Semantics

Defining the Discipline

Robert A. Hipkiss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135447373
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The subject of semantics has been appropriated by various disciplines including linguistic philosophy, logic, cognitive psychology, anthropological linguistics, and computer technology. As a result, it is difficult to define the study of semantics as an actual discipline without discovering what each field using a semantic approach to its subject matter has contributed to the understanding of what words mean. This volume is a result of those discoveries. Primarily an introductory work, this volume outlines the approaches that various disciplines have taken to the subject, attempts to show their relationships and their limitations, and presents the more important aspects of each approach -- from psychosemantics to artificial intelligence -- using pertinent source material from psychology, philosophy, logic, linguistics, and sociology. For individuals coming to the study of semantics for the first time, or those who are interested in what the overall study may offer beyond their specialization, this volume will provide a helpful overview of the subject.

Chapter 1
KNOWING AND MEANING

How do we know the meaning of a word? To answer that basic question we must examine the way humans convert their experience into thought and words. To what extent do words condition our thinking? Let us address the first question by a direct consideration of conceptualization and the second indirectly with a consideration of the Whorf "linguistic relativity" hypothesis.

Conceptualization

When we say that we know the meaning of a word, we are saying that we can relate that word to some object or action or to its attributes and/or to some class of objects, actions, or attributes. Thus, "house" refers to either a particular object or class of similar objects that we call "houses," "going" refers to the motion of some object, "white" refers to the color of some object, "rapidly" to some movement, and such words as "in" and "the" and "that" are words that help define the relationship of objects or actions to one another, objects or actions to attributes, and classes of each to themselves and to each other.

Words are symbols and have no meaning in themselves. What they mean depends on the connection between them and our perception of things, what they stand for in our experience both immediate and recalled. The meaning of a word such as "ball" can be more complex than such a simple object would at first suggest, and the meaning of an abstraction such as "America" can defy ready definition.

How do we know what an object is? In the words of the well-known language meaning theorists Ogden and Richards (1989), "To say that I recognize something before me as a strawberry and expect it to be luscious, is to say that a present process in me belongs to a determinative psychological context together with certain past processes (past perceptions and conceptions of strawberries). These psychological contexts recur whenever we recognize or infer" (p. 57).

Let us explore this process in detail. How do we know an object is a "ball"? As youngsters, perhaps we were allowed to toss and bounce a spherical object that our parents called a "ball," and whenever we wanted to play with it, we had to ask for it by pronouncing the word "ball." The first time we saw a volleyball perhaps we did not know what to call it. It was so much larger than the ball we played with that we could not make the word connection. And when we heard our brothers call an oval object a "football" and were told to get the "ball," we were surprised because it did not look like a ball at all. Perhaps one day a father rolled up a piece of paper off his desk and tossed it into the wastebasket and one of us said, "I'll get the ball," and tried to pull the wad out of the basket. The father might have been perplexed as to why his son should think that was a "ball," but the son had learned that that which is roughly round and thrown is a "ball." A round rock too? Maybe, but the son might hesitate to call it that because it is compressed and heavier for it size than anything called "ball" that he had known. Words, then, are symbols for concepts arrived at through experience. If an object fits the concept, then the word that is the symbol of the concept may be used to signify the object.

Now, although this commonplace mental activity is necessary for us to develop a vocabulary and to choose words to communicate with one another, it is subjective in nature, so that unless the past experience of the communicants is the same there are likely to be cases where the meaning of a word to one is not the same as it is to another, as in the case of the son and father with the paper "ball."

Moreover, how much more difficult it is to match meanings on a word like "America"! Once one gets past the most factual part of the definition—America's location, when it was discovered, its population and size, and so on—that person is faced with a plethora of impressions that the word makes upon its speakers and hearers, impressions of patriotism, destiny, wealth, freedom, opportunity, and the like, all in various degrees, depending on the individual's own experience with the country in its various regions and economic and cultural groups. These impressions are far more the meaning of the word to most Americans than the bare facts of America's existence, Likewise, this is true for all words that represent concepts that include a heavy burden of value judgments and thus have a great power of evoking emotions.

Knowing what something is in cases of complex relationships is seldom an either—or proposition. Korzybski (1921,1933) made this point repeatedly in his two books, The Manhood of Humanity and Science and Sanity. More recently, Fillmore gave us the example of colors in this connection: "... to know red¹ is to know something more or less directly, but to know pink is to know red and to know that pink differs from red along a certain dimension and to a certain degree..(Fillmore, 1972, pp. 55-56). The key word here is "degree." When we say that we know what a "ball" is or what "America" is, we are speaking of the concept to which the word is related and saying that we can describe the object referred to (the referent) so that most people would agree with the accuracy of the description and thus that their concept of the word is the same as ours. But once the general factual description is completed and we begin to deal with less known facts and with our own impressions of the object, we are less apt to find agreement. So, along a continuum from red to white, some people would fi nd pink covering one part of the continuum while others would find their own areas of coverage overlapping but having different limits. And in the case of America as a land of opportunity, the degree of opportunity would be defined differently by different socioeconomic groups, so that, for some, the word "opportunity" would need radical modification.

To further complicate the matter, not only is knowing the meaning of a word relative to one's own subjective experience, but the act of knowing is itself a matter of degree. We may hear a bell, for example, and know that it is a bell but may not know what it signifies. We are aware and are able to recognize the sound, nothing more. It is also possible for the bell to ring, according to someone else seated next to us, and for us not to be aware of it because our attention is on other matters.

How do we know what stimuli to reject and which ones to accept into consciousness? Almost immediately upon sensing some stimulus that stimulus would have to be classified. And in fact, speed of association tests do suggest that this is what takes place. In a test done by M. C. Patten in the 1970s it was shown that subjects' identification of rapidly shown cards was almost equally improved by giving the subjects advanced information as to the class of the object to be shown as it was by giving them in advance a picture of what would be presented (Klatzky & Story, 1978). The only way either of these advance presentations could be of value is for them to have been installed in the subjects' minds as ready associations for the test. In the case of the conceptual association, because the response had to be immediate, the test strongly suggests that immediate conceptualization is exactly what happens when something is first perceived.

Node excitation in computer simulation of neuron brain activity has demonstrated the associative, hierarchical pattern. "The level of activation of higher nodes is determined by how closely they match, and how closely their subpatterns and superpatterns match, and how closely alternative patterns match" (Anderson, 1983, p. 32). The computer simulation developed by Anderson and other researchers (ACT) is goal-driven, as is the human attempt at recall or our attempt to understand a process, and exhibits not only a hierarchical structure but also "the strong seriality in the flow of human cognition" (p. 33). The hierarchical, classificatory, structure of our thinking also enables us to retrieve facts, allowing the spread of node activation to be limited and focused.

Once the stimulus is recognized as an entity with certain attributes that make it a member of a class of things with similar attributes, there must be a further classification of this now conceptualized stimulus as being either important or unimportant to the immediate desires and needs of the person concerned. Attention is given to those stimuli that further a desire or pose a threat. Once classified, and this is automatic and subconscious, the degree of importance of the incident for the current situation is assessed, and the incident is either brought to consciousness for fresh consideration or rejected and dropped into subliminal memory, from which it may be recalled later consciously or perhaps in dreams or under hypnosis.

Classification may be conscious or unconscious, but a great deal of classification is habitual and is predominantly unconscious, although there may be some flickerings of conscious awareness connected with the process. For it to be unconscious, however, suggests that there is no need for conscious deliberation for the recognition and identification of the stimulus and awareness of its relation to feelings of desire and threat. For example, a driver, daydreaming while performing the daily commute to work, will not be conscious of many of the cars around him, but should someone ahead of him suddenly hit the brakes, he will probably respond by hitting his own and will allow the reality of cars, lights, and road ahead to cut off the daydream. One second, other cars are just cars and, the next second, they are cars as threats, recategorized instantaneously into a priority category² demanding conscious attention to other individual vehicles and immediate decisions regarding one's own.

We have, then, a classification process that has been made habitual through experience, but whenever experience fails to fit the existing categories, the need we feel to decide what it is, and, therefore, what it entails in its object attributes and relationships, prompts conscious thought and the conceptualization of new categories of experience, not by themselves but as part of a hierarchical process of generalization. This process develops new conceptual knowledge, and as it does so, it expresses new relationships between the new concepts and the old. It also develops language as we attach symbolic labels (words) to the new concepts. One might add that in finding or, in some cases, creating new words for items of experience that do not quite fit existing categories, we have also set limits to the perceptions that can be related to the pre-existing concepts, thus redefining them and their attendant labels (words).

Uncertainty of Perception and Memory

To know what an object or event is, we have to deal with the problem of the essential subjectivity of perception and, in doing so, with the different scope and intensity of conscious awareness under different circumstances in individual perceptions. How consciously we know something will determine how we define it. If it is something that we habitually see and know in its various forms, we can probably say that we know that it is a "dog," "table," "chair," "house," or whatever, without even thinking how generalized these terms are. If we designed the house or built the chair or owned the dog, we would know many of the particulars that would set apart this specific house, chair, or dog from the classses of things described as "house," "chair," or "dog." We would have made many conscious contacts with these things, made decisions concerning them, and would have treated their physical parts and functions in many ways very consciously. Our relationships with these objects will have conditioned the way we regard the whole class of such objects and, therefore, may well make our definitions of "house," "chair," and "dog" more particularized and somewhat different from those of other persons. And certainly, if the only dog a person ever owned was always biting people and getting into dog fights and running up enormous veterinary bills, that person would be apt to define "dog" differently from one who had merely patted and fed stereotypical Fidos.

There is also the problem of memory. Human memory is notoriously inexact. We keep records, letters, and books, not to mention cassette tapes, films, and heirlooms in order to re-experience and recollect. Even with these prompts we often cannot recall experience in detail. Our word descriptions of past events are apt to be inaccurate and vague.

Western civilization has attempted to overcome memory's fading and blurring with its written documentation of experience and its insistent indexing by calendars and clocks. Primitive societies that long lacked a written language have relied on the carefully tutored memories of their scops or storytellers to pass down their history, traditions, and mythological lore to succeeding generations. The storytellers cannot be exact as to when an event occurred, however, because these societies have not kept calendars, and, in fact, their mathematics is often limited to the addition and subtraction of a few things of their everday experience. So the Indian, when asked about the time of the event, may answer, "Many moons ago," when the event occurred not merely months ago but, perhaps, 100 years ago.

The inexactitude of memory and the habits of perception and conceptualization within a culture, its tendency to remember events in certain way, as the Indian does time in terms of moons, builds a certain content in the language of the culture and makes habitual certain forms of expression.

Linguistic Relativity

In his studies of the Hopi, Whorf (1956) noted that their language has a plethora of verbs but only three tenses. According to Whorf, tomorrow for the Hopi is the reappearance of today. Time is a continuation out of the darkness of a distant past into a distant future equally dark, the only known state being a continuing present. In expressing motion, the Hopi says that something in motion has "begun to move," and when the motion stops, it has "begun to move begun to move." In Western physics we speak of a static object as having potential (as opposed to kinetic) energy, and to the Hopi, apparently, there is no real staticity, always instead a sense of change and continuation. This fluid sense of time allows them to speak of the known past as part of the present, of the day-to-day future as repetition, and to use a general tense to convey timeless action.

Whorf's point, semantically, was that language is representative of a mode of thought peculiar to the people that use it. The corollary is that the meaning of words is culturally dependent, and translation between cultures does not permit word-for-word substitutions or even word-forphrase/phrase-for-word substitutions that are exact correlations of meaning (Whorf, 1956).

Since Whorf's work (1930-1956), other anthropological linguists have made more controlled studies of American Indian cultures. Malotki (1983) attacked the often self-contradictory Whorf on several points: He showed that, contrary to one of Whorf's statements, the Hopi do use spatial metaphors to express time, in their words for "on," "against," "end," "length," "lapse," "arrive," and others (p. 14). He also found "a direct equation of the noun qeni, 'space,' with the notion of time" (pp. 15-16). Moreover, the Hopi, using the metaphorical time sense of "approach" could convey an imaginary time-space such as one might find narrated in a story. However, any period of more than 4 days is "extreme" and usually not counted out. One may assume that periods of much longer duration are not counted out in days at all. And when it comes to dividing up the day into hours, the Hopi never did it until the White man came, and then, in order, to convey the concept, they relied upon the hour hand of the clock, so an hour is qoni, "he turned around" (p. 207).

Malotki spent much time refuting Whorf's claim that the Hopi count only in ordinal numbers. Whorf said that the Hopi counted a group of items as having so many repetitions of an item (or manifestation) having certain properties. Malotki interpreted certain instances of counting as totals, with the Hopi using what is meant to be cardinal numbers. He claimed to have refuted Whorf's assertion that '"our time' differs markedly from Hopi 'duration' " (p. 631).

Whorf's understanding of Hopi time is certainly ambivalent. He stated, on the one hand, that the Hopi have no concept of an ever-flowing time. They supposedly have, instead, a sense of forms being "manifested" or "manifesting" (Whorf, 1956). On the other hand, time for the Hopi is never a specified interval with beginning and end boundaries either, but always a "getting later" (p. 143).

Hopi is a verb-dominated language with only three tenses. Whorf believed that "users of markedly different grammars are pointed by the grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observations, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world" (Whorf, cited in Lucy, 1992b, p. 38). The question posed by these differing views of Hopi time and its expression in language is whether or not the Hopi reliance on verb forms and limited tenses really does preclude their understanding of time, in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Knowing and Meaning
• 2 Association and Logic
• 3 Truth, Meaning, and Pragmatics
• 4 Word Formation and Definition
• 5 Grammar and Syntax
• 6 Metaphor and Related Figures of Speech
• 7 Contrastive Figures of Speech
• 8 Artificial Intelligence
• 9 General Semantics
• 10 Semantics: An Intrarelated Discipline
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index