English Semantics

First, there is the relation of the lexeme with other lexemes with which it occurs in the same phrases or sentences, in the way that arbitrary can co-occur with judge, happy with child or with accident, sit with chair, read with book or newspaper. These are syntagmatic relations, the mutual association of two or more words in a sequence (not necessarily right next to one another) so that the meaning of each is affected by the other(s) and together their meanings contribute to the meaning of the larger unit, the phrase or sentence. Another kind of relation is contrastive. Instead of saying The judge was arbitrary, for instance, we can say The judge was cautious or careless, or busy or irritable, and so on with numerous other possible descriptors. This is a paradigmatic relation, a relation of choice. We choose from among a number of possible words that can fill the same blank: the words may be similar in meaning or have little in common but each is different from the others. Since we are used to a writing system that goes from left to right, we may think of syntagmatic relations as horizontal and paradigmatic relations as vertical. A compound expression, such as book and newspaper, cautious but arbitrary, read or write puts two lexemes that are paradigmatically related into a syntagmatic relationship.

As children, we learn vocabulary first through specific associations with specific things, actions, and characteristics (reference) and as we learn to recognize different instances of the ‘same’ thing, the ‘same’ event, and so on, we generalize (denotation). Slowly we learn from other members of our speech community and from our personal experiences what associations are favorable and which are not (connotation). And we acquire an implicit knowledge of how lexemes are associated with other lexemes (sense relations). Our implicit knowledge of syntagmatic relations facilitates our perception and identification of what we hear and read, enabling us to correct automatically what we hear and see, or what we think we hear and see, when correction is needed..

Meaning is more than denotation and connotation. What a word means depends in part on its associations with other words, the relational aspect. Lexemes do not merely ‘have’ meanings; they contribute meanings to the utterances in which they occur, and what meanings they contribute depends on what other lexemes they are associated with in these utterances. The meaning that a lexeme has because of these relationships is the sense of that lexeme. Part of this relationship is seen in the way words do, or do not, go together meaningfully. It makes sense to say John walked and it makes sense to say An hour elapsed. It doesn’t make sense to say John elapsed or An hour walked. Part of the meaning of elapse is that it goes with hour, second, minute, day but not with John, and part of the meaning of hour, second and so forth is that these words can co-occur with elapse. Part of the relationship is seen in the way word meanings vary with context. A library is a collection of books (Professor Jones has a rather large library) and is also a building that houses a collection of books (The library is at the corner of Wilson and Adams Streets). A number of English verbs can be used in two different ways —different grammatical association—and then have slightly different meanings.

Here what happened to the window is the same, but in the first sentence broke is equivalent to ‘became broken’ and in the second it is equivalent to ‘caused to be broken.’ (More about this in the next chapter.) Adjectives, too, can have different senses. If you come across some object which you have never seen before, and you wonder about its origin and its purpose, we can say that you are curious about it. But we can also call the object a curious kind of thing. The same term is used for your subjective feelings and for the supposedly objective properties of this item—a curious person, a curious object. A judge makes decisions; if he is guided by personal whim or choice, the judge is arbitrary (dictionary definition: ‘inclined to make decisions based on personal whim’) but we also say that the decision is arbitrary (dictionary definition: ‘based on personal choice rather than reason’). A lexeme does not merely ‘have’ meaning; it contributes to the meaning of a larger unit, a phrase or sentence. Take these phrases with the adjective happy.

When happy combines with a word that has the feature [human], like child and family in the first line, it is roughly equivalent to ‘who enjoy(s) happiness’—a happy child is a child who has or enjoys happiness. In combination with words that have the feature [event] such as accident and experience, its contribution is roughly ‘that produces happiness.’ In combination with words that have the feature [discourse]—story, report—its meaning is roughly ‘containing a happy event or events.’ Each of these words has a range of meanings; each meaning is determined by its linguistic context, just as the meaning of door on any specific occasion is determined by the physical context in which it occurs. The meaning of a lexeme is, in part, its relation to other lexemes of the language. Each lexeme is linked in some way to numerous other lexemes of the language. We can notice two kinds of linkage, especially.

The word dog has a certain denotation, the possibility of entering into numerous referring expressions such as the underlined expressions in the following.
1 This dog is a Dalmatian.
2 My children have just acquired a dog.
3 Several dogs were fighting over a bone.

But how do you feel about dogs? How does a particular society value dogs? Hjelmsle (1971:109–10) pointed out that among the Eskimos a dog is an animal that is used for pulling a sled, the Parsees regard dogs as nearly sacred, Hindus consider them a great pest and in Western Europe and America some members of the species still perform the original chores of hunting and guarding while others are merely ‘pets.’ Hjelmslev might have added that in certain societies the flesh of dogs is part of the human diet and in other societies it is not. The meaning of dog includes the attitudes of a society and of individuals, the pragmatic aspect. It would be wrong to think that a purely biological definition of the lexeme dog is a sufficient account of its meaning. Part of its meaning is its connotation, the affective or emotional associations it elicits, which clearly need not be the same for all people who know and use the word. A denotation identifies the central aspect of word meaning, which everybody generally agrees about. Connotation refers to the personal aspect of meaning, the emotional associations that the word arouses. Connotations vary according to the experience of individuals but, because people do have common experiences, some words have shared connotations.

Languages provide means of expressing different attitudes. The referring expressions that violin and that fiddle can have the same referent—can refer to the same object on a particular occasion—but they do not have the same meaning. They differ in connotation. Violin is the usual term, the neutral one; fiddle-is used for humor or to express affection or lack of esteem. Somewhat similar relations are seen with automobile and car, building and edifice, fire and conflagration and other sets, the members of which have, or can have, the same denotation but differ in the situations in which they are used and therefore have differences in the degree of formality, the style or ‘flavor’—the connotation. (We also need to note here that car, building, and fire have larger denotations than automobile, edifice and conflagration respectively.) The expression of attitudes can be quite subtle. We choose to use one word rather than another. We might, for example, say that Linda is thin, or slender, or svelte, or skinny.

In every language there are words like tree and run and red which seem to have an obvious relation to objects and events and descriptions of things in the world around us. Children learning their native language first learn words in association with observable items and situations and events. This simple fact can give rise to an overly simple idea about what ‘meaning’ is. We are likely to think that a language consists of a large number of words and each of these words has a direct correlation with something outside of language, which is its meaning. And since, if we communicate with one another through language, it must be that we all have the same ‘idea’ or ‘concept’ associated with each word. The best known elaboration of this view was made by Ogden and Richards (1923), who developed a mentalistic theory about meaning, an attempt to explain meaning in terms of what is in people’s minds.

Ogden and Richards called the bond between word and concept an ‘association,’ the bond between concept and object ‘reference,’ and the bond between object and word ‘meaning.’ When we hear or read a word, we often form a mental picture of what the word represents, and so we are apt to equate ‘concept’ with a mental picture. To be sure, it is easier to form a mental picture for some words—DOOR and DOG, for example—than for others such as ORDINARY or PROBLEM or PRETEND. But the idea of a mental picture is misleading. What mental image do you form for DOOR? A revolving door? A folding door? A sliding door, moving horizontally? An overhead door which moves vertically? A door turning on hinges? Is it in a wall, or on a cabinet, or part of a car? Is your image associated with DOG that of a St Bernard or a Pekingese, a mongrel or an Irish Setter? You can picture all of these in sequence but not simultaneously. Clearly the meaning of door or dog is more than what is included in a single image, and your knowledge of these words is much more than the ability to relate them to single objects. You can use these words successfully in a large number of situations because you have the knowledge that makes this possible.

Just as we distinguished between ‘utterance’ and ‘sentence,’ we need to draw a distinction betweeen reference and denotation. Reference is the relation between a language expression such as this door, both doors, the dog, another dog and whatever the expression pertains to in a particular situation of language use, including what a speaker may imagine. Denotation is the potential of a word like door or dog to enter into such language expressions. Reference is the way speakers and hearers use an expression successfully; denotation is the knowledge they have that makes their use successful.

The trouble with a mentalistic theory of meaning is, first, that not all words can be associated with mental images and some words have a range of meaning greater than any single association. The bigger problem with a mentalistic theory is that we have no access to other people’s minds. How can we ever know that we all have the same mental images? If semantics is a science, it cannot operate scientifically by starting with things that are not observable and not comparable. Furthermore, words are not the only semantic units. Meanings are expressed by units that may be smaller than words—morphemes—and meanings are expressed in units—sentences—that are larger than words. The sentences 'The dog bit a man' and 'The man bit a dog', to use a trite example, contain the same words but they don’t express the same meanings.

Furthermore, meaning is more than denotation. People not only talk and write to describe things and events and characteristics; they also express their opinions, favorable and unfavorable. Language furnishes the means for expressing a wide range of attitudes; this aspect of meaning is called connotation. Another aspect is sense relations: the meaning of any expression varies with context, what other expressions it occurs with and what expressions it contrasts with.

Combinations of paralanguage and gestures can communicate something about the mood of the speaker—anger, boredom, nervousness, elation, for instance—and actors work hard to achieve such effects in interpreting the characters they play. But each actor strives to do so differently. We are not impressed by a budding starlet who uses the same inventory of mannerisms as a seasoned actress. Other facets of appearance—clothing, hair style, jewelry, cosmetics, facial hair and what is done with it—have an effect on others, intentional or not. The distance between interlocutors and whether they touch each other or not depends on tacit standards that each of us learns from the culture in which we grow up. Whether we sit on the floor or on chairs, cross our legs at the ankles, over the knees, or not at all—these ‘say’ something about a person’s cultural background but they do not communicate semantically.

Just as we learn a language early in life and largely take it for granted, so we also learn these more peripheral elements of communication and, unless we move into a different society, we assume that they are ‘just natural.’ But gestures, interpersonal distances, the ways the voice is used can be quite different in different societies and thus any of these can have different effects on people of different backgrounds. What is meaningless or mild in one culture may be rude, obscene, or otherwise over-effective in another. Thus a face-to-face communication event contains linguistic and non-linguistic elements like these:

Linguistic:
vocal and verbal—words put together to form utterances (representing sentences)
vocal and non-verbal—prosody, the intonation and accenting with which utterances are spoken

Non-linguistic:
vocal—paralanguage, the “tone of voice”
non-vocal—distances maintained; appearance; gestures; silence.

There are visible signs, gestures, which have a standard, shared meaning, and there are elements of appearance—‘body language’— which possibly create an effect on the observer and therefore on the interpretation of a spoken message. The former, the visible signs, have the capacity to communicate in much the way a word communicates; the latter could only be said to communicate in a secondary sense.

Consider these visual signs:

nodding the head in response to an utterance
crossing one’s fingers
pretending to yawn, with finger tips in front of mouth
holding up a thumb from a closed fist
pinching one’s nostrils closed with thumb and forefinger

Like the audible signs mentioned above, these gestures have recognized, though somewhat vague, shared meanings. The first suggests agreement or affirmation; the second, a hope for success when circumstances are uncertain; the third, boredom; the fourth, determination to make one’s cause successful; the fifth, disgust or displeasure with something (‘It stinks’). Other physical postures and movements—for instance, gestures with hand or whole body, such as pounding on a table with a finger or a fist, and facial gestures like pursing one’s lips, arching the eyebrows, opening the eyes wide, squinting, or fluttering the eyelids— are not conventional signals and do not have meanings in themselves; they may lead an observer to form some particular impression of the speaker, which in turn may have an effect on how the hearer interprets, but they are not in themselves semantic. It is possible that a wink or a broad grin on the speaker’s face may communicate to the addressee a visual message that the verbal message is meant facetiously, not to be taken seriously, but there is never any certainty that such is the intended message.

There are other ways of using the voice, as part of the spoken utterance, which cannot be considered either signs or part of language. These include laughing, giggling, crying (which need not accompany an utterance); whisper, falsetto, a quavering or ‘breaking’ voice; and other elements that are vocal but not verbal: the relative loudness or softness of the voice, high or low pitch, the modulations of pitch from a near monotone to an exaggerated rising and falling, a nasal quality, a rasping sound, the tempo of speech—the speed at which a whole utterance is delivered or the relative timing of syllables, ranging from clipping to drawling. These ways of using the voice cannot be considered signs—they do not signify—but they may be expressive, communicative in a secondary sense. Speakers may want to create a particular effect with their ways of using the voice; listeners may interpret what they hear in particular ways because of vocal features; but if intentions and interpretations coincide, the coincidence is fortuitous. All these ways of using the voice are together called paralanguage. The failure to use language—silence—at a particular juncture can likewise be expressive.

Aside from what we say to one another through the verbal content and the prosody of spoken utterances, we can, in face-to-face communication, transmit less systematic messages to one another by means of audible and visible signs that are not part of language. In addition, our voice or our appearance may have an effect on other participants in a conversation and therefore have an effect on the way our verbal messages are interpreted. Consider first the standardized noises we make, which are written this way (not very accurately):

ps-st sh-sh huh? unh-huh m-m-m b-r-r tsk-tsk

These count as signs. On the whole they are known to all (or at least large portions) of a language community and indeed may be used by speakers of several different languages. In general, the maker of the sign and those who hear it attach the same meaning to that sign; communication occurs. These seven audible signs indicate, respectively, a request for attention; a call for silence; a request for repetition or clarification; a signal of agreement; an expression of pleasure or enjoyment; an indication of coldness; and an expression of shame or shock.

We enclose spoken utterances in double quotation marks to distinguish them from sentences, which we print in italics. However, a spoken utterance consists of more than words. In speech meanings are communicated not merely by what is said but also by the way it is
said.

A: Has the Winston Street bus come yet?
B: Sorry. I didn’t understand. What did you say?

C: I’m afraid Fred didn’t like the remark I made.
D: Oh? What did you say?

E: Some of my partners said they wouldn’t accept these terms.
F: And you? What did you say?

G: You’re misquoting me. I didn’t say anything like that.
H: Oh? What did you say?

The sequence of words “What did you say?” occurs in all four dialogues but it is pronounced differently in each. Individual speakers may vary somewhat in just what they pronounce, but the four renditions can be represented as follows, where the most prominent syllable is indicated with capital letters and the rising or falling of the voice is indicated by letters going up or down.

We produce all our spoken utterances with a melody, or intonation: by changing the speed with which the vocal bands in the throat vibrate we produce rising or falling pitch or combinations of rise and fall.

By making one syllable in a sense-group especially loud and long, usually where the change of pitch occurs, we endow that word with a special prominence called accent. Intonation and accent together constitute prosody, the meaningful elements of speech apart from
the words that are uttered. Within each sense-group one word (more accurately, the stressed syllable of one word) is more prominent than the rest of the group, giving special attention or focus to that word. Thus, the more numerous the divisions made, the more points of emphasis there are. Compare “I’d never say THAT” with one focus and “I/would NEVer/say
THAT” with three.

Typically, when speech is represented in print, italics are sometimes used to indicate the accent, but this is done only sporadically and unevenly; our writing system largely neglects this important element of spoken communication. A written transcript of a speech can be highly misleading because it is only a partial rendition of that speech. In speech there is always an accent in some part of an utterance, and placement of accent in different parts of an utterance creates differences of meaning.

In the English language accent is mobile, enabling us to communicate different meanings by putting the emphasis in different places. The usual place is on the last important word, for instance:

My cousin is an ARchitect.

If the utterance is broken into two or more sense groups, each group has its own accent. The last accent is ordinarily the most prominent of all because the pitch changes on that syllable.

My COUsin is an ARchitect.

My cousin EDWard, who lives in FULton, is an ARchitect.

Thus the speaker can highlight one word or several words in an utterance and give special focus to that word or those words. The placement of accent on different words ties the utterance to what has been said previously.

One might then volunteer this information:

My cousin EDward’s an architect.

Here my cousin Edward is new information and the stressed syllable of the name Edward is accented. The phrase an architect now represents given information and is de-accented. Accent, by giving special focus to one word, can create contrast with other words that might have been used in the same place. Moving the accent to different words creates different meanings in what would otherwise be a single utterance.

Because it is important to recognize what meanings are communicated to us in language and which meanings we derive from the contexts in which language is used. Because it is important to distinguish between linguistic meaning, what is communicated by particular pieces of language, and utterance meaning, what a certain individual meant by saying such-and-such in a particular place, at a particular time, and to certain other individuals. The utterance “Our visit to the factory was a wonderful experience” may be spoken as a joke, or sarcastically, or as a straightforward report, among other possibilities. The sentence Our visit to the factory was a wonderful experience has none of these meanings in itself—or, to put it differently, it has potentially any of these meanings. An utterance is often part of a larger discourse—a conversation, a formal lecture, a poem, a short story, a business letter, or a love letter, among other possibilities. A spoken discourse is any act of speech that occurs in a given place and during a given period of time. A written discourse may be the record of something that has been spoken, or it may originate for the purpose of being performed aloud, like a play or speech, or it may exist without ever having been spoken or intended to be spoken, like most articles and books. The linguistic context of an utterance can make a difference of meaning, as well as the social context.

Just as conventional signals like the blowing of a whistle can have different meanings in different situations, so different pieces of language can have different meanings in different contexts. Let’s illustrate with three fictitious events: A beggar who has not eaten all day says “I’m hungry”; a child who hopes to put off going to bed announces “I’m hungry”; a young man who hopes to get better acquainted with one of his co-workers and intends to ask her to have dinner with him begins with the statement “I’m hungry.” The three events obviously have something in common and yet, just as obviously, they are different: they indicate different intentions and are liable to be interpreted differently because the situations and the participants are different. Each of the three speech events illustrated above is a different utterance, and we write an utterance with quotation marks: “I’m hungry.” Each utterance contains the same sentence, which we write with italics: I’m hungry. An utterance is an act of speech or writing; it is a specific event, at a particular time and place and involving at least one person, the one who produces the utterance, but usually more than one person. An utterance happens just once; a spoken utterance happens and then, unless it is recorded electronically, it ceases to exist; a written utterance is intended to last—for a short time in the case of a shopping list, for instance, or much longer, as in the case of a book.

A sentence, on the other hand, is not an event; it is a construction of words (in English or whatever language) in a particular sequence which is meaningful (in that language). In our illustration each of the three utterances contains the meaning of the sentence, and each utterance has an extra meaning or meanings because of the circumstances in which it occurs. The meaning of a sentence is determined by the language, something known to all people who have learned to use that language. It is the meanings of the individual words and the meaning of the syntactic construction in which they occur. The meaning of an utterance is the meaning of the sentence plus the meanings of the circumstances: the time and place, the people involved, their backgrounds, their relationship to one another, and what they know about one another. All these circumstances we can call the physical-social context of an utterance.

Although we, as listeners, begin with a phonetic message, once we have grasped the semantic content we retain only the sense of the message (Clark and Clark 1977:49). People frequently give an accurate account of something that has been said but almost always they re-tell it in words that are different from the original message. The account is not an exact repetition of what was said unless the message is fairly short. Thus, as listeners, we begin by identifying the phonetic message and through the phonetic message identify the semantic message.

So much for perception and identification. Now consider interpretation. Comprehension is not just taking in words or even sense-groups. As listeners we use our background information to interpret the message. As Fillmore (1979:78) puts it, we need to know not only what the speaker says but also what he is talking about, why he bothers to say it, and why he says it the way he does. We have to relate what is being said to what was said previously—relate new information that is coming at us to the information that preceded it. The utterance in our illustration, above, must be part of a larger discourse, and the listener grasps the meaning of ‘the answer (to what?)’ and ‘the information (about what?)’ by relating these to what has been said before. The listener has to decide, from the conversation or from knowledge of the speaker, whether the place of residence of the speaker’s friend is relevant. The listener has to decide if the speaker is joking, being sarcastic, or is entirely serious, and such judgments and interpretations have to be made within a brief span of time. When we are reading, our interpretation of what the author wants to tell us depends on our background knowledge of the topic, and we probably will be more successful in comprehending if we find the author’s style somewhat familiar and to our liking. From the other side, speakers who make themselves understood have to have some notion of what their addressees already know and what the addressees can infer and fill in. Writers have to decide for what potential audience they are writing and how much these potential readers can contribute to the process of comprehending.

When we listen to someone talking, we first take in a sequence of sounds, a phonetic event, but our understanding is not a matter of grasping one sound after another, nor even one word after another. We organize the message into sense-groups (Clark and Clark 1977:43–57). Possibly the speaker helps by speaking in sense-groups, making the pauses that are needed for breathing between sense-groups; for example, at some of the places marked ‘(pause)’ in this utterance:

“I’ll let you know the answer (pause)
as soon as I get the information (pause)
from a friend of mine (pause)
who lives in Winchester.”

(What we call a ‘pause’ may be an instant of silence or it may be simply the lengthening of a final sound, for example, informationn-n.) But conversational speech is not usually so neatly organized. As speakers we typically hesitate as we figure out what we intend to say; we put in ‘fillers’ (“Well”; “As a matter of fact…”); we repeat; we correct ourselves (“I mean”), we appeal to the addressee’s understanding (“you know”). So even a short utterance like the one above may come out this way:

“Well, I’ll uh let you know (pause) the answer (pause)
as soon—as soon as I get the information (pause)
from a friend of mine (pause) um you know (pause) who
lives in Winchester.”


This may look strange on the printed page because in written English we are used to seeing the result of careful planning and polishing, but conversational speech is scarcely ever planned or polished. As listeners we ‘edit’ what we hear, separating the pauses, fillers and repetitions from the ‘gist’ of the message. Thus, although we can’t grasp a spoken message without hearing it (perception), our knowledge of the language enables us to distinguish between what communicates and what does not. Listeners—and readers—use their implicit knowledge of the language to grasp the message they are dealing with. For instance, if we encounter the verb put in an utterance, we are prepared to find three expressions telling us who puts, what is put, and where it is put. With the verb travel we unconsciously recognize that there will be information about the person(s) traveling and perhaps about the starting point, the goal, the route taken, and the duration of time. The verb buy must be accompanied by an expression that names the buyer and item(s) bought and there is likely to be information about seller and price, as well. One part of semantic analysis, therefore, is concerned with describing the kinds of expressions which usually accompany various verbs—what roles these expressions play with respect to the verb and to each other—the who, what, where and when.

Words are linguistic signs, similar in certain respects to natural and conventional signs. They do not ‘have meanings’ but rather are capable of conveying meanings to those who can perceive, identify and interpret. Words go together to form sentences which in turn are capable of conveying meanings—the meanings of the individual words and the meaning that comes from the relation of these words to one another. We can discuss individual linguistic signs—words—but since we are interested in language use, and words are not ordinarily used alone, we should direct our attention to whole utterances and how we perceive, identify and interpret them. Let’s consider the matter of perception, identification and interpretation with respect to language use. In order to grasp what somebody says, we must first of all perceive the utterance—hear a spoken utterance, see a written one. A number of things can create difficulty in perceiving a spoken message: too much noise in the environment, too great a distance between speaker and hearer, insufficient volume in the speaker’s delivery, a poor connection if the message is conveyed by telephone, static in a radio message, or insufficient attention on the part of the hearer. A written message must be clear, sufficiently lighted and have the reader’s attention. But hearing alone is not enough, nor is seeing. We get no message from an utterance in a language we don’t know. Identification of the elements in an utterance requires speaker and hearer to share what Clark (1996:92–121) calls ‘common ground.’ By and large, speaker and hearer use the same vocabulary: they attach the same meanings to the same words and sentences; they have similar pronunciations; and they have, in general, the same ways of putting words together in sentences. Of course there can be different degrees of commonality in the common ground. Speaker and hearer may speak different dialects of the same language, so that their pronunciations differ to some degree and there is some divergence in the ways they express themselves. One—or both—may be a foreigner with only partial mastery of the language they are using. Markedly different pronunciations, use of vocabulary items that the other doesn’t know, meanings not shared, syntactic constructions not familiar to both—these disturb the process of identification.

Suppose we hear an utterance, know the language, know the meanings of the words and the sentences formed with the words. We may still not fully comprehend what is said because we don’t know what the utterance is about. We don’t grasp the speaker’s intention, largely because we don’t know what is being referred to. On the other hand, when communication is successful, we, as hearers, interpret correctly because we derive some information from what has been said previously (the discourse context) and from knowledge of the speaker and from a grasp of conditions and circumstances in the environment (the physical-social context).

Observing any such sign and getting information from it seems like a simple matter and can take place in an instant, and yet the process of getting information consists of three steps:

1. Perception

The sign and the observer share a context of place and time in which the sign attracts the observer’s attention. Robinson Crusoe, to use our first example, walked where the footprint was, looked in the right direction, when there was sufficient light for visibility, and before the print had been obliterated by rain, wind, tide, or the movement of other creatures.

2. Identification
Every perception is a unique experience. To say that we ‘recognize’ a phenomenon means that we match it with previous experiences stored in our memory. Almost certainly, if you observe a sign and derive some meaning from it, you must have seen a similar sign before. We identify any new thing either as a phenomenon previously observed or, more often, as something that is ‘identical’ with phenomena we already know, a new token of a familiar type. The human mind cannot deal with an infinite number of separate things; we classify an entity as a new instance of the class of footprints or bushes or sirens or churches. And to identify what something is requires us to recognize what it is not, to discriminate between signs.

3 Interpretation
Meanings are often personal. The meaning of any sign depends on the space-time context in which we observe it. Crusoe’s reaction to the footprint was due to the circumstances of his life, the fact that until this moment it had been impossible for him to see any human footprint other than his own. This is clearly an unusual case, but all the time we interpret differently in different contexts. Conventional signs can have different meanings in different contexts or different circumstances. The whistle of a policeman directing traffic, the whistle of a hotel doorman summoning a taxi, and the whistle of the referee in a soccer game may all sound exactly the same; their different meanings are due to the difference of context in which the signal occurs. They have different intentions and are interpreted differently.

A language is a system of symbols through which people communicate. The symbols may be spoken, written, or signed with the hands. People who use a language to communicate with one another constitute a society, a language community—the English language community, for instance. Within that community there are differences in the way different people use the language, chiefly of a geographical or social nature. When people who have the same native language can understand one another but still notice consistent differences in each other’s speech, we say they speak different dialects of that language. It is easy to illustrate dialect differences: vocabulary differences like petrol versus gasoline, lift versus elevator, alternative ways of framing certain questions: Have you a pencil? versus Do you have a pencil? versus Have you got a pencil?, for instance. It is extremely difficult to say how many differences there are between dialects or to recognize where one dialect ends and another begins.

Language is only one of the common activities of a society. The totality of common activities, institutions, and beliefs make up the culture of that society. Cultural groupings are not necessarily coterminous with language communities. In the modern world it is
quite the opposite: cultural features are almost always more widespread than any one language. Native speakers of English belong to the so-called Western culture, which has developed from the Hebrews, Greeks and Romans of the ancient world. If it is hard to specify just what consitutes a ‘dialect,’ it is equally difficult to specify what is included in one ‘culture.’ Our culture includes, for example, eating with a fork, wearing neckties, knowing at least some of the same proverbs, using at least some of the same gestures for the same purposes, celebrating the arrival of a new year, believing in law and democracy, and hundreds of other major and minor customs and beliefs. The point is that communication takes place against a large common background.

A language is a complex system of symbols, or signs, that are shared by members of a community. It will be useful to consider other signs that we know and how we react to them.
Robinson Crusoe, according to Defoe’s novel, was walking along the beach one morning and suddenly saw a human footprint in the sand—made by the man who was later to be called Friday, as it turned out. This experience, after twenty-seven years of living alone on his island, so frightened poor Crusoe that he ran back to the cave that was his home and would not venture out again that day.

A footprint is a natural sign. It is the natural result of a foot treading on a soft surface, and it can communicate a message—that the owner of the foot was recently there—to anyone who observes it. We are all familiar with other natural signs. We see smoke and know that there is a fire, or a fire has just gone out. A black cloud informs us of the possibility of rain. Treetops moving tell us that the wind is blowing. Our own bodies provide such signs as earaches and hunger pangs. In other people we notice and interpret shivering, perspiration, or a head nodding with drowsiness. All sorts of sights, sounds and smells can be natural signs; they communicate to someone who observes and can interpret but their messages are unintentional, the by-products of various events. In modern life we are likely to be less concerned with natural signs than with conventional signs, the auditory and visual devices
that people have created to send routine messages to one another. Day after day we hear such signals because someone intends for us to hear them: horns, whistles, sirens, buzzers and bells. The pop of a gun starts competitive runners, swimmers and jockeys on their respective races. In various sports a whistle or buzzer marks the beginning and end of each period of play. Visual signs are just as prevalent and as varied. We have conventional ways of indicating a slippery road, a bicycle path, the location of a telephone, of men’s and women’s lavatories, where there is access for the handicapped, where smoking is prohibited, and much more. Humans produce not only single symbols but systems of symbols. Different bugle calls, different bell tones, different numbers of toots on a whistle or flashes of light can form a repertory of messages. The traffic light found at numerous city street intersections is a good example of a simple system. None of these communications uses language, though of course devising, installing and learning them could not be accomplished by people who had no language. Unlike natural signs, conventional signs have human senders as well as human receivers; each one has an intention and an interpretation. The message may be personal as when a friend rings your telephone or quite impersonal and general, like the warning siren on a speeding ambulance. We can even use devices like smoke detectors and burglar alarms to send messages to ourselves at a later time, in circumstances that we really do not want to occur.

Pragmatics is another branch of linguistics that is concerned with meaning. Pragmatics and semantics can be viewed as different parts, or different aspects, of the same general study. Both are concerned with people’s ability to use language meaningfully. While semantics is mainly concerned with a speaker’s competence to use the language system in producing meaningful utterances and processing (comprehending) utterances produced by others, the chief focus of pragmatics is a person’s ability to derive meanings from specific kinds of speech situations—to recognize what the speaker is referring to, to relate new information to what has gone before, to interpret what is said from background knowledge about the speaker and the topic of discourse, and to infer or ‘fill in’ information that the speaker takes for granted and doesn’t bother to say. Obviously the boundary between semantics and pragmatics is vague, and at the present time various scholars are apt to disagree about where the boundary is. Some of the contents of this chapter may be considered more ‘pragmatics’ than ‘semantics’ by some people.

How can we explain the speaker’s knowledge of meanings? Certainly we cannot expect that speakers can clearly define all the words they know. If that were our criterion, we should also expect speakers to be able to explain the meaning of every utterance they will ever produce or comprehend, which is, for all practical purposes, an infinite number. But the obvious thing is that speakers can make their thoughts and feelings and intentions known to other speakers of the language and can understand what others say. This ability requires possession of a vocabulary and for speakers to know how to pronounce every item in this vocabulary and how to recognize its pronunciation by other speakers. They know how to use the production vocabulary in meaningful sentences and to understand the sentences produced by others. And of course they know meanings—how to choose the items that express what they want to express and how to find the meanings in what other people say. If it is hard to say what meaning is, it is fairly easy to show what knowledge speakers have about meanings in their language and therefore what things must be included in an account of semantics
(Bierwisch 1970:167–75; Dillon 1977:1–6).

Speakers of a language have an implicit knowledge about what is meaningful in their language, and it is easy to show this. There are ten technical terms: anomaly; paraphrase; synonymy; semantic feature; antonymy; contradiction; ambiguity; adjacency pairs; entailment and presupposition.