with their meanings is often very important but it is never enough by itself. Instead, words and utterances should be seen as clues to interpretation, as instructions to the listener to search for an interpretation along certain lines (cf Gardiner 1951, Linell forthcoming.). Utterances allow for, or interpretations, but they do not express or transfer them (IX.1). Accordingly, Merleau-Ponty (1962) speaks of "the essential allusiveness and incompleteness of speech" as a ubiquitous and fundamental feature of all linguistic communication; it is not restricted to "special forms of insinuations, half-sayings, allusions to little tales of an intentionally nonserious character" (Volosinov 1973:97) and similar uses of language.
In discussing formal and semantic autonomy (III.1) I referred to Olson's (1977) pertinent analysis of the written language bias in linguistics and related disciplines. However, even Olson argues that written texts are, or may be, semantically autonomous. We recall that for him this was the most fundamental difference between writing and speech. But such a view can hardly be true in a strict sense. It is a fact that written texts are not semantically autonomous either (cf VII.6). However, they are relatively more autonomous than spoken dialogues, and this is a circumstance which has not failed to exert a great influence on linguists' views of semantics.
7.2 Word meanings
The view that there are immanent meanings or interpretations inherent in the linguistic signs as such, i.e. associated with the linguistic expressions (sign vehicles), has been much cherished by linguists. Sometimes these meanings are talked about as 'literal meanings', and one should carefully note the word 'literal' here' The assumption of literal meanings pertains to several linguistic levels. Here we will consider word meaning first and return to sentence meaning later on (7.5).
Within linguistic semantics there have been several theories of word meaning, and not all of them are equally amenable to characterizations of the kind that I am going to suggest. However, one element that seems to be implicit in many theories is the idea that many ('literal') uses or interpretations of a given word can be directly inferred from an underlying invariant word meaning. (Some would put it even stronger saying that the literal interpretation is identical to the word meaning). Such a conception is compatible with theories based on Grundbedeutunq as well as Gesamtbedeutung.
The standard view is that word meanings are definite, fixed and stable, e.g., a set of invariant semantic features. These meanings are ready-made, they exist "out there" in the language (la langue) as a system, and as such they are available for use by speaker-listeners (writer-readers). An extreme view is held by structuralists who maintain that word meanings should be defined entirely within the system itself without any recourse to extralinguistic experience. According to this view, the meaning of a given word consists in being different from other words; dans la langue il n'y a que des differences (Saussure 1964:166).
Instead of construing word meaning in terms of sets of invariant semantic feature complexes (as, for example, in the semantics of a generative grammar) one could look upon the meaning of a given word as something which is "dynamic, only partially determined" and "open and susceptible to contextual modifications"..."in communication when what is initially intersubjectively shared becomes expanded and/or modified" (Rommetveit & Blakar 1978:354). In Rommetveit's view the word has the potential of eliciting different semantic operations which are partly different in different situations and therefore result in distinct situationspecific interpretations. Another way to put it would be to say that word meanings place certain conditions on possible situational interpretations, or that they point to, allude to, certain interpretations.
Volosinov (1973) argues that the conventional view on word meaning derives from the traditional work by linguists and philologists on written texts in foreign languages ("the grandiose organizing role of the alien word"), which necessitated the development of dictionaries with their standard definitions of word meanings. Obviously, it makes a great difference if someone is acquiring his mother tongue in naturalistic situations, which may be assumed to lead to an implicit recognition of the negotiability and context-sensitivity of meanings, or if he is learning a foreign language by consulting dictionaries as a means of decoding written texts. In general, the system-internal definition of meanings in terms of semantic features or the like seems to fit the latter predicament, i.e. the learning of foreign and learned words and concepts, rather than the acquisition of everyday concepts. Learned vocabulary is typically acquired from written texts and/or by verbal definitions, i.e., the whole process is essentially language-internal.
The conception of word meaning as something fixed and stable recurs in several contexts. It often seems to be presupposed that understanding what a word means simply consists in knowing its linguistic meaning or being able to provide an explicit verbal definition. We are therefore often faced with an all-or-nothing conception; either someone understands what a word means, or else he does not do so. Something like this seems to be implicit in the theory of a linguist who performs investigations of people's knowledge of words by simply testing the understanding of isolated sentences in which the words in question occur. Another case would the parent who observes his little child reacting adequately (or not adequately) to the use of a certain word in a given situation, and then declares that the child understands (or does not understand) the word tout court. This is obviously absurd since the same word can often be understood in many ways and at different levels; we could talk about listeners' varying depth of understanding in analogy with the speakers' depth of intention" (Naess 1953). Therefore, one may perfectly well understand a given word in one situation, where, for example it is perhaps supported by other factors in a fortunate fashion, and at the same time completely fail to understand it in another situation.
In this discussion I have alluded to the layman s theory that "each word has its own proper meaning". It might be pointed out that this "theory" exists in assumed that "each thing has its right name". The view that there is one unique way of expressing something precisely to the point (le mot juste) is the other side of the coin (c.f. Gardiner 1951:174).
7.3 The boundary between semantics and pragmatics
One of the most hotly debated issues in the current theoretical discussion within linguistics concerns the relationship between semantics and pragmatics. Is it possible and/or desirable to split up the study of meaning into two disciplines? This is a complicated problem which is currently being highlighted in a great number of books and articles. For obvious reasons I am unable to discuss here all the pros and cons. Rather what is at stake here is simply the fact that a distinction has been made by many scholars. The dividing line can be drawn in different ways and at different places, and I will mention three different alternatives in the sequel (for further discussion, see Allwood 1981).
I will not argue that the distinction between semantics and pragmatics in any of the three versions or the theory to be discussed here corresponds to, say, what is inherent in the semantic representation of a written text (cf. Olson's hypothesis that texts are semantically autonomous, VII.1) vs. what additional odd factors are involved in the understanding of spoken utterances. There is no such simple relationship between writing and speech on the one hand and semantics and pragmatics on the other. Furthermore, the distinction has never (to the best of my knowledge) been rationalized by linguists on any grounds of that kind. On the other hand, this also applies to almost all the other theoretical issues discussed in this book; linguists generally argue that the theoretical options they take have a clear basis in the linguistic phenomena themselves rather than simply in the tradition of analyzing only written language.
As far as the semantics-pragmatics distinction is concerned, some scholars tend to rationalize it on the grounds that it helps the linguist to delimit language properly. Many linguists have been quite anxious to establish and maintain linguistics as an independent science distinct from, say, psychology, sociology and philosophy. Since one suspects that the actual understanding of utterances and texts on the part of listeners and readers is more or less dependent on their encyclopedic knowledge of the world, and since most linguists would prefer to have a neat dividing line between their (hopefully) well structured science and the whole mess of encyclopedia, the attempt to delineate a more restricted study of meaning, that of semantics, may be a sensible strategy. After all, in comparison with pragmatics, semantics is (in most people's opinions) more closely integrated with the language system itself (la langue, competence).
However, no matter what the explicitly given or consciously admitted reasons for setting up the semantics - pragmatics distinction are, the written language bias is undoubtedly there as a general background, and it may very well be treated as a contributing cause. This can be argued in all the three cases which I will now advert to. [2]
The first, and perhaps most popular, theory (e.g. Lyons 1977: 591) would define semantics as the study of those context-independent meaning elements which are tied to the linguistic expressions, i.e., part of the linguistic signs as such (signs taken roughly in Saussure's sense), and are (considered to be) invariant across all situations of use. Pragmatics, on the other hand, would then deal with the specifying effects of various situational factors, and try to account for the meaning of specific utterance tokens. In other words, semantics would focus on those contributions to the situational interpretations [3] of utterances and texts which are provided by the language itself (the rules for using words and expressions), while pragmatics would encompass the whole process of determining situational interpretations, the entire interplay of all the various linguistic and extralinguistic factors (cf. II). Accordingly, semantics and pragmatics could be seen as concerned with the meanings of linguistic expressions considered as types and tokens, respectively. [4]
It might be noted in passing that my own theoretical preferences (cf. the distinction between linguistic meaning and situational interpretation, VII:5 would, by and large, coincide with these views, although I am aware that it may be difficult to defend a strong version of such a theory. Clearly, there are some meaning potentials associated in the user's mind with the linguistic expressions as types. Thus, even a sentence like 'he is dangerous', which - as an abstract sentence type - is "unspecified" in obvious ways (VII:1), can be presented in abstracto, i.e. without any observable supporting context, and most of us would still be able to (re)construct at least some ingredients of a possible interpretation. We would understand what could or must be the case in a situation in order for the sentence to be meaningfully used there. [5]
Whatever the merits of this first-mentioned attempt at distinguishing semantics from pragmatics are, it is not too farfetched to suggest a possible link between this and the written language bias in linguistics and philosophy. The idea of context-independent, invariant meaning features belonging to the language itself is something which gets easily promoted through the traditional linguistic study of written sentences and texts; I have already pointed to the relative autonomy and explicitness of texts as compared with most spoken dialogues (II, VII.1). Here is Volosinov again:
"The isolated, finished, monologic utterance, divorced from its verbal and actual context and standing open not to any possible sort of active response but to passive understanding on the part of a philologist - that is the ultimate "donnée n and the starting point of linguistic thought". (Volosinov 1973:73)
The second theory has also been hinted at, e.g. by Lyons (1977: 591). It is based on the different communicative functions of utterances and texts, and on the linguist's assessment of these functions in terms of importance and priority (cf. IX.2, and also VII.4). Thus, it may be suggested that semantics be exclusively concerned with those meaning elements that have referential or cognitive functions, whereas the study of all the various social, emotive, practical and associative aspects be relegated to pragmatics ("the pragmatic waste-basket"). Such a conception is also in keeping with the written language bias, since writing clearly enhances the referential and cognitive aspects, the so-called intellectual functions, at the cost of the other functions. This definition of semantics would also fit the view that there is a close connection between semantics and logic (cf. VII.4, VII.9). Steiner comments on the-attempts to create a universal logic with a fixed semantics in the following way:
"The slippery, ambiguous, altering, subconscious or traditional contextual reflexes of spoken language, the centres of meaning which Ogden and Richards termed "emotive" and which Empson treats under the rubric of 'value' and 'feel', fall outside the tight but exiguous mesh of logic. They belong to the pragmatic".(Steiner 1975:203)
The third theory ties up with the distinction between normative and descriptive studies, which was applied to semantics by Carnap. According to this view, semantics is normative; it studies meanings and interpretations as they should be, or, alternatively, as they would be if certain well-defined rules were consistently followed. This is Carnap's "pure semantics", a discipline which may be seen as a subpart of logic. Pragmatics, on the other hand, would be the descriptive study of how language is actually used; how concepts are in fact applied to different situations, and what interpretations are arrived at by real language users. This is close to what Naess (1953) termed "empirical semantics". Even this third theory may be associated with the written language bias.
The written language is intimately connected with norms of language and training in an allegedly correct and logical use of language. The pursuit of normative semantics is therefore a rather natural endeavor for someone dealing with the theory of correct (written) language.
7.4 Semantics and truth
"If we knew what it would be for a given sentence to be found true then we would know what its meaning is". (Carnap 1953)
Linguists and philosophers like to theorize about the functions and goals of semantics in a way that links it up with questions of the theory of truth and truth conditions.
"Despite the uniquely fragmented state of contemporary linguistic theory at the present time, there is a remarkable consensus with respect to one fundamental issue: the nature of semantic representation. Scholars as disparate as Montague, Chomsky, McCawley, Katz, Sadock and Partee would, I think, now agree that the semantic representation of a sentence is a representation which expresses the logical form of the sentence, or, put differently, a representation which expresses the conditions under which that sentence would be true" (Gazdar 1980:5)
It is significant, especially in the light of the discussion in VII.3, that Gazdar adds to these statements that "other nontruth conditional aspects of the meaning of the sentence belong to pragmatics".
In logic, which may be seen as a special development of -sentence semantics, truth and truth conditions have always been of primary importance. How should one characterize truth vs. falsity? What are the conditions to be fulfilled if a given statement is to be true or false? In modern linguistics, truth conditions have also played a major role, as Gazdar notes. As an illustrative example indicating the primacy of truth conditions in the linguists' conception of meaning we may recall Partee's (1971) discussion of the respects in which transformations (in a standard generative grammar) are, or could be said to be, "meaning preserving"; the proposal given there was that transformations must not change truth values.
A truth-conditional semantics is thus concerned with (mainly or only) the referential ('intellectual') function of language, i.e. aspects of meaning which are emphasized in written texts. The referential-cognitive aspects of language are clearly more independent of the particular contexts of use, more independent of specific senders and receivers, than are the other aspects (emotive, evocative, expressive, social etc, cf. IX.2). The referential association can be depicted as an abstract connection between language and the world:
linguistic expression (e.g. a statement) with its semantic representation(a set of truth conditions)
^
|
V
things referred to in the "real world".
The relation here designated by an arrow can be characterized in terms of truth vs. falsity; either the statement corresponds with reality, or it does not. There is, in other words, a close connection between a correspondence theory of truth, and the conception of linguistic meaning as truth-conditional in nature.
The goal of describing and analyzing objective reality in a true manner is of course rather strongly stressed in certain varieties of mainly written discourse, in particular scientific texts. But there are many other uses of language, especially in spoken dialogues, where the purely referential elements are not of primary importance, and where the truth of the statement is not the main thing. If we take a simple utterance like 'It is raining', there are surely many situations of use, where the determination of the truth of this statement is not central to the speaker's intention or the listener's actual interpretation. Most often the listener would take it for granted that the speaker provides him with a veridical description. Rather than checking whether the speaker's assertion is actually true, the listener asks himself more important questions: What is the point of this assertion? For what purpose does the speaker utter it? In what way should I utilize this piece of information? That is, the why of communication is of utmost importance, and this can only clumsily (if at all) be accounted for in terms of truth conditions.
Another case in point which shows that the question of truth is often downgraded in actual discourse concerns the normal use of referring expressions (noun phrases). If I say 'That man With a camera is dangerous', the point of using the referring noun phrase ('that man with the camera') is not that of issuing a statement, the truth of which the listener should determine, but simply that of using a linguistic expression such that the listener succeeds in identifying the referent that I as speaker have in mind. In fact, the act of reference may be successful even if, on a closer look, either the speaker or the listener, or both, discover that the man was after all not carrying a camera but a pair of binoculars (cf. Donnellan 1971). Thus, the order of priority is this: the superordinate goal is the evocation of a certain act of understanding in the listener (he must understand what the speaker means by his utterance), a means to attain this goal is through reference to a certain person, and this in turn involves the subordinated tactic of describing this person in a certain, veridical way.
Current linguistic semantics thus overrates the importance of truth. The concentration on truth conditions turns into absurdity if it is argued that this is the only significant aspect of meaning. Steiner (1975:211 ff) has attacked this concentration on truth in linguistic semantics and stressed the importance of our ability to imagine and describe things as they are not. The fundamental properties of language, or rather linguistic communication, are incompleteness, vagueness and allusiveness (cf.Merleau-Ponty);the whole truth is never conveyed, it i8 only indicated or alluded to. Thanks to this, we can use language creatively in an ever changing social and physical reality, and we can, if we must, lie or tell half-truths, and this may even be a precondition for survival in some situations (Steiner, op cit).
7.5 Speech acts, sentence meaning and utterance meaning
Some semanticists (e.g. Grice 1957) have tried to distinguish between sentence meaning and utterance meaning. The former would be some type of invariant meaning which pertains to the linguistic expression as such i.e. without any consideration of particular situations where it may be used (cf. VII.3). After all, most linguists would surely agree with Lyons (1977:35) that "a sentence like "It's raining" has a certain constancy of meaning irrespective of the purpose of the communicative act in which it is used". I would here prefer the term linguistic or structural meaning, since the linguistic expression involved need not formally be a sentence (cf. VI.1). This must be carefully distinguished from the situational interpretations of particular occurrences of the expression (e.g. 'It's raining'), i.e. interpretations made when the expression is used in different specific utterances in particular situations. The term 'situational interpretation', which I use instead of utterance meaning, is applicable to non-verbal acts as well, and is, moreover, meant to imply that the interpretation pertains to a comprehensive communicative act, in which the verbal utterance is just one (albeit important) part. As will be pointed out presently (VII.6), there are always several possible situational interpretations of the same utterance token. For example, we must distinguish between how a speaker wants his utterance to be understood, and what the listener actually understands.
What then is the proper relation between linguistic meaning and situational interpretation? The compilations of this issue can hardly be unraveled here, but it is still possible to contrast two basic theories.
The first type of theory, which has gained a considerable popularity among linguists at least since Searle (1969), implies that there are two kinds of communicative acts, one in which the situational interpretation, what is or should be understood, is simply and precisely equal to the linguistic meaning (this would then be the "literal" meaning or interpretation), and one more complex type in which the understanding involves something more; the speaker does not mean "exactly what he says", and hence we must proceed to a "non-literal" or "figurative" interpretation (indirect requests, metaphors, jokes, irony, sarcasm, and many other implicatures). Thus, this dichotomy corresponds to Searle's distinction between direct and indirect speech acts.
Searle's theory of direct speech acts is based on the thesis of semantic autonomy; it is assumed that there are cases where the task of the listener is "just" that of understanding, or "reconstructing", the structural meaning, usually called the "semantic representation", of the linguistic expression used. Searle also formulates this as the "principle of expressibility": "whatever can be meant can also be said and understood" (1969: 19-20). Thus, it is argued that fixed and finite meanings can (in fortunate cases) be converted into exact expressions, and vice versa. In other words, direct speech acts would be such communicative acts, where the speaker says exactly what he means. I would deny that such acts exist. In fact, considering what has been said in ¤ VII.1, it is remarkable that such a theory has been proposed at all. On the other hand, it is not entirely surprising given the written language bias in linguistics and logic (c.f. VII.7). After all, contemporary linguists are accustomed to analyzing sentences in abstracto, thereby figuring out what "their semantic representations" are.
The other type of theory, which seems to me much more plausible, says that the understanding of an utterance always involves something more and something beyond constructing the linguistic meaning. Thus, for example, the why of communication is always more or less important, and this is not something which can be directly or exclusively associated with the linguistic expression or the overt behavior as such. Other situational factors also intervene (see VII.1). Even if we understand a sentence seemingly in vacuo, e.g. if we reflect on the meaning of sentence like He is dangerous or it's raining without any given extralinguistic context - which linguists are used to doing (cf. above) -, we take part in a language game with special presuppositions and expectations and cannot avoid constructing _ some rudimentary aspects of an imaginary context. The same applies to written texts (c.f. VII.6). Thus, Rumelhart is justified in saying:
In summary then, the supposition that conveyed meanings are ever identical to literal meanings (where literal meanings are assumed to be those given by a compositional semantic theory) is surely suspect. The problems of determining conveyed meanings of literal sentences are no less difficult (I believe) than finding those of figurative ones. (Rumelhart 1979:86)
In concluding this section I should point out that even those who believe in the existence of direct speech acts usually concede that the literal meaning of a sentence comprises only "a set of truth conditions", and that these have to be used "against a background of assumptions that are not explicitly realized in the semantic structure of the sentence" (Searle 1979:95). What Searle apparently alludes to here is assumptions concerning the identity of referents, universes of reference and comparison (e.g. the standard of comparison and precision applied when sentences like 'The box is big' and 'France is hexagonal' are used) etc. It is indeed remarkable that somebody can admit this and at the same time claim that there are cases (of so-called direct speech acts) when n literal sentence meaning and speaker's utterance meaning are the same" (Searle, op. cit. :96). Moreover, apart from this whole complex of referential specification, we must - as I pointed out earlier - add the immensely important aspect of the "why of communication" to the list of items that are usually ignored in linguistic semantics.
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