English Semantics

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).