Page 401 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Unit 31: Semantic: Meaning Types: Lexical, Contextual and Others Semantics Practice

The symbol (name or significant) is the phonetic shape of the word, the sounds which make it up Notes
and also other acoustic features such as accent. The reference (sense of thought), put in general
terms without committing oneself to any psychological doctrine, is ‘the information which the
name (symbol) conveys to the hearer’, whereas the ‘thing’ (significant or referend) is the non-
linguistic feature or event we are talking about. The letter, as we have seen, lies outside the
linguist’s province. Hence Bloomfield’s famous definition. This definition refers primarily to the
meaning of a whole utterance, but the meaning of individual words is obtained in the same way.
According to the referential definitions, therefore, ‘meaning’ is a reciprocal and reversible relation
between name and sense,’ it can be investigated by starting from either end : but one can start
from the name and look for the sense or senses attached to it, as do all alphabetical dictionaries :
but one can also start from the sense and look for the name or names connected with it.
The Referential theoreticians wish to confine themselves to formal meaning because the contextual
or functional level of language is difficult to describe rigorously and scientifically. The ‘analytical’
or ‘referential’ approach seeks to grasp the essence of meaning by resolving it into its main
components. According to this theory, there is no direct connection between words and the things
they stand for; the word ‘symbolizes’ a thought or ‘reference’ which in its turn ‘refers’ to the
feature or event we are talking about.
This approach has its weaknesses too. It gives an account of how the word acts on the hearer but
seems to neglect the speaker’s point of view. For the hearer, the sequence of events will be different
and reverse. Hearing the word, say, dog, he will think of a dog and thus understand what the
speaker was saying. And this will make him pronounce the word. There is therefore ‘a reciprocal
and reversible relationship between name and sense’ which Stephen Ullmann calls meaning : if
one hears the word one will think of the thing, and if one thinks of the thing one will say the word.
The choice of terms is, of course, of secondary importance as long as the analysis itself is accepted.
The analytical approach ignores this reciprocal and reversible relationship between sound and
sense.
Furthermore, by excluding the ‘referent’, the non linguistic feature of event referred to, semantics
will ‘fall prey to an extreme esoteric formalism’. The structuralists are unwilling to assume that
‘prior to the utterance of a linguistic form, there occurs within the speaker a non-physical process,
a thought, concept, image, feeling, act of will, or the like, and that the hearer, likewise, upon
receiving the sound-waves, goes through an equivalent mental process.’ (Bloomfield, Language).
According to Bloomfield, human utterances are connected with certain situations and accompanied
by certain responses. But Bloomfield’s modification too is untenable, which virtually equates
‘response’ with the ‘referent’. It takes no account of the innumerable cases where the thing referred
to is not present at the time of speaking—not to mention statements about abstract phenomena.
According to Bloomfield then, how will a person understand a statement about an earthquake
thousands of miles away, if he understands the meaning of a term by corresponding to something
in the hearer’s memory. Lastly, referential theories of meaning are inspired by the old metaphysics
of body and soul. Hence they need to make a provision for multiple meaning, and should remember
that words are not associated with situations alone; they are also associated with other words.
The Distributional Approach
The distributional analysis of meaning is the structural treatment of linguistic meaning. To facilitate
a scientific study of meaning some linguists favour the study of meaning as phenomenon isolated
from outside world of human experience, that is to say, the meaning of word is to be understood
as the range of its occurrences in sentences consisting of other words. ‘Just as there are probably
no words exactly like in meaning in all context, so there will probably be no two words in any
language sharing exactly the same lexical environment (distribution). This approach studies
meaning as syntagmatic relations (collocations) and paradigamatic relations (sets). ‘It uses statistical
methods and computer techniques (the mechanical collection and sorting of data) with considerable
precision and exhaustiveness in the study of semantics. But the distributional approach to meaning
fails to ‘save the phenomena.’ Meaning is everywhere understood as involving the relation of

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