English Semantics

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.