- •Part one starting out
- •What is linguistics?
- •What is a linguist?
- •How does linguistics differ from traditional grammar?
- •The scope of linguistics
- •Questions
- •What is language?
- •Use of sound signals
- •The Need for Learning
- •Duality
- •Arbitrariness
- •Displacement
- •Creativity (Productivity)
- •Patterning
- •Structure dependence
- •Human language versus animal communication
- •Origin and functions of language
- •Questions
- •The study of language
- •Nineteenth century: historical linguistics
- •Early- to mid-20th century: descriptive linguistics
- •Generative linguistics and the search for universals
- •Questions
- •Deciding where to begin
- •Language as a game
- •Universal and particular
- •Questions
- •The inner circles
- •Sound patterns
- •Sorting out the basic sounds
- •The phonemes of English
- •Allophones
- •Sound combinations
- •Shared properties of phonemes
- •Metrical phonology
- •Questions
- •Words and pieces of words
- •Defining words
- •Morphemes
- •Recognition of morphemes
- •Types of morpheme
- •Allomorphs
- •Phonological conditioning
- •Word classes
- •Major word classes
- •Questions
- •Sentence patterns
- •Linking words together
- •Word order
- •Inflections
- •Function words
- •Constituent analysis
- •Tree diagrams
- •Rewrite rules
- •Identifying constituents
- •Adding in extra patterns
- •Layers of branches
- •Complex sentences
- •Questions
- •Meaning
- •Word meaning
- •Semantic fields
- •Coping with overlaps
- •Synonyms and opposites
- •Classification (inclusion)
- •The meaning of sentences
- •Questions
- •The outer rings
- •Using language
- •The cooperative principle
- •Speech acts
- •Remembered frameworks
- •Discourse analysis
- •Taking it in turns
- •Repairs
- •Politeness
- •Questions
- •Language and society
- •The notion of a language
- •Dialect and accent
- •Stylistic variation
- •Speech versus writing
- •The topic under discussion
- •The language of advertising
- •Change in language styles
- •Charting phonological variation
- •Phonological variation in British English
- •Social networks
- •Language and sex
- •Multilingual communities
- •Pidgins and Creoles
- •Questions
- •Language and mind
- •Psycholinguistic evidence
- •Acquiring language
- •The content-process controversy
- •The rule-governed nature of child language
- •Learning the meaning of words
- •Understanding syntax
- •Recognizing words
- •Speech production
- •Speech disorders
- •Language and the brain
- •Part four changes and comparisons
- •Language change
- •How language changes
- •Spread of change within a language
- •Causes of language change
- •Natural tendencies
- •Therapeutic changes
- •Changes which trigger one another off
- •Interacting changes
- •Reconstruction
- •Questions
- •Genetic similarities
- •Building a family tree
- •Reconstructing the parent language
- •Unreliability of reconstructions
- •Linguistic areas
- •Language types
- •Word order criteria
The meaning of sentences
So far, we have dealt only with the meaning of words. But what about sentences? In fact, the meaning of words tells us quite a lot about the meaning of sentences, since sentences are individual words linked together by means of the syntax. This enables us to understand why a sentence like:
My brother is a spinster
is, if taken literally, contradictory. We would be saying: My male sibling is an unmarried female where male and female are opposites. Some semanticists talk about such sentences as being 'false', in that they could not possibly be 'true': they deal with meaning by working out conditions under which sentences will be either 'true' or 'false'.
The amalgamation of word meaning and syntax does not only enable us to reject anomalous utterances, it also allows us to make deductions about normal sentences. Take the sentence:
The cobra killed a rat.
Our knowledge that kill has the properties cause DIE allows us to draw the conclusion that The rat died'. In linguistic terminology, The cobra killed a rat entails The rat died'. Similarly, we know that cobras are snakes, so we can conclude that 'A snake caused the rat to die', or going further: 'An animate being, a snake, a cobra, caused an animate being, a mammal, a rat to become not alive*. A large proportion of our ability to understand sentences comes from logical inferences of this type. After a sentence has been 'unpacked' into its underlying mean-
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ing, most linguists assume that semantic representations should be expressed in some type of formal logic.
Formal logical systems can (in theory) provide formulae for the representation of the sentences of any language, and can show the logical relationships which exist between sentences. And logic has the great advantage of being able to show certain ambiguities quite clearly. Take the sentence.
All the nice girls love a sailor.
This could either mean: 'Every nice girl loves some sailor or other: Alice loves Joe, Mary loves Bert, and Desdemona loves Billy’. Or it could mean, 'Every nice girl loves one particular sailor: his name is Jack Tar’. Logic provides a precise notation in which the two different structures are clearly shown.
At the moment, it is not clear which type of logic (if any, of those currently in use) is best for language. One promising system is relatively new, devised especially for language by a logician Richard Montague. His approach is known as Montague semantics. A number of people working on transformational grammar have tried to use this system to deal with the semantic component of the grammar. But it is not yet clear whether it will become generally accepted, or whether some alternative approach will become more widespread.
Of course, working out logical relationships is not the only way in which humans cope with meaning. In addition, they put their common sense to work. If someone said:
That girl's an elephant.
a strict logical system would reject it as an impossibility, since girls are not elephants. But a human being would try to work out why the speaker said something so apparently idiotic. We will discuss how people do this in the next chapter.