Transcript Explaining and Creating Meanings

‘EXPLAINING AND CREATING MEANINGS’
‘The Language Detective’, Villiers Park Educational Trust, 9-13 July 2007
Aims of the session:
o To look briefly at the distinction between linguistically
encoded meanings and contextually inferred meanings (i.e.
the distinction between semantics and pragmatics )
o To think about how far we can account for word meanings
(or morpheme meanings) in terms of dictionary-like
definitions
o To discuss any other questions about language meaning
you’re interested in
‘knowns and unknowns’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq5mQLArjmo
Eric Cantona press conference
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTq6aApCBnA
‘knowns and unknowns’
‘Reports that say that something hasn't happened are
always interesting to me, because as we know, there are
known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also
know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know
there are some things we do not know. But there are also
unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don’t know’
(Donald Rumsfeld, US Defence Secretary, February 2002)
‘seagulls and trawlers’
‘When seagulls follow a trawler, it is because they think that
sardines will be thrown over the side into the sea’
(Eric Cantona, January 1995)
SEMANTICS-PRAGMATICS ACTIVITY
See if you can give a rough characterisation of what is
linguistically encoded by Donald Rumsfeld’s and Eric
Cantona’s utterances. What do you think is their intended
meaning and how do their audiences work out that that’s
what they mean?
SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS
As we said, before linguistic semantics is concerned with
linguistically encoded meanings while pragmatics is
concerned with meanings we work out in specific contexts.
We’ve just seen that the processes of working out
meanings can be very complicated.
To get the full picture you need to think systematically
about all of the things involved in working out meanings
based on what’s linguistically encoded.
LINGUISTIC SEMANTICS
So what’s linguistically encoded? Usually, this is divided
into lexical meanings (word meanings)** and syntactic
meanings.
So we need t o know the meanings of each word in an
utterance such as:
‘We’re horses and you’re the mummy horse’
and also know what this syntactic structure tells us about
the meaning.
**Of course, we should really say ‘morpheme meanings’.
INTONATIONAL MEANINGS
What about intonation?
It’s not easy to decide how to treat intonational meanings
(the meanings of pitch movements).
To make sure we all know what I mean by pitch
movements, I’m going to say this utterance with a
particular pitch movement now and ask you what kind of
utterance you think it is (e.g. a statement, a question, an
order, something else?):
‘I went to Graeme’s party yesterday’
INTONATIONAL MEANING
Compare the previous example with the second utterance in
this exchange:
A: They’ve announced the new author of the
James Bond books.
B: There’s books?
INTONATIONAL MEANINGS
Some people think intonational meanings are fully
linguistically encoded (similar to words like happily).
Others think they work more like non-verbal
communication (similar to nonverbal behaviour such as
speaking in a sad, wistful voice). Others (including me)
suggest that intonation can have both kinds of meaning.
WORD MEANINGS
How can we explain the meanings of words?
How, for example, would you explain the meaning of the word orange?
WORD/MORPHEME MEANINGS
A natural initial assumption is that we can account for word meanings
by defining them.
Do you know of any problems with this approach?
To help you think about it, propose a definition of the following words
and then look up their meanings, and the meaning of orange, in more
than one dictionary:
bachelor
elm
yew
happy
paint
although
beech
he
How satisfactory do you think these definitions are? Do they
accurately reflect what we know about their meanings?
PROBLEMS WITH DEFINITIONS
When people think of word meanings, they usually think in
terms of dictionary definitions, but there are several
problems with assuming that we can account for word
meanings in this kind of way, including:
o Circularity (defining words in terms of words)
o Variation from speaker to speaker
o Some words (e.g. although) don’t seem to fit this
kind of approach
WORDS AND CONCEPTS
One way out of the circularity problem is to say that
words name concepts (or that ‘word meanings ARE
concepts’). It’s not circular to say that bachelor names the
concept {BACHELOR} as long as we then go on to explain
what the concept {BACHELOR} is/means.
So what’s the concept {BACHELOR}? One approach
suggests that we should explain this by analysing the
concept into other concepts from which it is ‘composed’,
e.g.:
{ADULT}
{HUMAN}
{MALE}
{NEVER MARRIED}
WORDS AND CONCEPTS
Can you see any problems with our new approach?
Clues:
o Ask yourself what are the meanings of each of the
smaller concepts used in the definition
o How would you break down the meaning of
{ALTHOUGH} OR {HE} into other concepts?
KINDS OF WORD MEANING
There are different kinds of word meaning. Words like
although and he do not have the same kind of meaning as
words like bachelor or elm.
See if you can separate these words into groups with
similar kinds of meanings and say something about the
kinds of meanings they have (if they’re ambiguous, treat
the different senses as being associated with more than
one word):
bachelor
although
he
chase
follow
painful
but
tomorrow
democracy
here
free
even
KINDS OF WORD MEANING
We can distinguish at least four types of word meaning:
o ‘concept’ words which we can treat as naming
concepts, e.g bachelor
o ‘pointing’ words (technically known as deixis/deictic
expressions) which acquire a meaning (or a
‘referent’) when uttered in a specific context, e.g.
here
o ‘contextually determinable’ words, whose meanings
can be (but aren’t always) fixed in a particular
context, e.g. painful
o ‘definitionally vague’ words for which the meaning
never becomes determinate, e.g. democracy
KINDS OF WORD MEANING
So what does this picture suggest for how we understand
the meanings of utterances?
What, for example, would be the linguistically encoded
meaning of this utterance?
‘The dentist pressed against my tooth and asked if it
was painful’
And how would you work out what it meant in a particular
context?
INFERRING MEANINGS
To finish, consider what’s linguistically encoded by these
utterances and how hearers work out what they mean:
‘This is the best essay I’ve ever read’
‘This is the worst essay I’ve ever read’
‘It’s not the best essay I’ve ever read’
‘The party was a disaster. 100 people turned up’
‘Phew. I thought I was bald but I’ve just found I’ve still
got one hair left.’
‘Is Graeme here now?’