The other major perspective on the nature of meaning is that meanings are features of the world. For example, the meaning of a name like Aristotle is just the person it refers to in the world. This way of thinking is followed by most compositional semanticists as well as some lexical semanticists, and it solves Putnam’s problem: beechdescribes one set of things in the world, elm describes another, and the English-speaking community at large determines which is which.
The referential view is neutral on whether the world, as described by language, is objective and independent of our thinking about it. On the one hand, it might be that the category of beeches is “real” in a deep meta- physical sense. In that case, those who follow the referential view could simply say that the word beechnames the things which really are beeches.
On the other hand, it might be that the category of beeches is only an arti- fact of the way our minds work or of our culture; the things we call beeches may only form a group because we see them that way. Still, the commu- nity of language users can employ the word beechto describe the members of this group.
There are problems for the referential view as well (Frege 1892). In some cases, two words may refer to the same things in the world, and yet they seem to differ in meaning. For example, waterand H2Orefer to the same thing, but do they really have the same meaning? Perhaps not. Suppose I don’t know that H2O is water. I might think that H2O is poisonousis a true sentence and that water is not poisonousis also true. But if waterand H2Ohave the same meaning, the two sentences should contradict one another. How can I think the very same thing is poisonous and not? Philosophers and lin- guists agree that this is a difficult problem.
Chapter summary
Semantic meaning is the literal meaning of a word, phrase, or sentence;
speaker’s meaning is what a language user intends to communicate by his or her words. Semantic meaning is derived in accordance with the Principle of Compositionality through the interplay of lexical meaning, grammatical structure, and the context of use. Speaker’s meaning is in turn derived from the interaction between semantic meaning and the context of use. Semantics, the study of semantic meaning, focuses on the contribution which particular words or features of grammar make to meaning, and in this vein semanticists study such things as individ- ual parts of speech, predicates, arguments, quantifiers, and so forth.
Pragmatics aims to explain the ways in which context of use contributes to semantic meaning, and the ways in which speakers use language, in specific contexts, to convey the particular speaker’s meanings they want to convey.
Exercises
Exercise 4.1
Which of the basic semantic relations and properties outlined in the text (syn- onymy, entailment, etc.) are exemplified by the following?
a. Nobody likes enchiladas.
Mary likes enchiladas.
b. Nobody is at the party and Al is enjoying the party more than anyone else.
c. memory (as in “I have a good memory,” “I have beautiful memories of my trip to Amalfi,” and “I need to buy some more memory for my computer”) d. Either it’s raining in Delhi now, or it isn’t.
e. top (as in “You’ll find it on top of the refrigerator” and “When I was a boy, I enjoyed playing with a top”)
f. Nobody likes enchiladas.
Mary doesn’t like enchiladas.
g. I love beans.
I don’t hate beans.
Exercise 4.2
Classify the following adjectives according to whether they are intersective or not and whether they are vague or not: tall,previous,red,ideological,mere, ugly,even(as in even number).
Exercise 4.3
Explain the meanings of the following sentences, focusing on the role of quantifiers. Identify the restrictor and the scope, and say what set-relationship holds between them if the sentence is true.
a. Every dog has a tail.
b. Three or four people like Mary.
c. Nobody around here speaks French.
Exercise 4.4
In Box 4.2, we saw how to arrive at one meaning of I showed one bagel to every studentby putting every studentinside the scope of one bagel. We would derive the other meaning by doing it the other way around, putting one bagelinside the scope of every student. Draw a “box diagram” and a Logical Form tree similar to those presented in the text which represent this second meaning.
Exercise 4.5
Here are some more sentences with scope ambiguities. For each, describe the two meanings and indicate which two words or phrases create the ambiguity:
a. I don’t like every student.
b. Two unicorns seem to be in the garden.
c. During your visit to Rome, you must visit one fountain.
Exercise 4.6
Draw box diagrams and Logical Form trees for each meaning of the sentences in Exercise 4.5.
Exercise 4.7
Give examples in which the following adverbs quantify over times, and exam- ples where they quantify over ordinary objects (the example in the text used donkeys): usually, often, never.
Exercise 4.8
Which of the following words have modal meaning? Which have aspectual meaning?
finish, probably, impossible, beginning, certainty Exercise 4.9
Categorize the modality in the following sentences as epistemic, deontic, or
“other.”
a. Dogs may not enter the subway.
b. If you love animals, you ought to be a vegetarian.
c. Birds can fly.
d. You can probably find a book about raccoons in the library.
Exercise 4.10
The English present tense has some unusual properties:
a. Maria is tall.
b. Maria cries.
c. *Maria cries right now.
Sentence (a) is unremarkable, but sentence (b) does not simply describe an event which is taking place at the present moment. Example (c) is quite strange. Describe the restrictions on the English present tense in terms of the aspectual classes of sentences. (You will need to come up with more exam- ples than (a)–(c) to see the picture clearly.)
Exercise 4.11
Describe the meaning of each of the following words in a way that makes clear how it can be indexical: nearby,return,tomorrow,above,local,ahead.
Suggestions for further reading
Green, G. 1996, Pragmatics and natural language understanding, 2nd edition, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. This short, engagingly written book discusses a remarkably wide range of issues in prag- matics. It emphasizes a single, coherent perspective on the nature of pragmatics: pragmatics is a component of cognitive science which aims to understand the crucial role which the intentions and plans of speakers have in creating meaning.
Levinson, S. 1983, Pragmatics,Cambridge University Press. This is the classic pragmatics textbook, laying out in detail how pragmatic theory had developed up until the time it was written. It thoroughly discusses all of the main areas of pragmatics, including indexicality, presupposition, speech acts, and implicature, and also explores the connections between pragmatics and the study of discourse.
Martin, R. 1987, The meaning of language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. This book gives an accessible intro- duction to the philosophical issues relevant to the study of meaning, including many not touched on in this chapter. It also briefly develops some standard ideas about compositional semantics.
Portner, P. 2004, What is meaning? An introduction to formal semantics,Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell.
This book gives a introduction to contemporary formal semantics without requiring any logical or mathematical machinery. It discusses philosophical issues and the meanings of a wide variety of words and grammatical constructions, including referential noun phrases, predicates, modifiers, quantifiers, tense, aspect, and modality.
Exercise 4.12
What do the following sentences presuppose? Sentences may have one or more presuppositions.
a. John continued smoking.
b. Each of the Russian students in the class surmised that the answer was hard to figure out.
c. It’s surprising that Mary likes to eat meat.
d. Everyone’s paper is worth reading.
e. Why is it that most students enjoy studying semantics?
Exercise 4.13
Describe contexts in which each of the following sentences would create an implicature by flouting and explain which maxim is being flouted in each case.
a. Your answer to the question was adequate.
b. It’s a wonderful party, but I have to get up early tomorrow.
c. I’ll die if you don’t give me another bite of that delicious cake.
Exercise 4.14
Examine a letter to the editor in a newspaper or a piece of junk mail, and circle at least five indexicals. Then identify an implicature of the writer. What Gricean maxim (or maxims) give rise to this implicature? Why does the writer use impli- cature in this case, rather than explicitly saying what he or she means?
Exercise 4.15
It is difficult to test whether the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is correct because differences in language typically correlate with differences in experience. For example, people who speak a language with few words for different kinds of fish probably live in a place where they see few fish. If the way they think about fish is different from the way a sea-faring people think about them, this could be due to their lack of experience with fish, rather than the lack of words in their language. Discuss what kinds of studies or experiments one could do to test the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.