Page 398 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics

Notes contradictions, paraphrase, relations, ambiguities, implications and transformations of the language.
It should give an account of semantic properties and relations. Hence to understand the meaning
of a sentence and its semantic relations to other expressions, one must know not only the meaning
of its lexical elements but also how they inter-relate.
According to Manfred Bierwish, a semantic theory must : (a) make reference to the syntactic
structure in a precise way; (b) systematically represent the meaning of the single words; (c) show
how the structure of the meaning of words and the syntactic relations interact, in order to constitute
the interpretation of sentences; and (d) indicate how these interpretations are related to the things
spoken about.

31.2 Importance of Meaning
Although the structuralists tried to study language without meaning, the importance of meaning
has been recognized since time immemorial. In the Vedas, meaning is treated as the essence of
language, and the speech without meaning has been called ‘the tree without fruits and flowers.’
Ancient Indian scholars such as Katyayana, Patanjali, Vyadi, Vyas, etc. regard the relationship of
word and meaning as eternal. According to Patanjali, words naturally express meaning. Were the
words eternal, one word would have meant one and the same thing in all the languages; there
would have been no semantic change, and men would not have felt any necessity of learning
words. Nevertheless, some western scholars too have started talking about semantic universals
now-a-days, and today, there is a wide agreement than it ever was that meaning is the soul of
language.
31.3 Difficulties in the Study of Meaning

The problem of ‘meaning’ is quite difficult, it is because of its toughness that some linguists went
on to the extent of excluding semantics from linguistics. A well-known structuralist made the
astonishing statement that ‘linguistic system of a language does not include the semantics. The
system is abstract, it is a signalling system, and as soon as we study semantics we are no longer
studying language but the semantic system associated with language.” The structuralists were of
the opinion that it is only the form of language which can be studied, and not the abstract functions.
Both these are misconceptions. Recently a serious interest has been taken in the various problems
of semantics. And semantics is being studied not only by the linguists but also by philosophers,
psychologists, scientists, anthropologists and sociologists.
Scholars have long puzzled over what words mean or what they represent, or how they are
related to reality. They have at times wondered whether words are more real than objects, and
they have striven to find the essential meanings of words. It may be interesting to ask whether
words do have essential meaning. For example, difficulties may arise in finding out the essential
meaning of the word table in water table, dining table, table an amendment, and the table of 9.
An abstract word like good creates even more problems. Nobody can exactly tell what good really
means, and how a speaker of English ever learns to use the word correctly. So the main difficulty
is to account facts about essential meanings, multiple meanings, and real word conditions. The
connotating use of words adds further complications to any theorizations about meaning,
particularly their uses in metaphoric and poetic language. Above all is the question : where does
meaning exist : in the speaker or the listener or in both, or in the context or situation ?
Words are in general convenient units to state meaning. But words have meanings by virtue of
their employment in sentences, most of which contain more than one word. The meaning of a
sentence, though largely dependent on the meaning of its component words taken individually, is
also affected by prosodic features. The question whether a word may be semantically described or
in isolation, is more a matter of degree than of a simple answer yes or no. It is impossible to
describe meaning adequately in any other way except by saying how words are typically used as
part of longer sentences and how these sentences are used. The meanings of sentences and their
components are better dealt with in linguistics in terms of how they function than exclusively in
terms of what they refer to.

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