Contextual modulation of meaning

Four ways of breaking the circle

2.2 The units of meaning

2.2.4 Contextual modulation of meaning

The examples of noun-incorporation we have just seen show the meaning of words and other morphemes varying according to their collocation, the immediate linguistic context in which they occur. This sort of varia- tion is found throughout language. We can see a similar phenomenon in English, where the meanings of verbs seem to vary slightly depending on the noun which they govern. If I cut my foot, for example, I am doing some- thing that is rather different from what I am doing when I cut the grass, or when I cut a cake, cut someone’s hair, cut the wood, cut a diamond, cut a deck of cards, cut a disc or cut a notch. The nature of the event, the means by which it is accomplished, its typical object, and the extent to which it is deliber- ate may all vary in these different uses. Despite this variation, we have the strong sense that essentially the ‘same’ meaning of cut is involved in all those cases (in other words, we do not usually think of this verb as polyse- mous; see 5.3). Cruse (1986: 52) refers to this phenomenon as the contex- tual modulation of meaning. The degree of semantic ‘distance’ gets even greater if we consider more ‘extended’ meanings, like cut a deal, cut corners, cut a paragraph or cut prices.

This type of phenomenon poses an interesting descriptive and theoreti- cal problem: do the differences in meaning of the different collocations arise compositionally or not? Are the meanings of the collocations just the results of the combinations of the meanings of their parts, or are the

whole collocations themselves the meaning bearing units? In other words, which of the following two possibilities gives the best semantic description of English:

•

one which lists the meanings of cut, foot, grass, cake, hair, etc., and sees the specifi c meanings of the collocations cut one’s foot, cut the grass, cut a cake, etc., as derived compositionally from the meanings of the parts; or

•

one which just lists all the different collocations in which cut appears, and specifi es a different meaning for the entire collocation?

We will examine each possibility in turn.

2.2.4.1 First possibility: compositionality

The fi rst possibility is that the meanings of cut one’s foot, cut the grass, cut a cake, etc., result compositionally from the meaning of the verb cut and the meanings of its noun objects. The meaning of cut the grass just is the mean- ing of cut combined with the meaning of grass. This might work in one of two ways.

•

The general meaning hypothesis: Cut might have the same vague or general meaning in all its different collocations: it refers to some act of accomplishing a material breach in a surface, with the particular details of each type of breach being inferred by the listener, rather than being built into the meaning of the verb itself.

Alternatively,

•

The multiple meaning hypothesis: Cut might have a separate meaning in each collocation: the cut in cut one’s foot has its own entry in the mental lexicon (‘breach surface of, usually accidentally’), as does the cut of cut the grass (‘sever one part of surface from another, usually deliberately’).

Problems with the general meaning hypothesis The problem with the first option is that describing this common core of general meaning sup- posedly present in all cases of cut is not necessarily an easy matter (see section 2.6): the Concise Oxford 2004 edition gives ‘make an opening, inci- sion, or wound with a sharp tool or object’ as its definition, but this is not involved when someone cuts butter, for example, nor when a whip cuts someone’s flesh: the cutting object in these situations need not be sharp.

Perhaps, then, we need to dismiss these uses as in some way special or extended and therefore absolve them from the scope of the vague defini- tion: perhaps ‘make an opening, incision, or wound with a sharp tool or object’ will work for all the others. Even if it does, though, we still have a problem: the definition does not adequately distinguish cut from chop, slit, stab or unpick: to chop a sausage, slit a letter, stab someone’s side or unpick a seam is equally to ‘make an opening, incision, or wound with a sharp tool or object’, but we could not also describe these actions as cutting. In our

effort to formulate the most general definition possible, we have drawn the net too wide and failed to distinguish cut from various non-synonymous verbs in the same semantic field.

QUESTION Can you formulate a general definition of cut which avoids these problems? Consider other possible cutting objects, like cheese- cutting wire.

QUESTION Another example of a similar problem would be the verb crush in contexts like crush petals in the hand, crush paper, crush sugar and crush a car under concrete: in spite of the presence of the same verb, the action involved, and the resulting state of the object, differ considerably with each collocation. Can you formulate an adequate general definition which distinguishes crush from related verbs like bend, crease, fold and squash?

The prototype-based models of meaning discussed in Chapter 7 constitute a possible response to problems of this sort.

Problems with the multiple meaning hypothesis The second option is to propose multiple meanings for cut, a separate one for each collocation.

In cut one’s foot, for example, cut could be described as meaning something like ‘partially breach a surface with a sharp instrument, typically acciden- tally’: when one cuts one’s foot, one typically does not detach one’s foot from the rest of the body (this would be cutting it off). In cut the grass, and cut someone’s hair, on the other hand, the verb conveys the meaning of more than just a partial breach in the surface of the object: the meaning of these collocations is that one part of the object is completely detached from the rest. Now consider cut a notch: here the object is brought into being by the action of the verb: if I cut a notch into a stick, the notch did not exist before I created it. As a result, the meaning of cut in cut a notch could be paraphrased as ‘create by breaching with a sharp instrument’, an entirely different meaning from that found in the other collocations, which all presuppose the prior existence of the object being cut. Again, when we talk of a whip cutting someone’s skin, we have the meaning of breach to a surface, as in cutting one’s foot, but without the usual element of ‘sharp object’: being made of leather, whips are not normally considered as sharp.

We have, then, a list of different meanings of cut:

•

‘partially breach surface with a sharp instrument, typically acciden- tally’,

•

‘create by partially breaching the surface with a sharp instrument’,

•

‘detach one part of object from another with one’s hands’,

•

‘detach one part of object from another with a sharp instrument’, etc.

These will all have highly specifi c collocational restrictions: the meaning

‘partially breach surface with a sharp instrument, typically accidentally’, for example, will be a very likely sense of cut in collocation with foot, but

not with cake: cutting a cake is usually an entirely deliberate action. And the meaning ‘create by partially breaching a surface with a sharp instru- ment’ is quasi-obligatory in cut a notch, but excluded in cut wood, which does not, as we have seen, involve any creation.

This second option has two problems. The fi rst is the sheer number of the different senses to be attributed to cut. Since the action of cutting in each of the examples in question is slightly different, we seem to need a very large range of different senses. While it is clearly impossible to defi ne the meaning of cut in just a single paraphrase – extended meanings like cut text, cut a disc, etc., seem to demand a distinct set of defi nitions – the recognition of a different sense of cut in each of the collocations seems to fail to do justice to the fact that it is the same verb in all collocations: as a result, we have some reason to think that it is also the same meaning that is involved in all of them. Furthermore, given the assumptions about the organization of the ‘mental lexicon’ mentioned above (2.1.1), the attri- bution of a separate meaning to cut in each collocation has struck many linguists as ineffi cient and inelegant, given the explosion it entails in the number of separate verb entries: we no more want to propose separate

‘mental lexicon’ entries for the cut of cut a cake and cut one’s foot than we would expect to fi nd separate entries in a dictionary.

The second problem is related: given this variety of different possible meanings of cut, how does the correct specifi c meaning get chosen in a given case? How does a hearer know that the appropriate interpretation of cut in cut a deck of cards is ‘detach one part of object from another with one’s hands’ and not ‘create by partially breaching the integrity of a sur- face with a sharp instrument’? The second option would clearly be wrong, and our theory of the meaning of the expressions needs some way to exclude it. Yet the description of the process of word sense disambigua- tion is highly problematic, the best current computational models sig- nifi cantly failing to match human ability (see 8.2.2 for details).

We can now recap the discussion up to this point. We have been consid- ering the possibility that the meaning of collocations like cut one’s foot, cut the grass etc. are derived compositionally from the meanings of their ele- ments. We looked at two options for the details of this. The fi rst is that the meaning of cut is general or vague in each collocation. This creates the problem of adequately defi ning this general or vague meaning in a way which distinguished cut from other non-synonymous verbs. The second option is that cut has a separate meaning in each collocation. But if we adopt this solution we fi nd that the number of defi nitions of cut explodes.

Confronted with this vast array of different meanings, how do speakers know which one to choose in any given case?

The compositional solution therefore seems quite problematic. This is not to say that we should reject it, just that it involves us in complex ques- tions. Let us now look at the non-compositional solution.

2.2.4.2 Second possibility: non-compositionality

A number of the problems of the fi rst solution are avoided if each colloca- tion as a whole is seen as the relevant defi nition-bearing unit. On this

approach, the meaning of the collocation is not constructed composition- ally; we learn one defi nition for the unit cut the grass, another for cut one’s foot, and a third for cut a CD. Thus, the fact that in cutting the grass, a mower or a scythe is the instrument of the action, and that in cutting a disc it is a CD-burner, is not part of the meaning of cut itself, but is a property of the collocation as a whole. This avoids several of the problems of the compo- sitional solution:

•

we do not have to advance a general defi nition of cut that will work in every context, as we do in the general-meaning version of the compo- sitional solution

•

we do not have the problem of word-sense disambiguation, since each collocation carries its own defi nition.

Here is another consideration in favour of non-compositionality. It is not just cut whose meaning is determined by its collocational environment: the collocation also determines what reading is operative for cut’s object. Thus, English speakers know that cutting the grass refers to the grown grass blades, whereas planting the grass refers to grass seeds or shoots, and smoking grass refers to the leaves of a completely different plant. They also know that it is the physical CD that is involved in cutting a disc, but the ‘acoustic’ object in listening to a disc. Because both verb and object have different meanings in different collocations, it seems reasonable to think that the basic meaning- bearing unit is the collocation as a whole, not the individual words.

Unfortunately, this solution is just as problematic as the compositional one. It seems precisely to ignore our intuition of the compositionality of the meanings of the collocations: the reason that cut the grass has the interpretation it does is, surely, something about the combination of the meanings of cut and the meaning of grass. It is not an arbitrary fact that cut the grass means what it does: instead, the meaning of the phrase is dependent on the meaning of its components, and this is the reason that this meaning is not conveyed by some other sequence of different ele- ments like plant the tree. And if one takes the analogy of the ‘mental lexi- con’ seriously, this option also involves the threat of an explosion in the number of entries. Analysing each collocation involving cut as having a separately specifi ed meaning would lead to an enormous amount of rep- etition and redundancy in the mental lexicon, and would fail to extract the generalization that the meaning of cut in each such collocation is signifi cantly similar to its meaning in other collocations.

We can summarize the choices here in Figure 2.1:

compositional meaning

non-compositional meaning

cut has a different meaning in every collocation

cut has the same vague/general meaning in every collocation cut a cake

cut someone’s hair cut the wood cut a diamond cut a deck of cards cut a disc cut a notch, etc.

FIGURE2.1

Options for analysing collocations.

These arguments are obviously shaped by many assumptions about the nature and limits of linguistic competence. In the absence of a clear understanding of how the brain actually does process and store language, linguists have assumed that their description of assumed linguistic competence should refl ect the same criteria of economy and non-redun- dancy that operate in real paper dictionaries. Thus, much linguistic research has assumed that the mental lexicon does not contain a huge number of independently listed entries, but that it extracts the maxi- mum number of generalizations about the meaning of a verb like cut across all its collocational contexts, in order to present the most eco- nomical, least redundant entry. As a result, it has been the topmost solution in Figure 2.1 that has traditionally been considered preferable.

We will see in later chapters how this assumption has been challenged in more recent theories of language. One of these, in particular, known as cognitive linguistics, specifi cally rejects the dichotomous reasoning we see embodied in the claim that either the separate listing or the compositional approach should be adopted to the question of the mental representation of the meaning of collocations like these.

According to linguists in the line of Langacker (1987), this sort of think- ing is an example of the exclusionary fallacy, the idea that ‘one analy- sis, motivation, categorization, cause, function or explanation for a linguistic phenomenon necessarily precludes another’ (Langacker 1987:

28). Langacker continues:

From a broad, pretheoretical perspective, this assumption is gratuitous and in fact rather dubious, in view of what we know about the multiplic- ity of interacting synchronic and diachronic factors that determine the shape and import of linguistic expressions. (ibid)

Thus, even though it might seem inelegant to list all the different colloca- tions of cut separately in the lexicon, this option should obviously not be rejected if it somehow turns out (for example, through neuroscientifi c experimentation) that this is, in fact, what speakers (unconsciously) do.

And this discovery would not of itself invalidate the idea that speakers also simultaneously represent cut as having an independent meaning or set of meanings which enter into composition each time the verb gains a new set of arguments.