Questions

1. Suggest three ways in which languages show the relationship of one word to another.

2. What is a tree diagram, and why is it useful?

3. What are rewrite rules?

4. Draw a tree diagram and formulate rewrite rules for the sentence: The monkey put the coconut in a hole.

5. Draw a tree diagram for each of the following sentences: The bus ran down the dog.

The boy ran down the street.

6. Distinguish between conjoining and embedding. Give examples.

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8

Meaning

The study of meaning is normally referred to as semantics, from the Greek noun sema, 'sign, signal', and the verb semaino 'signal, mean'. A linguist who is studying meaning tries to understand why certain words and constructions can be combined together in a semantically acceptable way, while others cannot. For example, it is quite all right to say:

My brother is a bachelor.

The camel sniffed the chocolate and then ate it.

The platypus remained alive for an hour after the hunter shot it.

Socrates arrived yesterday.

but not:

!My brother is a spinster.

!The camel swallowed the chocolate and then ate it.

!The platypus remained alive for an hour after the hunter killed it.

!Socrates arrived tomorrow.

These sentences are all well-formed syntactically: nouns, verbs, and so on are all in the right order. But they are contradictory. An English hearer could interpret them only by assuming that the speaker has made a mistake, in which case he would say, for instance, 'A brother can't be a spinster, уоц must mean "bachelor"'. (An exclamation mark indicates a semantically impossible sentence).

A linguist studying semantics would also like to know why anyone who knows a language can recognize certain phrases and sentences as having similar meanings, and would ask how it is that people can recognize:

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Indicate to me the route to my habitual abode,

I am fatigued and I wish to retire,

I imbibed a small amount of alcohol approximately 60 minutes ago,

And it has flowed into my cerebellum,

as roughly equivalent to:

Show me the way to go home, I'm tired and I want to go to bed, I had a little drink about an hour ago, And it's gone right to my head.

A further human ability which needs explaining is the fact that hear­ers not only recognize ambiguous sentences, but they can also use the surrounding context to choose the most likely of the possible interpretations. For example:

Visiting great-aunts can be a nuisance.

is ambiguous. Are the great-aunts coming to see us, or are we going to see them? But if someone came across the sentence

Visiting great-aunts can be a nuisance: I wish we didn't have to go.

they would have no doubt that we are visiting the great-aunts, rather than vice versa.

Word meaning

Clearly, the question of meaning is to a large extent connected with the meaning of individual words, or (more accurately) lexical items -since (as we saw in Chapter 6) the word 'word' can be misleading: boa constrictor, we noted, is two written words, but a single lexical item. So in a sentence such as:

!My brother is a spinster

we need to find out about the meaning of brother and spinster in order to see why such a sequence is unacceptable.

Three preliminary points need to be clarified in connection with word meaning. First of all, we shall be concerned primarily with con­tent words, such as zoo, apple, jump, red, rather than with function words such as of, that, by, which whose role is mainly to show the rela­tionship between syntactic units (though the distinction between the

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two is not always clear-cut).

Second, we shall be dealing only with straightforward descriptive meaning, and ignoring what is sometimes called 'emotive' meaning or 'connotation'. For example, the word adolescent will be taken to mean someone who is between childhood and adulthood. We shall be ignor­ing the fact that some people use the word to imply that the person con­cerned is also likely to be awkward, immature, obstinate and moody.

Third, we must be aware that meaning is double-faced. The mean­ing of a lexical item such as tree must be considered in two ways: first of all, as one element in a language system, whose 'meaning' is depen­dent on relationships with the other words in the system. Second, its 'meaning' is linked up with a certain class of recognizable objects in the external world (Figure43).

Linguists regard these two aspects as complementary: they exam­ine first one, then the other, starting with the internal relationships between linguistic elements.

As with all linguistic elements, every lexical item has its own partic­ular place in the pattern. By studying the relationships of individual items, linguists can build up a picture of the overall structure of a lan­guage's vocabulary. When they do this they must forget that a word such as apple refers to an objectively identifiable object in the outside world, and must concentrate solely on its relationships with the other items in the language.