Discourse Semantics

The Problem of Meaning

It is remarkable how well, how routinely, we communicate with one another. Whether we relate the common and trivial events of our day-today lives or argue passionately for our ideologies; whether we read a simple newspaper account of a world event or an academic paper on the intricacies of human language; whether we compose a simple thank-you note or a legal brief, our problems remain the same: how can we ensure that our comprehender gets the message we intend, and how do we derive the message intended from what we hear or read? Our problems as linguists also remain the same: for the comprehender, whether listening or reading, we must describe and account for how meaning is derived from any of these multiple sources; and, for the producer, whether speaker or writer, we must account for how meaning is conveyed. This problem of meaning, this problem of discourse semantics, is a complex one, involving interplay among a wide array of linguistic and non-linguistic processes.

Let us consider a very simple example, the text fragment in (1).

• (1)
  Text fragment

  • 1
    … puck knocked away by Dale McCourt,

    • Ø picked up again by Steve Shutt/
    • Now Shutt coming out, into the Detroit zone/
    • He played it out in front/
  • 5
    There's Lemaire with a shot.

    • and it was blocked by Reed Larson/

The fragment is a short segment transcribed from the concurrent and online description of an ice hockey game. The professional announcer rapidly produces his description as the events unfold before him. One can see that the announcer alternates between active and passive voice (lines 4 vs lines 1, 2, and 6), between nominal and pronominal form, and between existential or presentative clause type (line 5) and simple clauses (line 3). What is it about the message the announcer must convey that leads to the selection of these alternative structures? Our initial and intuitive guesses, [Page 64]some grounded perhaps in our traditional schooling, is that the difference between the active and passive is related to which referent is given more emphasis or is somehow, at least at the moment, more important; that the selection of the proper names versus the pronoun is related to keeping clear which referent one targets at a given moment, and that the selection of the existential is tied to whether or not the referent has been recently ‘on stage,’ as it were, as the action unfolded.

This chapter provides an introduction to the concepts and processes underlying our intuitions about how matters of emphasis and importance and prior knowledge contribute to the meaning one derives from text and discourse during comprehension, and how they contribute to and shape decisions about the use of language structures in the service of larger meanings.

The remainder of this section provides a framework for this effort.