English Semantics

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).