1.

COMMUNICATION AND LANGUAGE

1.1 A Model of Communication

For CRUISE meaning makes little sense except in the context of
communication. Communication can be conceived as the transfer of information
between biological generations via the genetic code, the interaction between
the driver and his car, and indeed any sort of stimulus-response situation.
COMMUNICATION is the transfer of information between human beings.

A Simple Model of Communication (LYONS, 1977)

channel

{message} (encoding) Transmitted Received {message}

….. (decoding)
sender signal signal receiver

noise

The speaker has something to communicate (MESSAGE). Since messages

in their initial form cannot be transmitted directly (at least not reliably), they must
be converted into a form that can be transmitted, a SIGNAL. In an ordinary
conversation, this involves a process of LINGUISTIC ENCODING, that is, translating
the message into a linguistic form, and translating the linguistic form into a set
of instructions to the speech organs which result into an acoustic signal. The
initial form of this signal may be termed the TRANSMITTED SIGNAL.
Every mode of communication has a CHANNEL, through which the signal
travels: for speech, we have the auditory channel, for normal writing and sign
language, visual channel, for Braille, the tactile channel, and so on. As the
signal travels from sender to receiver, it alters in various ways, through
distortion, interference from irrelevant stimuli or loss through fading. These are
referred as NOISE. As a result, the signal picked up by the receiver (RECEIVED
SIGNAL) is never precisely the same as the transmitted one. Efficient
communicating systems like language compensate for this loss of information
by building a degree of redundancy into signal, the information in a signal is

English Semantics and Lexicography 1

given more than once or the entire message can be reconstructed even if there
is significant loss.
Once the signal has been received by the receiver, it has to be DECODED in
order to retrieve the original message. The message reconstructed by the
receiver would be identical to the message that the sender started with. In the
majority of cases it is close enough. It is worth distinguishing three aspects of
meaning:
a) SPEAKER’S MEANING – speakers’ intended message.
b) HEARER’S MEANING – hearer’s inferred message.
c) SIGN MEANING – the sum of the properties of the signal which make it
(a) more apt than other signals conveying speaker’s intended
message, and (b) more apt for conveying some messages than
others.

Speaker’s Meaning
Meaning Hearer’s Meaning
Sign Meaning

In case of established signalling system like language, the meaning of

the signs are not under control of the users; the signs are property of the
speech community and have fixed meanings.

Any natural human language is a complex sign system designed to

ensure infinite expressive capacity – there’s nothing that is thinkable which
cannot in principle be encoded. Each elementary sign is stable symbolic
association between meaning and form (phonetic and graphic); elementary
signs may combine together in a rule-governed way to form complex signs
which convey correspondingly complex meanings.

1.2. Problems of the Study of Meaning

Different branches in the studies of meaning such as lexical semantics or
formal semantics are presented. LYONS defines SEMANTICS as the study of
meaning and LINGUISTIC SEMANTICS as the study of meaning in so far as it is
systematically encoded in the vocabulary and grammar of natural languages.

English Semantics and Lexicography 2

 The problem of where to draw the line between semantics and
pragmatics is not easy.
SEMANTICS is the study of meaning communicated through language.
Speakers of a language have different types of linguistic knowledge, including
how to pronounce words, how to construct sentences, and about the meaning
of individual words and sentences. In this sense knowing a word unites different
kinds of knowledge. To reflect this, linguistic description has different LEVELS OF

ANALYSIS.

So PHONOLOGY is the study of what sounds a language has and how these
sounds combine to form words; SYNTAX is the study of how words can be
combined into sentences; and SEMANTICS is the study of the meaning of words
and sentences.

Since linguistic description is an attempt to reflect speakers’ knowledge

the semanticist is committed to describing semantic knowledge. This knowledge
allows English speakers to know, for example that both the following sentences
describe the same situation

“In the spine, the thoracic vertebrae are above the lumbar
The
vertebrae”
basic “In the spine, the lumbar vertebrae are below the thoracic vertebrae” task of

semantics is to show how people communicate meanings with pieces of

language. Linguistic meaning is a special subset of more general human ability
to use signs.

According to SAUSSURE, the study of linguistic meaning is a part of this

general study of the use of sign systems. This study is called SEMIOTICS.
Semioticans investigate the types of relationship that may hold between a sign
and the object it represents (or in SAUSSURE’S terminology between a SIGNIFIER and
its SIGNIFIED). One basic distinction is between ICON, INDEX and SYMBOL.
An ICON is where there is a similarity between a sign and what it
represents (portrait – real life subject). An INDEX is where the sign is closely
associated with its signified (smoke – fire). A SYMBOL is where there is only a
conventional link between the sign and its signified (mourning – black clothes;

English Semantics and Lexicography 3

three stars – captain). In this classification words would seem to be examples of
verbal symbols.

According to the DEFINITIONS THEORY, we should establish definitions of the

meanings of words to give the meaning of linguistic expressions. We could then
assume that when a speaker combines words to form sentences according to
the grammatical rules of his/her language, the word definitions are combined to
form phrase and then sentence definitions, giving us the meaning of the
sentences. There appear different challenges when attaching definitions to
words.
The first is the problem of CIRCULARITY. We can only state the meaning of a
word by using other words, either in the same or a different language. To
understand the meaning of the word you must understand the words in the
definition. According to the aims of semantics we have to describe the meaning
of these words too.
The second problem we find is to make sure that our definitions of a
word’s meaning are exact. If we ask where the meanings of words exist, the
answer must be: in the minds of native speakers of the language. Thus
meaning is a kind of knowledge. We should make the distinction between
LINGUISTIC KNOWLEDGE (about the meaning of words) and ENCYCLOPAEDIC KNOWLEDGE

(about the way world is).

The third problem comes from looking at what particular utterances mean
in the context. For example: if someone says to you “Marvellous weather you
have here in Ireland”, you might interpret it differently on cloudless sunny day
than when rain is pouring down. The problem here is that if features of context
are part of an utterance’s meaning, the number of possible situations, and
therefore of interpretations is enormous if not infinite.
These three issues: circularity, the question of whether linguistic
knowledge is different from general knowledge; and the problem of contribution
of context in meaning, show that our definitions theory is too simple to do the
job we want. Semantic analysis must be more complicated than attaching
definitions to linguistic expressions.

English Semantics and Lexicography 4

 To cope with the problem of circularity, one solution is to design a
semantic METALANGUAGE with which to describe the semantic units and rules of all
languages. An ideal metalanguage would be neutral with respect to any natural
languages. Moreover, it should satisfy criteria of clarify, economy, consistency,
etc.
Setting up a metalanguage might help too with the problem of relating
semantic and encyclopaedic knowledge, since designing meaning
representations, for example for words, involves arguing which elements of
knowledge should be included. The knowledge a speaker has of the meaning of
words is often compared to a mental lexicon or dictionary.
In tackling the third problem, of context, one additional solution has been
to assume a split in an expression’s meaning between the local contextual
effects and a context-free element of meaning, which we might call CONVENTIONAL
or LITERAL MEANING. It turns out to be not easy task to isolate the meaning of a
word from any possible context.

For many linguists the aim of doing semantics is to set up a component

of the grammar which will parallel other components like syntax or phonology.
Linguistic knowledge is modulized. As a result, many linguistic theories are
themselves modularized, having something like the boxes in the box below.

sound phonology syntax semantics thought

In at least one sense, meaning is a product of all linguistic levels.

Changing one phoneme for another, one verb ending for another, or one word
order for another will produce differences of meaning. This view leads some
writers to believe that meaning cannot be identified as a separate level,
autonomous from the study of other levels of grammar.

“…a strict separation of syntax, morphology and lexicon is untenable;

furthermore it is impossible to separate linguistic knowledge from extra-
linguistic knowledge”
RUDZKA-OSTYN 1993:2

English Semantics and Lexicography 5

 If an independent component of semantics is identified, one central issue
is the relationship between word meaning and sentence meaning. Knowing a
language involves knowing thousands of words. The mental store of the words,
the LEXICON, is not completely static because we are continually learning and
forgetting words.
Phrases and sentences also have meaning but these are different to
words in terms of PRODUCTIVITY. It is always possible to create new words, but this
is relatively infrequent occurrence. On the other hand, speakers regularly create
sentences that they never used or heard before, confident that their audience
will understand them. According to CHOMSKY, a relatively small number of
combinatory rules may allow speakers to use a finite set of words to create a
very large, perhaps infinite, number of sentences. To allow this the rules for the
sentence must be RECURSIVE, allowing repetitive embedding or coordination of
semantic categories.

NP  [NP NP (and NP)*]

* means the optional group is repeatable

I bought [NP a book]

I bought [NP [NP a book] and [NP a magazine]]
I bought [NP [NP a book] and [NP a magazine] and [NP some pens]] etc

If a speaker can make up novel sentences and these sentences are

understood, then they obey semantic rules of the language. So the meanings of
sentences cannot be listed in a lexicon like meanings of words: they must be
created by rules of combination too. Semanticists often describe this by saying
that sentence meaning is COMPOSITIONAL. This term means that the meaning of an
expression is determined by the meaning of its component parts and the way in
which they are combined.

A difficult distinction is between SEMANTICS and PRAGMATICS, both

concerning the transmission of meaning through language. Drawing the line
between the two fields is difficult and controversial. Morris divided semiotics in
the following way:

English Semantics and Lexicography 6

 SYNTAX: the formal relation of signs to each other.
SEMANTICS: the relations of signs to the objects to which the signs are
applicable.
PRAGMATICS: the relation of signs to interpreters.

Narrowing signs to linguistic signs, this would give us a view of PRAGMATICS

as the study of speaker/hearer’s interpretation of language, as suggested by

CARNAP

We might interpret crudely as follows:

PRAGMATICS – meaning described in relation to speakers and hearers.

A
SEMANTICS – Meaning abstracted away from users.

speaker can utter the same sentence to a listener, e.g. “The place is closing”,
and mean to use it as a simple statement, or a warning hurry and get that last
purchase (if they are in a department store) or drink (if in a bar). It could also be
an invitation or command to leave. In fact we can imagine a whole series of
uses for this example, depending on the speaker’s wishes and the situation the
participants find themselves in. Some semanticists would claim that there is
some element of meaning common to all these uses and this common, non-
situation specific meaning is what semantics is concerned with. On the other
hand, the range of uses a sentence can be put to, depending on context, would
be the object of study for pragmatics.
One way of talking about this is to distinguish between SENTENCE MEANING
and SPEAKER MEANING. This suggests that words and sentences have a meaning
independently of any particular use, which meaning is then incorporated by a
speaker into a particular meaning she/he wants to convey at any one time. In
this view semantics is concerned with sentence meaning and pragmatics with
speaker meaning.
In order to understand utterances, hearers seem to use both types of
knowledge along with knowledge about the context of the utterance and
common sense reasoning, guesses, etc. A semantics/pragmatics division
enables semanticists to concentrate on just the linguistic element in utterance
comprehension. Pragmatics would then be the field which studies how hearers

English Semantics and Lexicography 7

fill out the semantic structure with contextual information and make inferences
which go beyond the meaning of what was said to them (for example that “I’m
tired” might mean “Let’s go home”).

According to SAEED, one way of approaching the problem is by

distinguishing between SENSE OF MEANING and SPEAKERS MEANING, he suggests that
words and sentences have meaning independently of any particular use and
that it is the speaker who incorporates further meaning into sentence meaning.
SAEED links the semantics-pragmatics overlapping to the concept of
presupposition. The basic idea is that SEMANTICS deals with conventional
meaning – with those aspects which do not seem to vary too much from
context. PRAGMATICS deals with aspects of individual usage and context-
dependent meaning.

BENNETT bases his distinction between semantics and pragmatics on

concepts such as IMPLICATURE and ENTAILMENT.

English Semantics and Lexicography 8

 2. DIFFERENT UNITS OF ANALYSIS: WORDS,
UTTERANCES, SENTENCES, AND
PROPOSITIONS

2.1 Words
When dealing with the nature of meaning, CRUISE and LYONS agree that it
is difficult to define this concept. The definition of words as meaningful units
poses several problems since different criteria come into play in the definition of
a word.
LYONS differentiates words from expressions. He proposes that words as
expressions can be defined as composite units that have both form and
meaning and suggests a more technical term: Lexeme. Not all lexemes are
words and not all words are lexemes. Lyons points out that it is word-
expressions that are listed in the dictionaries and not word-forms.

People have an intuition that meaning is intimately bound up with

individual words. Such an intuition seriously underestimates other aspects of
meaning. It is not, however, in itself, wrong.

What is a Word?
According to BAKER, WORD is the smallest unit which we would expect to
possess individual meaning. Defined loosely, the word is ‘the smallest unit of
language that can be used by itself. Despite this definition, meaning can be
carried by units smaller than the word and often by units much more complex
than the single word and by various structures and linguistic voices.

There has been a great deal of discussion of nature of the word as a

grammatical unit. Probably the best approach is a prototypic one: what is a
prototypical word like? It is a minimal permutable element. This attributes two
features to a prototypical word:

English Semantics and Lexicography 9

 a) It can be moved about in the sentence, or at least its position
relative to other constituents can be altered by inserting new
material.
b) It cannot be interrupted or its parts reordered.
In other words, in making changes to a sentence, we are obliged to treat
its words as structurally inviolable wholes.

(1) “The government is strongly opposed to denationalization.”

Reordering appears in such examples as (2)-(4)
(2) “The Government is opposed to denationalization – strongly.”
(3) “What the government is strongly opposed is to denationalization.”
(4) “It is denationalization that government is opposed to.”
GOVERNment
And reORDERing
the possibilities STRONGly
for the insertion deNATIONalization
of new material are as follows:OPPOSed
TYPically
(5) “The (present) government, CLEAReris LEXical
(apparently), (very (strongly) (and implacably)
opposed (not only) to (creeping) denationalization, but…etc.”

Notice that the only possible insertion points are between words. Words
are separated by spaces in writing, although not usually by silences in speech.
They also have a characteristic internal structure, in that they prototypically
have no more than one LEXICAL ROOT.

Some words, such as HEDGE-HOG, BUTTER-FLY, and BLACK-BOARD

seem to have more than one lexical root. However, these are atypical and for
many of them it is impossible to argue that the apparent roots are not fully
autonomous, semantically, but form a fused root.
Other words have no lexical roots at all: these are the so-called
grammatical words like the, and, and, of.
In one sense, obey, obeys, obeying and obeyed are different words (e.g.
for crossword purposes); in another sense, they are merely different forms of
the same word (and one would not expect them to have separate entries in a
dictionary). On the other hand, obey and disobey are different words in both
senses, whereas bank (river) and bank (money) are the same word for
crossword purposes, but we would expect them to have separate dictionary
entries and they are therefore different words in the second sense.

English Semantics and Lexicography 10

 WORD FORMS are individuated by their form, whether phonological or
graphic (most of examples will be both)
LEXEMES can be regarded as groupings of one or more word forms, which
are individuated by their roots and/or derivational affixes.

So, run, runs, running, and ran are word forms belonging to the same
lexeme RUN, while walk, walks, walking, and walked belong to a different
lexeme, WALK. Obey, obeys, obeying, and obeyed belong to a single lexeme
and disobey, disobeys disobeying, and disobey, despite having the same root
as the first set, belong to a different lexeme, distinguished this time by the
possession of the derivational affix dis-.
A simple test for derivational affixes is that they are never grammatically
obligatory. For instance, in “John is disobeying me”, disobey can be substituted
by watch without living an ungrammatical sentence, which shows that dis- is not
essential to the grammatical structure of the sentence. This is true to all
occurrences of dis-. On the other hand, any verb which will fit grammatically into
the frame “John is --- me” must bear the affix –ing, showing that it is not
DERIVATIONAL, but an INFLECTIONAL affix.
Word forms that differ only in respect of inflectional affixes belong to the
same lexeme. It is the word-as-lexeme which is the significant unit for lexical
semantics.

Obey
2 different lexemes: Lexeme 1: Obey Lexeme 2: Disobey
Disobey

Obey
Obeying 1 single lexeme: Lexeme: Obey

Disobey 1 single lexeme: Lexeme: Disobey

Disobeying

2.2. Utterances, Sentences and Propositions.

English Semantics and Lexicography 11

 The three terms are used to describe different levels of abstraction in
language. These different levels of abstraction allow us to identify different units
of analysis in relation to meaning.

An UTTERANCE is created by speaking or writing a piece of language. If

someone says “Today is Tuesday” in a room, this is an utterance; if another
person in the same room also says “Today is Tuesday”, this is another
utterance.

SENTENCES, on the other hand are abstract grammatical elements obtained

from utterances. Sentences are abstracted or generalised from actual language
use. Differences in accent or pitch do not alter the basic content of the
sentence. Speakers seem to discard differences in pitch levels between
women, men and children, some accent differences due to regional or social
variation and certainly those phonetics details which identify individual speakers
and so discard them.

SAEED says that one further step of abstraction is possible for special
purposes: to identify PROPOSITIONS. Certain elements of grammatical information
in sentences were irrelevant; for example, the difference between active and
passive sentences. Because of passive and active sentences share the same
state of affairs they can also be represented by the same proposition.

John paints the picture (Sentence 1)

The picture is painted by John (Sentence 2) The same proposition

A proposition can be represented by using capitals in order to avoid

confusion with various sentences which represent it: JOHN PAINTS THE
PICTURE.
In propositions verbs are identified as functions and subjects and objects
as arguments of the function. In such formulae verb endings, articles and other
grammar elements are deleted.
John paints the picture (Sentence)
JOHN PAINTS THE PICTURE (Proposition)

paint (john, picture)

English Semantics and Lexicography 12

 Propositions are a way of capturing part of the sentences. They are more
abstract than sentences because the same proposition can be represented by
several different statements. Moreover in non-statements like questions, orders,
etc. they cannot be complete meaning since such sentences include and
indication of speaker’s attitude to the proposition.

UTTERANCES are real pieces of speech.

SENTENCES are abstract grammatical elements
PROPOSITIONS are descriptions of states of affairs, the basic element of sentence
meaning.

2.3. Texts
A TEXT, which may or may not coincide with a sentence, can be defined
as a unit of language in use. A Text is a pre-theoretical term used in linguistics
and phonetics to refer to a stretch of language recorded for the purpose of
analysis and description. What is important is to note that texts may refer to
collection of written or spoken material, e.g. conversation, monologues, rituals
and so on. The term TEXTUAL MEANING is sometimes used in semantics as part of a
classification of types of meaning, referring to those factors affecting the
interpretation of a sentence which derive from the rest of the text in which the
sentence occurs –as when, at a particular point in a play or novel, a sentence or
word appears whose significance can only be appreciated in the light of what
has gone before.

3. MEANING AND THE WORD. DIFFERENT

DIMENSIONS OF MEANING.

English Semantics and Lexicography 13

 Defining meaning is practically the same as to defining the object of
semantics.
There are different views of how semantics should approach the ability to
talk about the world. Two of these are particularly important in current semantic
theories: we can call them the REFERENTIAL (or DENOTATIONAL) APPROACH and the
REPRESENTATIONAL APPROACH.
For semanticists adopting the first approach this action of putting words
into relationship with the word is meaning, so that to provide a semantic
description for a language we need to show how the expressions of the
language can ‘hook onto’ the world.
Thus theories can be called Referential (or Denotational) when their
basic premise is that we can give meaning of words and sentences by showing
how they relate to situations. Nouns, for example, are meaningful because they
denote entities in the world and sentences because they denote situations and
events.

There is a casino in Grafton Street.

There isn’t a casino in Grafton Street.
The difference in meaning between these two sentences arises from the
fact that the two sentences describe different situations.

For semanticists adopting the second approach our ability to talk about
the world depends on our mental models of it. In this view a language
represents a theory about reality: about the types of things and situations in the
world. Thus a speaker can choose to view the same situation in different ways.
In English we can view the same situation as either an activity or as a state:

John is sleeping (Action)

John is asleep. (State)

Such situations are influenced by each language’s conventional ways of

viewing situations. Different conceptualisations influence the description of the
real world situations. Theories of meaning can be called representational when

English Semantics and Lexicography 14

their emphasis is on the way that our reports about reality are influenced by the
conceptual structures conventionalised in our language.

We can see these two approaches as focusing on different aspects of the

same process: talking about the world.

In REFERENTIAL THEORIES, meaning derives from language being attached to reality.

In REPRESENTATIONAL APPROACHES meaning derives from language being a reflection of our
conceptual structures.

3.1. Reference
The meaning of linguistic expressions derives from two sources: the
language they are part of and the world they describe. Words stand in a
relationship to the world, our mental classification of it: they allow us to identify
parts of the world, and make statements about them.

Language is used to communicate about things, happenings, and states

of affairs in the world, and one way of approaching the study of meaning is to
attempt to correlate expressions in language with aspects of the world. This is
known as the EXTENSIONAL approach to meaning.

LYONS mentions ODGEN AND RICHARDS’ distinction between REFERENT and

REFERENCE. While the term “referent” specifies any object or state of affairs in the
external world that is identified by means of a word or expression, the term
“reference” points to the concept which mediates between the world or
expression and the “referent”.

According to SAEED, there are some major differences in the ways that
words may be used as referents.
Names and noun phrases can be called NOMINALS. The nominal is the
linguistic unit which most clearly reveals function of language.
We can apply the distinction of REFERRING AND NON-REFERRING EXPRESSIONS in
two ways. Firstly there are linguistic expressions which can never be used to
refer, for example the words so, very, maybe, if, not, all. These words do of
course contribute meaning to the sentences they occur in and thus help

English Semantics and Lexicography 15

sentence denote, but they do not themselves identify entities in the world. We
will say that these are intrinsically non-referring items.
The second use of the distinction REFERRING/NON-REFERRING concerns
potentially referring elements like nouns: it distinguishes between instances
when speakers use them to refer and instances when they do not.

We can distinguish between CONSTANT and VARIABLE REFERENCE. One

difference among referring expressions becomes clear when we look at how
they are used across a range of different utterances. Some expressions will
have the same referent across a range of utterances, e.g. the Eiffel Tower or
the Pacific Ocean. Others have their reference totally dependent on context, for
example I, you, she, it, my office, where to identify the referents we need to
know who is speaking to whom.
Expressions like the Pacific Ocean are sometimes described as having
CONSTANT REFERENCE, while expressions like I, you, she, etc. are said to have
VARIABLE REFERENCE. To identify who is being referred to by pronouns we obviously
need to know a lot about the context in which these words were uttered. Most
acts of referring rely on some contextual information: for example, to identify the
referent of the nominal the President of the United States we need to know
when it was uttered.

DENOTATION is intrinsically connected with reference. According to LYONS,

they are different and he bases his approach on the two ways the language
hooks on the world.

DENOTATION is part of the meaning which the expression has in the language-system,
independently of its use on particular utterance. The denotation of an expression is
invariant and it is utterance-independent.
REFERENCE is variable and utterance-dependent. As a result, lexemes do not have reference.

LYONS says that the DENOTATION of an expression is invariant and it is

utterance-independent: The thing or things in the world referred to by a
particular expression is its REFERENT(S): in saying “The cat’s hungry”, I am
referring to a particular cat, and that cat is the referent of the expression the cat.

English Semantics and Lexicography 16

 We can also consider the whole class of potential referents of the word
cat, the class of cats. This is sometimes called the REFERENCE of the word cat.
But this is clearly different from the designation of particular individuals as in the
case of “The cat’s hungry”, so, to avoid confusion, we shall follow Lyons and
say that the class of cats constitutes the DENOTATION of the word cat. So, in the
sentence “The cat’s hungry”, the word cat denotes the class of cats, but the cat
refers to a particular cat.

“The cat’s hungry”

Cat  denotes the class of cats

The cat  refers to a particular
cat

3.2. Denotation and Sense

The alternative to an extensional approach to meaning is an INTENTIONAL
approach. The world is associated with some kind of mental representation of
the type of thing that can be used to refer to.

CAT √
PLATYPUSES X
Sense of the
AARDVARKS X word cat

SPINY ANTEATERS X

The semantic links between elements within the vocabulary system is an

aspect of their sense or meaning.

English Semantics and Lexicography 17

 The SENSE OF AN EXPRESSION may be defined as the set, or the network, of
sense relations that hold between it and other expressions of the same
language.

This representation constitutes what is called the SENSE of the word (or at
least part of it).
The main function of linguistic expressions is to mobilize concepts.
Concepts are the main constituents of sense, and sense (and hence concepts)
constrains reference.

SENSE is an interlexical or intralingual relation; it defines the

relations within the same language.
On the other hand, DENOTATION relates expressions to classes of
entities in the world.

SAUSSURE distinguished between Signifier and Signified and held that the
meaning of linguistic expressions derives from two sources: the language they
are part of and the world they describe. The relationship by which language
hooks onto the world is called “Reference”, whereas the question of semantic
links between elements within the vocabulary system is an aspect of their
sense. The signifier would be the referent while the signified would be related to
other terms in the same language.

Some authors, for instance LYONS, understand sense in a different way.

For them, sense is a matter of relations between a word and other words in
language. So, for instance, the sense of cat would be constituted by its relations
with other words such as dog (a cat is necessarily not a dog), animal (a cat is
an animal), miaow (The cat miaowed is normal but The dog miaowed is not).

dog (a cat is necessarily not a dog)

CAT animal (a cat is an animal)
miaow (The cat miaowed is normal but The dog miaowed is not).
Sense of cat according to Lyons

English Semantics and Lexicography 18

 SAEED adopts the position that meaning of a noun is a combination of its
denotation and a conceptual element.
A noun is said to gain its ability to denote because it is associated with
something in the speaker/hearer’s mind. This gets us out of the problem of
insisting everything we talk about exists in reality, but arises the question of
what these mental representations are. Presumably the relationship between
the mental representation and the real world entity would then be one of
resemblance.
This theory runs into serious problems with common nouns. This is
because of the variation in images that different speakers might have of a
common noun like car or house depending on their experience. A problem
arises when trying to find an image for words such as animal, or food; or worse
love, justice or democracy.
The hypothesis that sense of some words, while mental, is not visual but
a more abstract element can help on this. We call this more abstract element a
concept. This concept will be able to contain the non-visual features which
make a dog a dog, democracy democracy, etc

4. TYPES OF MEANING

English Semantics and Lexicography 19

4.1 Functional Meaning and Content Meaning. Lexical Meaning and
Grammatical Meaning.

Descriptive .vs. Non-Descriptive Meaning

We can distinguish between DESCRIPTIVE and NON-DESCRIPTIVE MEANING. CRUISE

sticks to Lyons’ terminology and maintains the term descriptive meaning for
what others labelled as ideational, referential, logical or propositional meaning.
Cruise also lists a number of prototypical characteristics that descriptive
meaning displays.

INTRINSIC DIMENSIONS OF DESCRIPTIVE MEANING are semantic properties an

element possesses in and of itself, without reference to other elements.

QUALITY is one and at the same time the most obvious and important
dimension of variation within descriptive meaning. It is which constitutes the
difference between red and green, dog and cat, apple and orange, run and
walk, hate and fear, here and there.

Compare:

It is not here, it’s there.

It’s not there, it’s here.
Not X but Y
Not Y but X
Her dress is not red, it’s green.
Her dress is not green, it’s red.

There’s a semantic
?That’s not my father, that’s my Dad.
difference, but not one
?She didn’t’ pass away, she kicked the bucket. of a descriptive nature

That items which differ in

It’s an animal, but it isn’t a dog
specificity Hill pass only
*It’s a dog, but it isn’t an animal the half of this test.

Differences of quality can be observed at all levels of specificity. We may

think of hierarchies of semantic domains of various scope or different

English Semantics and Lexicography 20

ontological types. A typical set of ontological types at the highest level of
generality is the following:

THING QUALITY QUANTITY PLACE TIME STATE

PROCESS EVENT ACTION RELATION MANNER

These represent fundamental modes of conception that human mind is

presumably innately predisposed to adopt.

There are INTRINSIC and RELATIVE DIMENSIONS of descriptive meaning.

Intrinsic Dimensions
Descriptive meaning may vary in INTENSITY, without change of quality. For
instance, one would not wish to say that large and huge differ in quality: they
designate the same area of semantic quality space, but differ in intensity. Huge
is more intense than large, and terrified than scared. Variation in intensity is only
possible in certain areas of quality space.

Differences of descriptive SPECIFICITY show up in various logical properties.

“It’s a dog” unilaterally entails “It’s an animal”.

“It’s not an animal” unilaterally entails “It’s not a dog”.

“Dogs and other animals” is normal but not “?animals and other dogs.”

From this, we can conclude that dog is more specific than animal (alternatively,
animal is more general than dog). Similarly, woman is more specific than
person. In all these cases one can say that one term (the more general one)
designates a more extensive area of quality space than other.

an object - specific
According to Langacker, the less
an animal
specific the greater distance. For
a mammal instance, from a great distance, a dog
may just look like an object and from a
closer distance we can distinguish an
a dog animal, a mammal, a dog, a variety of
dog …

a variety of dog
English Semantics and Lexicography 21
 + specific

It is possible to distinguish several types of specificity. All cases

illustrated above involve TYPE-SPECIFICITY. The more specific term denotes a
subtype included within the more general type.
There is also PART-SPECIFICITY: hand:finger (where finger is more specific),
bicycle:wheel, university:faculty. John injured his finger is more specific than
John injured his hand.
A third type of specificity is INTENSITY-SPECIFICITY, where one range of
degrees of some property is included in another range. For instance, one
reading of large includes all ranges of intensity of “greater than average size”.
Hence It’s huge entails It’s large, but It’s large does not entail It’s huge.

Another dimension of descriptive meaning is VAGUENESS. We shall say that

the meaning of a word is vague to the extent that the criteria governing its use
are not precisely stable. Under the heading of vagueness we shall distinguish
two different subdimensions.
The firs one is ILL-DEFINEDNESS. It is well illustrated by terms which
designated region on a gradable scale such as middle-aged. Age varies
continuously: middle-aged occupies a region on this scale. But we don’t know
when someone begins and ceases to be middle-aged.
The second subtype of vagueness is LAXNESS (vs. STRICTNESS) of
application. For some terms, their essence is easily defined, but they are
habitually applied in a loose way. This seems to be a characteristic of individual
words. For instance, the notion of a circle is capable of a clear definition, and
everyone is capable of grasping the strict notion. But the word circle is
habitually used very loosely, as in “The mourners stood in a circle round the
grave”. No on expects the people form an exact circle here.

BASICNESS is another dimension of descriptive meaning. Some meanings

are considered more basic than others. A general assumption is that the
concrete/observable/basic terms will be the first learned. Cognitive linguists
believe that cognition is built up as it were from concrete to abstract.

English Semantics and Lexicography 22

 acceleration speed movement
- basic + basic

Notice that acceleration is not more specific than speed, but it is more
complex. Acceleration depends on the notion of speed, which in turn depends
the yet more basic notion of movement.

A number of linguistic expressions encode as part of their meaning a

particular VIEWPOINT on the events or states of affairs designated. Perhaps the
most obvious example of this is provided by this, that, these, those, here, there,
now, then and so on, which are usually claimed to encode the viewpoint of the
speaker at the moment of utterance. So for instance, the book on the table, if it
was valid for one speaker in a particular context, would be valid for anyone
present; however, the validity of this book here, as a description of the same
book, would clearly depend on the position of the speaker relative to the book in
question.
There are less obvious encodings of viewpoint. Consider the difference
between:
The village is on the north side of the hill
The village is on the other side of the hill
The village is over the hill
The village is round the other side of the
hill

Relative Dimensions
The first parameter is NECESSITY. The simple views of this parameter is to
make sharp dichotomy between necessary and contingent logical relationships,
and use entailment to determine whether or not a feature is necessary. On the
basis of the following we could say that “Being an animal” is necessary feature
of dog, whereas “ability to bark” is
X is a dog entails X is an animal.
not:
X is a dog does not entail X can bark.

We can not be confident in our ability to say definitively whether some

sentence A entails another sentence B. Consider the following entailment:

English Semantics and Lexicography 23

 X is Y’s wife ?entails? X is not Y’s daughter.

Suppose that neither X nor Y knew that X was Y’s daughter and they got
married. Then X would be Y’s legal wife.
A convenient and rough way of measuring degree of necessity is by
measuring degree of necessity is by means of the but-test:

It’s a dog, but it is an animal. (tautology)

It’s a dog, but it’s not an animal. (contradiction)
(“is an animal” is a necessary feature of dog)

It’s a dog, but it barks. (tautology)

It’s dog, but it doesn’t bark. (normal)
(“barks” is an expected feature of dog)

It’s a dog, but it’s brown. (odd)

It’s a dog, but it isn’t brown. (odd)
(“brown” is a possible feature of dog)

It’s a dog, but it sings (normal description of an abnormal dog)

It’s a dog, but it doesn’t’ sing (odd-tautology)
(“sings” is an unexpected feature of dog)

It’s a dog, but it is a fish (contradiction)

It’s a dog, but it’s not a fish (tautology)
(“is a fish” is an impossible feature of dog)

SUFFICIENCY is a kind of converse of necessity. We normally speak of the

joint sufficiency of a set of features (for instance, the feature [ MALE] and [HORSE]
are jointly sufficient to guarantee that anything possessing them is a stallion.)
For instance, the feature [BREATHES] is not very diagnostic for bird, since
many other creatures breathe. The feature [TWO LEGGED] is much better, but
applies also to humans. A maximally diagnostic feature for BIRD is [FEATHERED],
since no other creature has feathers.
Things which are salient stand out from their background in some way,
and have a superior power of commanding attention. One way of interpreting
the notion of SALIENCE is in terms of ease of access of information. Features
which are easy to get at are going to play a larger role in semantic processing in
real time than those which are harder to get at. When people are asked to list

English Semantics and Lexicography 24

the characteristics of some entity, under time pressure, there is a strong
tendency for certain features to be mentioned early in everyone’s list. This is
presumably because they are the easiest features to access.

Dimensions of Descriptive Meaning

-Quality
- Intensity
Intrinsic - Specificity
Dimensions - Vagueness
- Basicness
- Viewpoint

- Necessity and Expectedness

Relative
- Sufficiency
Dimensions
- Salience

About the NON-DESCRIPTIVE dimensions we can distinguish EXPRESSIVE

MEANING. Compare:
Gosh!
I am surprised

“Gosh!” Is subjective, and does not present a conceptual category to the

hearer: it expresses an emotional state. It’s validity is restricted to the current
state of the speaker. By contrast “I am surprised” expresses a proposition,
which can be questioned or denied, and can be expressed equally well by
someone else or at a different place or time. In a sense, of course, “Gosh!” and
“I am surprised” ‘mean the same thing’, which suggests that the difference
between descriptive and expressive meaning is matter not of semantic quality
but of mode of signification.
Some words possess only expressive and no expressive meaning and to
these we can assign the term EXPLETIVES.

It’s freezing – shut the bloody window!

English Semantics and Lexicography 25

 Notice that expressive meaning1 does not contribute to propositional
content, so the action requested would not change if bloody were omitted: a
bloody window (in this sense) is not a special kind of window.

Some words have both descriptive and expressive meaning:

A - I was damn cold. (cf. extremely, which has only descriptive meaning)
B – It wasn’t all that cold

Questions and negatives only operate on descriptive meaning in such

sentences, so, for instance, It wasn’t all that cold in replay to It was damn cold
would deny the degree of cold indicated, but would not call into question the
speaker’s expressed feelings.

Some words seem to be potentially, but not necessarily expressive. With

one type of such words, the expressivity appears only when appropriate
intonation is added:

Expressively neutral: Expressively stressed:

Does she still live in Manchester? Are you still here?
Has the postman been yet? Surely she hasn’t gone already?
The railway station had already been closed You mean you haven’t done it yet?

. Out of a set of near-synonyms, it sometimes happens that some but not

others can be expressively stressed:

Baby vs. infant, child, neonate

Mother and baby are doing well.
Oh, look! It’s a baby! Isn’t it lovely?
? Oh, look! It’s a child/infant/neonate! Isn’t it lovely?

Lexical and Grammatical Meaning

A distinction is often made between lexical meaning and grammatical

meaning. A convenient way of presenting the distinction is in terms of sorts of

1
For more information about Expressive Meaning have a look at Lexical Meaning on page 25.

English Semantics and Lexicography 26

element which carry the meaning in question. We can divide grammatical units
into CLOSED-SET items and OPEN-SET items.

Central examples of closed-set items have the following characteristics:

a) They belong to small substitution sets
b) Their principal function is to articulate the grammatical structure of
sentences.
c) They change at a relatively slow rate through time, so that a single
speaker is unlikely to see loss or gain of items in their lifetime. (No
new tense markers or determiners have appeared in English for long
time.) In other words, the inventory of items in a particular closed-set
grammatical category is effectively fixed.

These may be contrasted with open-set items, which have the following
characteristics:
a) They belong to relatively large substitution sets.
b) There is a relatively rapid turnover in membership of substitution
classes, and a single speaker is likely to encounter many losses and
gains in a single lifetime. (Think of the proliferation of words relating to
computing in recent years).
c) Their principal function is to carry the meaning of a sentence.

Both closed-set and open-set items carry meaning, but they different
functions mean that there are differences in the characteristics of meaning that
they typically carry.
A closed-set item, in order to be able to function properly as a
grammatical element, has to be able to combine without anomaly with a wide
range of roots, and for this to be possible, it must have a meaning which is
flexible, or broad enough, or sufficiently ‘attenuated’ not generate clashes too
easily. Hence, meanings such as “past”, “present”, and “future”, which can co-
occur with virtually any verbal notion, and “one” and “many”, which can co-occur
with vast numbers of nominal notions, are prototypical grammatical meanings.
In contrast, there is no limit to the particularity of richness of the meaning
an open-set element may carry, as there are no requirements for recurrent

English Semantics and Lexicography 27

meanings or wide co-occurrence possibilities. Hence, open-set items typically
carry the weight of the semantic content of utterances. Because of richness of
their meanings and their unrestricted numbers, they participate in complex
paradigmatic and syntagmatic structures.
What are called content words (basically nouns, verbs, adjectives, and
adverbs) prototypically have one open-set morpheme (usually called the root
morpheme) and may also have one or more closed-set items in the form of
affixes. Lexical semantics is by an large the study of the meanings of content
words. Grammatical semantics concentrates on the meanings of closed-set
items. However, a strict separation between grammatical and lexical semantics
is not possible because the meanings of the two kinds of element interact in
complex ways.

LEXICAL MEANING is related to an open-set class of items or content words.

GRAMMATICAL MEANING refers to close-set class of items or grammar A
words.

word does not convey ‘a whole thought’: for that purpose, more complex
semantic entities are necessary – built out of words, certainly – having at least
the complexity of propositions (argument+predicate). Words (and at a more
basic level, morphemes) form the building blocks for these more complex
structures.
Languages have words, at least partly, because in the cultures they
serve, the meanings such words carry need to be communicated. This means
that if some culture had a use of notion expressed, then it would not be
surprising if there were a word for it.
A word meaning is not allowed to be on both sides of the vital subject and
the predicate divide. Possible word meanings are constrained in a strange way
by semantic dependencies. It is first necessary to distinguish DEPENDENT and
INDEPENDENT components of semantic combination.
The INDEPENDENT component is the one which determines the semantic
relations of combination as a whole with external items. So for instance, in very
large, it is large which governs the combinability of the phrase very large with
other items
A very large house
?A very large wind
English Semantics and Lexicography 28
 There is a semantic incompatibility between large and wind – there is no
inherent clash between very and wind, as normality of a very hot wind
demonstrates. By the similar reasoning, the independent item in warm milk is
milk, and in drink warm milk is drink. By following this line of reasoning, we can
establish chains of semantic dependencies. For instance:

“warm”  “milk”  “drink”

The elements that constitute the meaning of a word must form a

continuous dependency chain. This means, first, that there must be relation of
dependency between elements. This, for instance, rules out “wine slowly” as a
possible word meaning, because there is no dependency between “wine” and
“slowly”. Second, there must be no gaps in the chain which need to be filled by
semantic elements from outside the word. This rules out cases like “very ___
milk”, where the dependency chain would have to be completed by an external
item such as “hot”.

According to ZGUSTA, every word (lexical unit) has something that is

individual, that makes it different from any other word. Ad it is just the lexical
meaning which is the most outstanding individual property of the word.
The LEXICAL MEANING of a word or lexical unit may be thought as the
specific value it has in a particular linguistic system and the ‘personality’ it
acquires through usage within that system.

According to CRUISE, we can distinguish four main types of meaning in

words and utterances: PROPOSITIONAL MEANING, EXPRESSIVE MEANING, PRESUPPOSED

MEANING, and EVOKED MEANING.

The PROPOSITIONAL MEANING of a word or an utterance arises from the
relation between it and what refers or describes in real or imaginary word, as
conceived by the speakers of the particular language to which the word or
utterance belongs. It is this type of meaning which provides the basis on which
we can judge an utterance as true or false.

English Semantics and Lexicography 29

 Propositional Meaning of shirt
‘a piece of clothing worn on the upper part of the body’.

EXPRESSIVE MEANING cannot be judged as true or false. This is because

expressive meaning relates to the speaker’s feelings or attitude rather than to
what words and utterances refer to.

Compare:
Don’t complain
Don’t whinge

The difference between Don’t complain and Don’t whinge not lie in their
prepositional meaning but in the expressiveness of whinge, which suggests that
the speaker finds the action annoying.
Words can have propositional meaning and expressive meaning
(whinge), only propositional meaning (book) or only expressive meaning
(bloody). Words which contribute solely to expressive meaning can be removed
from an utterance without affecting its information content.
PRESUPPOSED MEANING arises from co-occurrence restrictions, i.e.
restrictions on what other words or expressions we expect to see before or after
a particular lexical unit. These restrictions are of two types:
a) Selectional restrictions: these are a function of the propositional
meaning of a word. We expect a human subject for the adjective studious and
an inanimate one for geometrical. Selectional restrictions are deliberately
violated in the case of figurative language but are otherwise strictly observed.
b) Collocational restrictions: these are semantically arbitrary restrictions
which do not follow logically from propositional meaning of a word. For instance,
laws are broken in English, but in Arabic they are ‘contradicted’ Because it is an
arbitrary, collocational restrictions tend to show more variation across
languages than do Selectional restrictions.
EVOKED MEANING arises from a dialect and register variation. A DIALECT is a
variety of language which has currency within a specific community or group of
speakers. It may be classified on one of the following bases:
a) GEOGRAPHICALLY – e.g. a Scottish dialect: Church (Br.E.) Kirk (Sc.E)

English Semantics and Lexicography 30

 b) TEMPORAL – e.g. words and structures used by members of different
age groups within a community, or words used at different periods in the
history of language: cf. verily and really.
c) SOCIAL – words and structures used by members of different social
classes: cf. napkin and serviette.
REGISTER is a variety of language that a language user considers
appropriate to a specific situation. Register variation arises from the variations
in the following:
a) FIELD of discourse: This is an abstract term for ‘what is going on’ that is
relevant to the speaker’s choice of linguistic items.
b) TENOR of discourse: An abstract term for the relationships between the
people taking part in the discourse.
c) MODE of the discourse: An abstract term for the role that the language
is playing (speech, essay, lecture, instructions) and its medium of
transmission (spoken, written).

Of all the types of lexical meaning explained above, the only one which
relates to the truth or falsehood of an utterance and which can consequently be
changed by the reader or hearer is propositional meaning. All other types of
lexical meaning contribute to the overall meaning of an utterance or a text in the
subtle and complex ways.

4.2 Literal and Non-Literal Meaning

Most people are aware that if someone says Jane’s eyes nearly popped
out of her head, a literal truth has not been expressed. Jane’s eyes were not, as
a matter of fact, on the point of being projected from her head; the message is
rather than Jane was very surprised.

Dictionaries often organise their entries historically, with the earliest first.
It would be a reasonable requirement of a dictionary that it should indicate
which meanings are literal, and which figurative.

English Semantics and Lexicography 31

 The distinction between LITERAL and NON-LITERAL MEANING is assumed in
many semantics texts but attempting to define it soon leads us into some
difficult decisions.
The basic distinction seems a common-sense one: distinguishing
between instances where the speaker speaks in neutral, factually accurate way,
and instances where speaker deliberately describes something in untrue or
impossible terms in order to achieve special effects.

I’m hungry.
Literal meaning
I’m starving.
I could eat a horse. Non-literal meaning
My stomach thinks my throat’s cut.

Non-literal uses of language are traditionally called FIGURATIVE and are

described by a host of rhetorical terms including METAPHOR, IRONY, METONYMY,

HYPERBOLE, and LITOTES.

On closer examination it proves difficult to draw a firm line between literal
and non-literal uses of languages. For one thing, one of the ways languages
change over time is by speakers shifting the meanings of words to fit new
conditions. Some new expressions’ metaphorical nature remains clear, as for
example in surfing the internet. After a while such expressions become
fossilized and their metaphorical quality is no longer apparent to speakers. The
vocabulary of a language is littered with fossilised metaphors and this
continuing process makes it difficult to decide the point at which the use of a
word is literal rather than figurative.
The idea is that metaphors fade over time, and become part of normal
literal language. In this approach there is a valid distinction between literal and
non-literal meaning.
Metaphors and other non-literal uses of language require a different
processing strategy than literal language. One view is that hearers recognise
non-literal uses as semantically odd. The hearer makes inferences in order to
make sense out of non-literal utterance.

LAKOFF claim that there is no principled distinction between literal and

metaphorical uses of language. Such scholars see metaphor as an integral part

English Semantics and Lexicography 32

of human categorisation: a basic way of organising our thoughts about the
world.

4.3 Contextual Meaning

CONTEXTUAL MEANING is realized at the sentence level and is the meaning
expressed by a sentence associated with its context. This type of meaning is
not decided by the word itself but by the context in which the whole sentence
functions.
The meaning of a given word or set of words is best understood as the
contribution that word or phrase can make to the meaning or function of the
whole sentence or linguistic utterance where that word or phrase occurs. The
meaning of a given word is governed not only by the external object or idea that
particular word is supposed to refer to, but also by the use of that particular
word or phrase in a particular way, in a particular context, and to a particular
effect.
There is a difference between the propositional meaning of a word and
the CONTEXTUAL MEANING of the same word. Let us consider, for example, three
lexical items which have the same physical reference in the world of non-
linguistic reality, but are not simply used alternatively in free variation on each
other. The words 'father', 'daddy' and 'pop' refer to the same physical object, i.e.
the male parent. Yet other factors contribute to the choice of one rather than the
other two in different situations. These factors may vary in accordance with the
personality of the speaker or addressor, the presence or absence of the male
parent in question, the feelings the addressor has towards his father as well as
the degree of formality or informality between the two.

The philosopher JOHN PERRY made a while ago the point that an utterance
such as it's raining does not have an explicit meaning (and thus no truth
conditions) outside of its contextual determinants: where is it raining? When is it
raining? Therefore there are constituents of the meaning of an utterance that
can be omitted without the hearer thinking s/he is confronted with an elliptical
clause or a fragment. And what about utterances like aspirin is better (which
demands contextual completion because of the syntactic requirements of the
comparative).

English Semantics and Lexicography 33

 When looking at what particular utterances mean in a context, for
example: if someone says to you “Marvellous weather you have here in
Ireland”, you might interpret it differently on cloudless sunny day than when rain
is pouring down. The problem here is that if features of context are part of an
utterance’s meaning, the number of possible situations, and therefore of
interpretations is enormous if not infinite.

According to CRUSE, one is forced to confront the fact that the semantic
import of a single word form can vary greatly from one context to another.
Regular patterns appear not only in the nature and distribution of the
meanings of a single word in different contexts, but also between words in the
same context.

4.4 Extensions of Meaning: Metaphor and Metonymy.

A typical dictionary definition of METAPHOR is: “The use of a word or phrase
to mean something different from the literal meaning” (Oxford Learner’s
Dictionary)
The Greek word from which the term metaphor originated literally meant
‘transfer’. For Aristotle, what was transferred was the meaning of one
expression to another expression: for him a metaphorical meaning was always
the literal meaning of another expression. (This is the substitution view of
metaphor.)
Richards (1965) made a distinction between three aspects of metaphor:
VEHICLE, the item(s) used metaphorically, TENOR, the metaphorical meaning of the
vehicle, and GROUND, the basis for the metaphorical extension, essentially the
common elements of meaning, which license the metaphor. There must be
The foot of the mountain
VEHICLE: foot
TENOR: Lower portion
GROUND: the spatial parallel between the canonical position of the foot relative to the rest of the
human body, and the lower parts of a mountain relative to the rest of the mountain.

some essential connection between tenor and vehicle – a word cannot be used
to mean just anything.

English Semantics and Lexicography 34

 According to LAKOFF, metaphors are not merely decorative features of
certain styles, but are essential component of human cognition.

METONYMY and METAPHOR are quite distinct processes of extension.

Metaphor is based on resemblance, whereas metonymy is based on
‘contiguity’. Metaphor involves the use of one domain as an analogical model to
structure our conception of another domain; in other words the process crucially
involves two distinct conceptual domains. Metonymy, on the other hand, relies
on an association between two components within a single domain.

There are certain highly recurrent types of metonymy. The following may
be signalled:
a) Container for contained: The kettle is boiling.
b) Possessor for possessed/attribute: Where are you parked?
c) Represented entity for representative: England won the World Cup.
d) Whole for part: I’m going to fill the car with petrol.
e) Part for whole: There are too many mouths to feed.
f) Place for institution: The White House denies the allegations.

5. METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES:
AN INTRODUCTION.

English Semantics and Lexicography 35

5.1 An Introduction to conceptual categorization.
The name methodological issues deals with the fact that
conceptualisation is something that needs to be approached from a working
perspective. This implies defining units of analysis and the basic types of
operations that relate them.

Concepts have the status of categories: they classify experience and

give access to knowledge concerning entities which fall into them.

Classical and prototypical approaches to definition of concepts constitute

alternative views on categorisation.

The CLASSICAL APPROACH TO CATEGORISATION, which goes back at least to

Aristotle, but is still often taken for granted, defines a category in terms of a set
of NECESSARY and SUFFICIENT criteria for membership. So, for instance the criteria
for some X to qualify for inclusion in the category girl are:

X is human
X is female
X is young

If any of these criteria are not satisfied, the X is not a girl; if the criteria
are satisfied, ten X is a girl. The above criteria can be taken as a definition of
the meaning of girl.

Some problems appear when using a classical approach.

The words like girl, which apparently can be satisfactorily defined by

means of a set of necessary and sufficient features constitute a relatively small
proportion of the vocabulary at large, and are confined to certain semantic
areas and specialised terms for animals specifying age and sex, and so on.
There are many everyday words whose meanings cannot be captured by
means of a set of necessary and sufficient features. For example game. It is
impossible to draw p a list of features possessed by all games which jointly

English Semantics and Lexicography 36

distinguish games from non-games. We might suggest the following as possible
criteria:
a) involves winning and losing: there are many games which do not
involve winning or losing.
b) involves more than one person: solitaire is a game for one person.
c) has arbitrary rules: children’s games, such as dressing-up games,
have no stable rules.
d) done purely for enjoyment: many games are played professionally.

Another problem is that an Aristotelian definition of a category implies a

sharp, fixed boundary. However, the boundaries of natural categories are fuzzy
and contextual flexible. BERLIN AND KAY (1969), who studied colour categories,
found that while judgements of central examples of colours were relatively
constant across subjects and reliable within subjects on different occasions,
judgements o borderline instances, for instance between red and orange, or
between blue and purple, showed neither agreement amongst subjects nor
reliability with a single subject on different occasions. LABOW (1973), found that
contextual conditions could alter subject’s responses, so that for instance, an
instruction to imagine all the items as containing rice extended the boundaries
of bowl category, while similar instruction to imagine coffee as contents
extended the cup category. Such results receive no natural explanation within
the classical picture.

Everything that satisfies the criteria has the same status, that is to say,
something is either in the category, or not in it, and that is all there is to say
about the matter. However, language users have clear intuitions about
differences of status of items within a category. For example, an apple is a
better example of fruit than is a date, or an olive. In other words, categories
have internal structure: there are central members, less central members, and
borderline cases. No account of these can be given using the classical
approach.
In contrast to the classical approach, there is the PROTOTYPE THEORY. This
holds that the meaning of a word should be described in terms of the ideal
example of a category. According to ROSH AND MERVIS (1975), the natural

English Semantics and Lexicography 37

conceptual categories are structured around the ‘best’ examples, or prototypes
of the categories, and that other items are assimilated to a category according
to whether they sufficiently resemble the prototype item.

Subjects are asked to give a numerical value to their estimate of how

good an example something is of a given category – the GOE ratings. For
example, if the category was vegetable, the ratings of various items might be as
follows:

1. potato, carrot 1. very good example

2. turnip, cabbage 2. good example
3. celery, beetroot 3. fairly good example
4. aubergine, courgette 4. moderately good example
5. parsley, basil 5. fairly poor example
6. rhubarb 6. bad example
7. lemon 7. very bad example / not an example at all

Ratings of GOE may be strongly culture dependent. Familiarity is

undoubtedly a factor influencing GOE scores. For instance, in a British context,
DATE typically receives a GOE score of 3-5 relative to the category of FRUIT, but
an audience of Jordanians accorded in an almost unanimous 1.

There is abundant evidence that prototypically, as measured by GOE

scores, correlates strongly with important aspects of cognitive behaviour. Such
correlations are usually referred to as PROTOTYPE EFFECTS. The principal prototype
effects are as follows:
a) ORDER OF MENTION: When subjects are asked to list the members of a
category, and specially they are put under time pressure, the order of
listing correlates with GOE ratings, with the prototypical member
showing a strong tendency to appear early in the list.
b) OVERALL FREQUENCY: The overall frequency of mention in such lists also
correlates with GOE score.
c) Order of acquisition: Prototypical members of categories tend to be
acquired first, and order of acquisition correlates with GOE rating.
d) VOCABULARY LEARNING: Children at later ages of language acquisition,
when vocabulary enlargement can be greatly influenced by explicit

English Semantics and Lexicography 38

 teaching, learn new words more readily if they are provided with
definitions that focus on prototypical instantiations than if they are
given abstract definition that more accurately reflect the total range of
word’s meaning.
e) SPEED OF VERIFICATION: In psycholinguistic experiments in which subjects
are required to respond as quickly as they can to categorisation task,
subjects produce faster responses if the tasks involve a prototypical
member.
f) PRIMING: Subjects see strings of letters flashed on to a screen and their
task is to respond Yes if the string of letters makes a word, and No if it
does not. If a word is preceded by a semantically related word,
response to it will be speeded up. The presentation of a category
name has the greatest effect on the prototype of a category.

5.2 Linguistic Codification: Lexicalization and gramaticalization.

5.3. Iconicity

5.4 Compositionality

English Semantics and Lexicography 39

GLOSARY

• COMMUNICATION – (Cruise) The transfer of information between human beings.

• LINGUISTIC ENCODING – (LYONS) to translate a message into a linguistic form,
and translate the linguistic form into a set of instructions to the speech
organs which result into an acoustic signal.
• LEXEME – (Lyons) Not all lexemes are words and not all words are lexemes.
• WORD – (Cruise) It is a minimal permutable element. Words are separated
by spaces in writing, although not usually by silences in speech. They also
have a characteristic internal structure, in that they prototypically have no
more than one LEXICAL ROOT. (Baker) It is the smallest unit which we would
expect to possess individual meaning. Defined loosely, the word is ‘the
smallest unit of language that can be used by itself.
• SEMANTICS – (Lyons) the study of meaning. (Saaed) Semantics is the study of
meaning communicated through language. Semantics deals with
conventional meaning - with those aspects which do not seem to vary too
much from context.
• LINGUISTIC SEMANTICS - (Lyons) the study of meaning in so far as it is
systematically encoded in the vocabulary and grammar of natural
languages.

English Semantics and Lexicography 40

• PRAGMATICS - (Saeed) Pragmatics deals with aspects of individual usage and
context-dependent meaning. (Morris) The relation of signs to interpreters.
(Carnap) The study of speaker/hearer’s interpretation of language.
• PHONOLOGY - (Saeed) The study of what sounds a language has and how
these sounds combine to form words.
• SYNTAX – (Saeed) The study of how words can be combined into sentences.
(Morris) The formal relation of signs to each other.
• SEMANTICS – (Saeed) The study of the meaning of words and sentences.
(Morris) The relations of signs to the objects to which the signs are
applicable.
• ENTAILMENT – (Saeed) Relationship between sentences so that if sentence A
entails a sentence B, then if we know A we automatically know B.
• SIGNIFICATION – (Saeed) Process of creating and interpreting symbols.
• SEMIOTICS – (Saussure) The study of linguistic meaning as a part of the study
of the use of sign systems.
• COMPOSITIONAL MEANING – (LYONS) The meaning of an expression is determined
by the meaning of its component parts and the way in which they are
combined.
• REFERENCE – (Saeed) The relationship by which language hooks onto the
world
• INTRINSIC DIMENSIONS OF DESCRIPTIVE MEANING – (Cruise) Semantic properties an
element possesses in and of itself, without reference to other elements.
• DIALECT – (M.Baker) Variety of language which has currency within a specific
community or group of speakers.
• REGISTER – (M.Baker) Variety of language that a language user considers
appropriate to a specific situation.

EXTRA BIBLIOGRAPHY
General literature
Tió, J. 1999 Fonaments de la Lingüística. Lleida: Edicions de la Universitat de Lleida
Lyons, J. 1984 Introducción al lenguaje y a la lingüística. Barcelona: Teide

English Semantics and Lexicography 41

On Lexical Meaning
Baker, M. 1992 In Other Words. London: Rotledge
On Contextual Meaning
http://accurapid.com/journal/14theory.htm
http://exchanges.state.gov/forum/vols/vol38/no4/p12.htm

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