Semantics

I

Introduction

Semantics (Greek, semantikos, “significant”), the study of the meaning of linguistic signs—that is, words, expressions, and sentences. Scholars of semantics try to answer such questions as “What is the meaning of (the word) X?” They do this by studying what signs are, as well as how signs possess significance—that is, how they are intended by speakers, how they designate (make reference to things and ideas), and how they are interpreted by hearers. The goal of semantics is to match the meanings of signs—what they stand for—with the process of assigning those meanings.

Semantics is studied from philosophical (pure) and linguistic (descriptive and theoretical) approaches, plus an approach known as general semantics. Philosophers look at the behaviour that goes with the process of meaning. Linguists study the elements or features of meaning as they are related in a linguistic system. General semanticists concentrate on meaning as influencing what people think and do.

These semantic approaches also have broader application. Anthropologists, through descriptive semantics, study what people categorize as culturally important. Psychologists draw on theoretical semantic studies that attempt to describe the mental process of understanding and to identify how people acquire meaning (as well as sound and structure) in language. Animal behaviourists research how and what other species communicate. Exponents of general semantics examine the different values (or connotations) of signs that supposedly mean the same thing (such as “the victor at Jena” and “the loser at Waterloo”, both referring to Napoleon). Also in a general-semantics vein, literary critics have been influenced by studies differentiating literary language from ordinary language and describing how literary metaphors evoke feelings and attitudes.

II

Philosophical Approaches

In the late 19th century Michel Jules Alfred Bréal, a French philologist, proposed a “science of significations” that would investigate how sense is attached to expressions and other signs. In 1910 the British philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell published Principia Mathematica, which strongly influenced the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers who developed the rigorous philosophical approach known as logical positivism (see Analytic and Linguistic Philosophy).

A

Symbolic Logic

One of the leading figures of the Vienna Circle, the German philosopher Rudolf Carnap, made a major contribution to philosophical semantics by developing symbolic logic, a system for analysing signs and what they designate. In logical positivism, meaning is a relationship between words and things, and its study is empirically based: because language, ideally, is a direct reflection of reality, signs match things and facts. In symbolic logic, however, mathematical notation is used to state what signs designate and to do so more clearly and precisely than is possible in ordinary language. Symbolic logic is thus itself a language, specifically, a metalanguage (formal technical language) used to talk about an object language (the language that is the object of a given semantic study).

An object language has a speaker (for example, a French woman) using expressions (such as la plume rouge) to designate a meaning (in this case, to indicate a definite pen—plume—of the colour red—rouge). The full description of an object language in symbols is called the semiotic of that language. A language's semiotic has the following aspects: (1) a semantic aspect, in which signs (words, expressions, sentences) are given specific designations; (2) a pragmatic aspect, in which the contextual relations between speakers and signs are indicated; and (3) a syntactic aspect, in which formal relations among the elements within signs (for example, among the sounds in a sentence) are indicated.

An interpreted language in symbolic logic is an object language together with rules of meaning that link signs and designations. Each interpreted sign has a truth condition—a condition that must be met in order for the sign to be true. A sign's meaning is what the sign designates when its truth condition is satisfied. For example, the expression or sign “the Moon is a sphere” is understood by someone who knows English; however, although it is understood, it may or may not be true. The expression is true if the thing it is extended to—the Moon—is in fact spherical. To determine the sign's truth value, one must look at the Moon for oneself.

B

Speech-Act Semantics

The symbolic logic of logical positivist philosophy thus represents an attempt to get at meaning by way of the empirical verifiability of signs—by whether the truth of the sign can be confirmed by observing something in the real world. This attempt at understanding meaning has been only moderately successful. The Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein rejected it in favour of his “ordinary language” philosophy, in which he asserted that thought is based on everyday language. Not all signs designate things in the world, he pointed out, nor can all signs be associated with truth values. In his approach to philosophical semantics, the rules of meaning are disclosed in how speech is used.

From ordinary-language philosophy has evolved the current theory of speech-act semantics. The British philosopher J. L. Austin claimed that, by speaking, a person performs an act, or does something (such as state, predict, or warn), and that meaning is found in what an expression does, in the act it performs. The American philosopher John R. Searle extended Austin's ideas, emphasizing the need to relate the functions of signs or expressions to their social context. Searle asserted that speech encompasses at least three kinds of acts: (1) locutionary acts, in which things are said with a certain sense or reference (as in “the Moon is a sphere”); (2) illocutionary acts, in which such acts as promising or commanding are performed by means of speaking; and (3) perlocutionary acts, in which the speaker, by speaking, does something to someone else (for example, angers, consoles, or persuades someone). The speaker's intentions are conveyed by the illocutionary force that is given to the signs—that is, by the actions implicit in what is said. To be successfully meant, however, the signs must also be appropriate, sincere, consistent with the speaker's general beliefs and conduct, and recognizable as meaningful by the hearer.

What has developed in philosophical semantics, then, is a distinction between truth-based semantics and speech-act semantics. Some critics of speech-act theory believe that it deals primarily with meaning in communication (as opposed to meaning in language) and thus is part of the pragmatic aspect of a language's semiotic—that it relates to signs and to the knowledge of the world shared by speakers and hearers, rather than relating to signs and their designations (semantic aspect) or to formal relations among signs (syntactic aspect). These scholars hold that semantics should be restricted to assigning interpretations to signs alone—independent of a speaker and hearer.