English Semantics

Every human child, with a few pathological exceptions, learns the language of the society in which it grows up. A child acquires the fundamentals of that language in the first five or six years of life—perhaps the greatest intellectual feat of its lifetime. How the child does this is one of the most intriguing puzzles in the study of human nature. All we know is that the child follows a general timetable in the process of acquisition. Just as the baby sits up, then crawls, stands and walks according to an innate timetable, so the child, at about the age of twelve months, begins to imitate its parents’ ways of naming what is in the environment (bed, bottle, doll, baby, mama, etc.) and of telling the characteristics and events in which these things can be observed (wet, empty, up, sit, all-gone). Children who can hear learn speech and deaf children learn sign language, provided they are exposed to a medium which they can perceive. By the age of eighteen months the child is likely to be producing two-word utterances (Baby up, Daddy byebye, Mama shoes, Dolly sit). Soon utterances become more and more complex, and these utterances are clearly invented, not just repetitions of what parents may have said. Processes like making questions and negative statements are acquired—processes that go beyond a mere reflection of what is in the environment and make it possible for the child to express himself and interact with others (Lenneberg 1967; Clark and Clark 1977:295–403).


The child acquires the ability to make use, as speaker and hearer, of the most important communication system of the community. Through this possession the individual enjoys a life of being able to inform, to express feelings and thoughts, perhaps to influence others in smaller or larger ways, and to learn. Our ability to use language and our ability to think and conceptualize, develop at the same time and these abilities depend on each other. So, while we may retain some memory of learning to read and write, which we began around the age of six, we do not remember learning to understand what was spoken to us in the first four or five years of life and still less our struggles to speak. Thus it happens that the knowledge which each of us has about our native language is partly conscious and explicit but to a large extent unconscious and implicit. We know the language but we do not fully know what we know.
We know in the sense that we successfully communicate our intentions to others and we correctly interpret what others tell us—we know how to use the language. But we are not likely to be cognizant of the multiple meanings that common words can have, of the ways in which words are related to one another, of all the potential ambiguities that are always lurking in language. Because language is creative, our communication is not restricted to a fixed set of topics; we constantly produce and understand new messages in response to new situations and new experiences. At the same time, language use is subject to very specific rules and constraints. There seems to be an infinite number of things we can say, but a language does not have an infinite number of words nor an infinite number of ways of combining words. If it had, we could not learn it. What is the knowledge that a speaker of a language has about that language? Quite simply, a vocabulary and the ways to use it. More specifically, speakers have two vocabularies, one that they use in producing utterances and a somewhat larger one that is needed for understanding a variety of people.

The vocabulary contains numerous names of people and places, as well as what we might think of as ordinary words. The productive vocabulary grows rapidly in early childhood, and for most people changes somewhat throughout life. And what knowledge does one have that makes one capable of using the vocabulary, productively and receptively? We have to know how to combine the vocabulary items into utterances that will carry meanings for others and we have to grasp the meanings of complex utterances that others produce. With this goes the knowledge of how to pronounce words and utterances and how to recognize the pronunciation of words and utterances produced by others. So, for every word that speakers know, for production or recognition, they must know the pronunciation, how it fits into various utterances, and what it means.

Because we acquire our native language so early in life, our knowledge is mostly implicit. The linguist’s task is to explicate this implicit knowledge. To describe a language the linguist writes a grammar. As Chomsky and Halle (1968:1) put it, we use the term grammar to mean two things: the implicit knowledge that a speaker has and the explicit description and explanation of it by the linguist. Whether we think of the grammar of a language as the knowledge that every speaker of the language has, or the explicit description made by a linguist, or both, the grammar must contain three parts. One part, of course, is semantics, the knowledge (from the point of view of the individual who speaks and hears others speaking), or the description (from a linguist’s point of view), of meaningful units like words and meaningful combinations of words like sentences. This whole book is about semantics; here it is more appropriate to consider the other parts of a grammar.

Phonology is the knowledge, or the description, of how speech sounds are organized in a particular language—there are units called phonemes which combine in various possible ways (but not all possible ways) to express meaningful units such as words. These phonemes contrast with one another to make different units of meaning. Sometimes two words sound the same but have different meanings (homonyms), and sometimes sequences of words with the same pronunciation have different interpretations (ambiguity).

Syntax is the knowledge, or the description, of the classes of words, sometimes called parts of speech, and of how members of these classes go together to form phrases and sentences. Syntax deals with grammatical categories like tense, number, aspect—categories that differ from language to language and which yet are present somehow in all languages. Another part of grammar is morphology, the description or the knowledge of word formation: the account of different forms of the ‘same’ word (cat, cats; connect, connecting, connected) and the derivation of different words which share a basic meaning (connect, disconnect, connection). It is impossible to explore semantics without also dealing with syntax (and vice versa) because the two are closely interrelated: the meaning of a sentence is more than the meanings of the words it contains, and the meaning of a word often depends partly on the company it keeps—what other words occur in the same sentence. When we say that speakers of a language know the phonology
of their language, we mean that they can accurately produce the sequences of sounds that signal different meanings and can recognize the sequences of sounds produced by other speakers and can connect these sequences to the meanings intended by those speakers. But ordinary speakers do not ‘know’ in the sense that they can describe the complex manipulations of their vocal organs in pronouncing. Any native speaker of English can pronounce and recognize beat, bit, meat and meek, but the ability to explain how bit differs from beat in articulation, and beat from meat and meat from meek, is not part of native-speaker knowledge. Similarly, a speaker knows how to combine words into complex sentences and to grasp the meanings of complex structures that other speakers produce. Any adolescent or adult speaker can produce and can understand a sentence like We shouldn’t expect whoever took these things to be likely to want to return them, but few speakers would be able to explain the syntax of it.

All animals have some system for communicating with other members of their species, but only humans have a language which allows them to produce and understand ever-new messages and to do so without any outside stimulus. Bees, birds, dolphins and chimpanzees, among other animals, transmit and interpret a fixed number of messages that signal friendliness or hostility, the presence of food or of danger, or have to do with mating and care of offspring. But human language differs from these animal communication systems in two crucial ways (Hockett 1957:574–85; Bickerton 1990: 10–16). First, animals can communicate only in response to some particular stimulus. Bees, when they have located a source of nectar in some group of plants, fly back to their hive and report this discovery by doing a dance that indicates the approximate direction and distance to the site, but in general non-human communication takes place on the spot, and is concerned with what is immediately present. No animal can tell another one about past experiences, and still less are they able to communicate their plans for the future. Humans alone are able to talk about vast numbers of things which come from accumulated knowledge, memory and imagination. Human language is stimulus-free. Second, while animals have only a fixed repertoire of messages, human language is creative: we are always producing new utterances which others understand; we comprehend new sentences which others have produced (as you understand this sentence, though it is not likely you have read it before).

The importance of stimulus-freedom and creativity is often overlooked. Throughout history various thinkers have tried to describe and explain language as if language is only related to the phenomenal world, the objects and events that we can observe through our senses. The simple fact is that the human mind deals easily and frequently with what does not exist, or what does not yet exist. Nobody can explain just how people are able to abstract elements from their sensory world and put these elements together in ways that are partly familiar, partly new. Yet that is just what happens when the architect envisions a building not yet erected, the composer puts together a concerto that is still to be played, a writer devises a story about imaginary people doing imaginary things, or when all of us take delight in nonsense and concoct names for things that might exist or might not. The productivity of language is due to another feature which distinguishes our communication from that of other animals. While some bird songs are different arrangements of a repertory of elements, generally each signal emitted by a dog or donkey or dolphin is an indivisible unit, different from any other signal that the animal may utter. Human utterances, on the other hand, are composed of interchangeable units on two levels. An utterance consists of words in a particular sequence (at least one word and usually more than one), and a word consists of sound-units, or phonemes, in a particular order. A fairly small number of phonemes, which are meaningless, combine to make a vast number of meaningful words; for example, the English words pat, tap and apt consist of the same three phonemes, differently arranged, and these three phonemes occur over and over in combinations with a relatively small number of other phonemes to make up thousands of combinations that we call words. This freedom from context is possible only because language is conventional, or has the feature of arbitrariness. There is no natural relation between the word goat, for instance, and what that word designates. Since ancient times people have been arguing about whether language is ‘natural’ or not. We can only conclude that it is natural for humans to have language—that a human child has a natural propensity to acquire the language which is used by the members of its family. But the ways in which meanings are communicated through language are not natural, nor is one language more natural
than another. All human societies have language and—contrary to some popular but unfounded opinions—every known language is complex and subtle, capable of expressing whatever its speakers need to express and capable of changing to meet the changing needs of the speakers.

the meaning of some poem or story. Three disciplines are concerned with the systematic study of ‘meaning’ in itself: psychology, philosophy and linguistics. Their particular interests and approaches are different, yet each borrows
from and contributes to the others.

Psychologists are interested in how individual humans learn, how they retain, recall, or lose information; how they classify, make judgements and solve problems—in other words, how the human mind seeks meanings and works with them.
Philosophers of language are concerned with how we know, how any particular fact that we know or accept as true is related to other possible facts—what must be antecedent (a presupposition) to that fact and what is a likely consequence, or entailment of it; what statements are mutually contradictory, which sentences express the
same meaning in different words, and which are unrelated. (There is more about presupposition and entailment later in this chapter.) Linguists want to understand how language works. Just what common knowledge do two people possess when they share a language—English, Swahili, Korean or whatever—that makes it possible for them to give and get information, to express their feelings and their intentions to one another, and to be understood with a fair degree of success? Linguistics is concerned with identifying the meaningful elements of specific languages, for example, English words like paint and happy and affixes like the -er of painter and the un- of unhappy. It is concerned with describing how such elements go together to express more complex meanings—in phrases like the unhappy painter and sentences like The painter is unhappy—and telling how these are related to each other. Linguistics also deals with the meanings expressed by modulations of a speaker’s voice and the processes by which hearers and readers relate new information to the information they already have. Semantics is the systematic study of meaning, and linguistic semantics is the study of how languages organize and express meanings.Linguistic semantics is the topic of this book, but we need to limit ourselves to the expression of meanings in a single language, English. Here and there throughout the book we make comparisons with other languages, but these are meant to be illustrative of language differences, not full accounts of what differences exist.