1、Semantics is traditionally defined as the study of meaning. The noun meaning and the verb mean are used in a wide range of contexts and in several distinguishable senses.The distinctions between the intentional and the non-intentional, on the one hand, and between what is natural and what is convent
2、ional, or symbolic, on the other, have long played a central part in the theoretical investigation of meaning and continue to do so.Most language-utterances, whether spoken or written depend for their interpretation upon the context in which they are used. Utterances containing the verb mean are no
3、different from other English utterances in this respect. It must not be assumed that all natural languages have words in their everyday vocabulary which can be put into exact correspondence with the verb mean and the noun meaning grammatically and semantically.It is linguistic semantics with which w
4、e are primarily concerned in this book. 1.2 The metalanguage of semanticsThere are contexts in which the noun meaning and the verb mean are not in correspondence with one other.Semanticists refer to as a metalanguage: i.e., a language which is used to describe language. The property by virtue of whi
5、ch a language may be used to refer to itself I will call reflexivity.As far as the metalinguistic vocabulary of natural language is concerned, there are two kinds of modification open to us: regimentation and extension. We can take existing everyday words, such as language, sentence, word , meaning
6、and sense, and subject them to strict control, defining them or re-defining them for our own purposes.As far as the everyday metalinguistic use of the spoken language is concerned, there are certain rules and conventions which all native speakers follow without ever having been taught them and witho
7、ut normally being conscious of them. But these have not been fully codified and cannot prevent misunderstanding in all contexts. 1.3 Linguisic and non-linguistic semanticsThe term linguistic semantics is ambiguous. Given that semantics is the study of meaning, linguistic semantics can be held to ref
8、er either to the study meaning in so far as this is expressed in language or, alternatively, to the study of meaning within linguistics. Linguistics does not aim to deal with everything that falls within the scope of the word language, it establishes its own theoretical framework.One kind of non-arb
9、itrariness is commonly referred to these days as iconicity. Roughly speaking, an iconic sign is one whose form is explicable in terms of similarity between the form of the sign and what is signifies: signs which lack this property of similarity are non-iconic.Spoken utterances, in particular, will c
10、ontain, in addition to the words of which they are composed, a particular intonation-contour and stress-pattern: these are referred to technically as prosodic features. They are an integral part of the utterances in which they occur, and they must not be thought of as being in any sense secondary or
11、 optional. The prosodic features of spoken languages and the paralinguistic gestures that are associated with spoken utterances in particular languages in particular cultures vary from languages to language and have to be learned as part of the normal process of language acquisition. 1.4 Language, s
12、peech and utterance; langue and parole; competence and performanceThe English word language, like the word meaning, has a wide range of meaning. But the first and most important point to be made about the world language is that it is categorically ambivalent with the respect to the semantically rele
13、vant property of countability: i.e., it can be used as a count noun; it can also be used as a mass noun, which does not require a determiner and which normally denotes not an individual entity or set of entities, but an unbounded mass or aggregate of stuff or substance.Expressions containing the wor
14、ds English, French, German, etc. exhibit a related, but rather different, kind of system-product ambiguity when they are used as mass nouns in the singular. The syntactic ambivanlence upon which the ambiguity turns, is not between count nouns and mass nouns, but between proper nouns and common nouns
15、.One way of avoiding ambiguity is to adopt the policy of never using the English word language metalinguistically as a mass noun when the expression containing it could be replaced, without change of meaning, with an expression containing the plural form of language used as a count noun. Another way
16、 of avoiding, or reducing, the ambiguity and confusion caused by the syntactic ambivalence of the everyday English word language and by its several meaning is to coin a set of more specialized terms to replace it.The word langue always refers to language-system. The word parole has a number of relat
17、ed, overlapping and meanings in everyday French. The essential distinction is between a system and the products of the system.By “competence” Chomsky means the language-system which is stored in the brains of individuals who are said to know the language in question. The Chomskyan term “performance”
18、 is often employed by linguistics to refer indifferently both to the use of the system and to the products of the use of the system. Parole, in contrast, employed to refer to anything other than the products of the use of particular language-system. 1.5 Words: forms and meaningsIn this book, single
19、quotation-marks will be employed for words, and for other composite units with both form and meaning; italics for forms and double quotation-marks for meanings.The grammatically distinct forms of a word are traditionally described as inflectional, some languages are much more highly inflected than o
20、thers. It is nevertheless important to draw a distinction between a word and its form, even if it has no distinct inflectional forms.Homonyms: different words with the same form. For example, bank1, one of whose meaning is “financial institution” and the bank2, one of whose meaning is “sloping side
21、of a river”, are generally regarded as homonyms. The fact that two or more phonetically different forms may be orthographically identical is also readily illustrated from English. This kind of identity may be called material identity.1.6 Sentences and utterances; text, conversation and discourseThe
22、meaning of a sentence is determined not only by the meaning of the words of which it is composed, but also by its grammatical structure. This is clear from the fact that two sentences can be composed of exactly the same words.In everyday English, the word utterances is generally used to refer to spo
23、ken language. The word text is generally refer to written language. Our language must not be confused with speech. Indeed, one of the most striking properties of natural language is their relative independence of the medium in which they are realized.The terms utterance, discourse and conversation h
24、ave both a process-sense, they denote a particular kind of behaviour , or activity; in their product-sense, they denote, not the activity itself, but the physical product of the activity. Sentence meaning is context-independent, whereas utterance meaning is not: that is to say, the meaning of an utt
25、erance is determined by the context in which it is uttered. And there is an intrinsic connexion between the meaning of sentence and the characteristic use,not of the particular sense as such, but of the whole class of sentences to which the sentence belongs by virtue of its grammatical structure. Th
26、is connection may be formulated, for one class of sentences, as follows: a declarative sentence is one that belongs to the class of sentences whose members are used to make statement.Sentence-meaning is related to utterance-meaning by virtue of the notion characteristic use, but it differs from it i
27、n that the meaning of a sentence is independent of the particular context in which it may be uttered. To determine the meaning of an utterance,we have to take contextual into account.1.7 Theories of meaning and kinds of meaningThe distinction between descriptive and the non-descriptive: with regard
28、to descriptive meaning, it is a universally acknowledged fact that languages that can be used to make descriptive statements which are true or false according to whether the propositions that they express are true or false. Non-descriptive meaning is more heterogeneous and less central. Expressive m
29、eaning-i.e. , the kind of meaning by virtue of which speakers express, rather than describe , their beliefs, attitudes and feelings-is often held to fall within the scope of stylistics or pragmatics. Chapter2 Words as Meaningful Unit 2.0 IntroductionIt is generally agreed that the words, phrases and
30、 sentences of natural languages have meaning, that sentences are composed of words and that the meaning of a sentence is a product of the words of which it is composed.The technical term dictionary-word is lexeme. A lexeme is a lexical unit: the unit of the lexicon. The lexical structure of a langua
31、ge is the structure of its lexicon, or vocabulary. Not all words are lexemes, and not all lexemes are words. 2.1 Forms and expressionsThe American philosopher Peirce referred to as the distinction between words as tokens and words as types. It is word expressions, not word forms, that are listed and
32、 defined in a conventional dictionary. According to an alphabetic ordering of their citation-forms; what are commonly referred to the head-words of the dictionary entries. In order to assign meaning to the word forms of which a sentence is composed, we mast be able to identify them, not merely as tokens of a
