Semantics

Linguistic Semantics

Semantics is one of the main subdisciplines of linguistics. Linguistic semantics, or semantics of natural language, is also one of the several distinct disciplines that carry this name; the others are parts of philosophy, mathematical logic, and semiotics. All the semantics differ from each other in all the components of a theory, namely in their purview, premises, body, goals, falsifiability, and justification and evaluation.

The purview of linguistic semantics includes all the meaningful elements of natural language, from the morpheme—a meaningful part of a word, such as prefixes, roots, suffices, and infixes—to the word, then the phrase, and finally the sentence. The meaning of the word, lexical semantics, and that of the sentence, compositional or sentential semantics, are the main responsibilities of the semantics of natural language.

The premises include the seemingly obvious association of every word in a language with one or more [Page 674]elements of reality (or their mental images), such as objects, events, attributes, or relations between or among those elements. In other words, the premise states that each word in a language has a meaning or several meanings, as in the case of polysemy, that is, words having several senses, as most words of most languages do. Clear indeed as this premise may be to lay persons who have to learn new words of their own or foreign languages by memorizing the pairing between the sound (or spelling) of the new word with its meaning(s), Austrian British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953), however, and the whole British school of thought called “ordinary language philosophy” denied this premise, thus adding the urgency to making the premise explicit. This premise may be referred to as essentialist.

Another premise is compositionality. It assumes that, in the common case, a language unit, consisting of two or more smaller meaningful units, has a meaning that includes the component meanings. Simplistically, it is the sum of those meanings; in reality, it is a function depending on how these smaller units are arranged within a larger one. British American philosopher of language H. Paul Grice (1975), the founder of linguistic pragmatics, denied that it was the case, citing various contextual violations and exceptions. But those may occur only with a rule in place, and the compositional premise is that rule.

The third premise is so ingrained in the very core of human communication and, hence, language as its main tool, that it is hardly ever explicated. It may be referred to as the shorthand premise. Language underdetermines reality by stating a very small part of any situation and letting the hearers reconstruct the whole picture on the basis of their shared commonsense knowledge. This premise of constantly having to extend an explicit into a much larger implicit narrative is so “natural” to human users of language that numerous recall experiments of a few decades ago confirmed the virtual impossibility of recalling identically for several witnesses of a dialog a week later what had been actually said verbatim. Rather, the witnesses would recall various possible parts of the situation, and it was always the same situation. This “aura” around an explicitly stated sentence is the mysterious “context” that scholars bring up both to indicate the different interpretations of a sentence and the impossibility of full description. The ubiquity of shorthand has been brought home painfully in computational semantics because the computer is unable to expand a sentence referring to a situation into the whole picture. But much more important here is that the shorthand premise explains how the same sentence or even the whole text may evoke two different whole pictures that linguistic theories of humor call scripts.

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