SEMANTICS PRAGMATICS
SEMANTICS PRAGMATICS
“ MEANING AND DEFINITION “
MEMBERS OF GROUP :
VIVI
AZHARA (2317059)
FARDILA
YOLANDA (2317070)
RONA
DIALESTARI (2317072)
NURTIS
SOLIHAT (2317073)
FATMAWATI
(2317076)
INTAN
RATU FADILLA (2317081)
LECTURE :
DR. IRWANDI NASHIR M.PD
STATE ISLAMIC INSTITUTE OF BUKITTINGGI
FACULTY OF TARBIYAH AND TEACHER TRAINING
ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A.
Background
Meaning and Defenition, focuses on
defenition and the part it playsin how we understand and describe meaning.
Riemerfirst discuses the differencess
between different conceptions of defeintions, such as those found insemanticsvs
those found in lexicography. He also introduces the concept of themental
lexicography. He also intoduces the concept of themental lexicon. He then goes
no to introduce basic units of meaning :word,morphemes, and also onomatopoeia
and idioms. After discussing the effect of context on meaning and the idea of
compositionality, this paper into the meatof the discussion and looks at
deifferent ways to define meanings: real andnominaldefenitions, and defenition
by ostension, context, exemplars, and genus. He also discussion
substitutability as a measure of accuracy for defenitions, aswell as problems
with defeitions and the influence of usage on definitions.
Based on the problems describe in the background. So it can be
formulated problems in this study are as follows:
-
What is meaning and definition
-
What other aspects of the meaning and use of pour are not made
explicit by the quote definition?
-
Would it be possible to eliminate these uncertainties purely
ostensively? If so, how? If not, why?
-
Can you think of other words for which a GD definition seems
difficult? What cause the difficulty?
C.
Purpose
The purpose of
writing this paper is :
1. Explained about meaning and the dictionary
2. Explained about the units of meaning
3. Explained about different ways of defining
meanings
BAB II
DISCUSSION
- Meaning and Dictionary
The conceptof a word`s meaning is closely linked to the
concept of definition, which was first made explicit in Greek philosophy by
Aristotle. Defenitions have been particuarly important for conceptual theories
of meaning. A result, an understanding of definition is necessary for any
attempt to develop a conceptual theory of word meaning. Furthermore, when
people think of a word`s maning, they are inclined to think of something like
its definition in a dictionary.
1. Semantics and Lexicography
Semantics is the linguistic and philosophical studyof meaning in
language, programming languages, formal logics and semiotic. It is concerned
with the relationship between signifiers-like words, phrases,signs,and symbols
and what they stand for reality, their denotation.
Lexicography is the process of writing,editing,and/or compiling a
dictionary.
In process of matchng a meaning with a word is analogous to that involved
in consulting a dictionary. Just as language-learner discovers the meaning of
an unknown word by looking it up in dictionary, yhe production and
understanding of ordinary speech is conceived of as a process of matching
between stored word-forms and the stored meaning representations associated
with them in long-term memory. Like dictionary definitions, these meaning
representations are imagined as discrete and relatively fixed. And just as
dictionaries aim for a maximum degree of concision, it has been assumed that
the mental lexicon also seeks the most efficient, least redundant listing of
lexemes` meaning.
Example: shall I pour
- a) I was pouring the tea when the phone rang.
b) They were pouring the concrete when the phone rang
- a) I was pouring the rainwater when the phone rang.
b)
I was pouring the mud when the phone rang.
- a) I was pouring the raintwater over the ground when the phone
b)
I was pouring the mud down the hole when the phone rang
Furthermore, the
dictionary is silent about the conditions under which pour in sense one is
usually followed by a preposition or prepositional phrase. Whereas 1a and 1b
are quite acceptable without any following
propositional phrase, 2a and 2b seem more questionable, whereas 3a and 3b are
perfectly acceptable.
Word-based
and meaning-based approaches to definition
The definitions
found in dictionaries are the result of a word-based, or semasiological approach
to meaning. This sort of approach starts with a language’s individual lexemes,
and tries to specify the meaning of each one. This is not the only possibility,
however, for the analysis of meaning in linguistics. The other approach, the
onomasiological one, has the opposite logic: start with a particular meaning,
and list the various forms available in the language for its expression. Thus,
whereas a semasiological analysis would start with a list of verbs, say scare,
frighten, terrify, startle, spook, and panic, and specify a slightly different
meaning for each (startle, for instance,referring to a considerably weaker form
of alarm than panic), an onomasiological analysis would start with a general
concept, FRIGHTEN, and list all of these verbs as its possible realizations.
The difference between the two approaches corresponds to the difference between
a dictionary and a thesaurus. As a semasiological tool, a dictionary is a list
of words, and one accesses meanings through words. A thesaurus, on the other hand,
is a list of concepts: for a particular concept, the thesaurus gives access to
the different words through which the concept could be expressed.Semasiological
and onomasiological analysis are in no way exclusive: the semasiological
approach emphasizes differences between lexemes, the onomasiological one
similarities. Furthermore, both are necessary to a full description of the
processes underlying communication. A complete description of linguistic
performance will show how a speaker achieves the mapping between the concept or
meaning she wishes to express and the word forms actually chosen: given the
need to express the concept or meaning FRIGHTEN, for example, what are the
onomasiological principles according to which one of the possible verbs listed
above is chosen? For the hearer, however, a semasiological approach is called
for. Hearing or reading the word frightenin a particular context, what is the
meaning which the hearer will assign to this verb?
- The Units Of Meaning
I.
Words and Morphemes
What is the
word? Ferdinan de Saussure said
that a word is like a coin because it has two sides to it that can never be
separated. One side of this metaphorical coin is the form of a word: the sounds
(or letters) that combine to make the spoken or written word. The other side of
the coin is the meaning of the word: the image or concept we have in our mind
when we use the word. So a word is something that a given form with a given
meaning.
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unitin a language. A morpheme
is not identical to a word. The main difference between them is that a morphem
sometimes does not stand alone, but a word, by definition, always stands alone.
Ex:
· “Unbreakable” is composed of
three morphemes: un- (a bound
morpheme signifying “not”), -break-
(the root, a free morpheme), and –able (a
free morpheme signifing “can be done’)
· Allomorphs
of the plural morpheme for regular
nouns: /s/ (e.g. in cats /kæts/), /ɪz, əz/ (e.g. in dishes /dɪʃɪz/), and /z/
(e.g. in dogs /dɒɡz/).
Meaning Below the Morpheme : Sound Symbolism
The question of what level of
grammatical sructure a meaning should be attributed to may often be
problematic, and boundary cases, where meanings seem to straddle several
different grammatical units, occur quite frequently. One such boundary case is
sound symbolis, ( also known as ideophony or onomatopoeia ). This is existence
of semi-systematic corespondences between of the individual morpheme, such as
English clas, clang, clatter,
etc. Such associations may sometimes
have a clear imitative basis, as with English click, thwack,meow, etc. Sond symbolism is by no means limited to
English, of course. In Ilocano (Cordilleran, Philippines), for instance,a high
front vowel is often used in words denoing high pitched sounds, like :
singgit ‘high pitched voice’ :
sing-i ‘sobbing (of a child)’ ; sultip ‘whistle’; riri ‘whimper’ (Rubino
2001:304).
Here the choice of vowel imitates
the characteristic timbre of the sound referred to. Similarly, the alveolar
fricative is often found nword representing rustling sounds or the sound of
water:
- Karasaka
‘rustling sound of leaves’
- Saraisi ‘sound
of rippling water’
- Barasabas
‘sound of heavy rain’
A possible connection might be
discerned here between theacoustic quality of the fricative and irregular, sound
of the refeent. But theimitative basis of such associations is often
lessobvious,at east to English speakers. For example,docments the fact that
many words indicating ‘smallness’ contain kp in Emain 9 Niger-congo, Nigeria):
Kpuku‘pointed’ :small,compact and
round, short
Kpdo‘round’ : small, circular and
supple, proportional
Kpeke ‘petit’: small,thin, short.
In all cases we have a sound-meaning
correspondence which existsbelowthe level of the individual mopheme. Neither
the high front vowel nor the alveolar fricative in Ilocano, nor kp in Emacan,
formally, be considered as individual morphemes,since once cannot remove them
from the ideophonic words in the (examples) and retain possible roots to which
other morphemes could attach.
Meanings Above the Word Level : Idioms
Idioms constitute another boundary
case where it is not clear what the correct level is for the chracterization of
meaning. we defined idioms asnon-compositional phrases-phrases like throw in the
towel whose overall meaning is not the same as the combined meaning of the
individual parts. However, it is often possible to advance an interpretation of
the individual words of an idiom which removes its idiomatic or
non-comositionalcharacer.
For example, the english idiom “to
scoop the pool”, which means something like ‘to winor gain everything’ with the
entire unit scoop the pool, without trying to break the phrase down further.
Neverthless, if we imagine scoop as having a meaning like ‘quickly gather up a
large quantity ofsomething in a single movement’, and pool as meaning ‘the
entire set o available items’. Then the arbitrarines and non-compositionality
of the expressionis reduced, and the interpretation ‘win or gain everything’can
follow unproblemaically from the combined meanings of the expression’s
elements. The fact that a variety of possible interpretations is availabe for
each component of theidiom, with consequent defferences in the overall
interpretation of the expresion,only adds to the ambiguity. Thus, other
speakers of English might associate scoop with a scoop in jounalism (a news
story abtained exclusively by a single journalist), while others might analyse
pool as in some way referring to a body of water.
As we have been using the term, an
idiom is non-compositional combination of words. But if we define an idiom as a
non-compositional combination of morpheme, then idiom can also exist on the
sublexical level. In following xample from Lakota (Siouan, Mississippi Valley;
Rankin et al.2002: 181-182), a noun stem ‘heart’ is compounded with the verb
stem meaning ‘be good’; the meaning of the resulting compound, ‘I made him/her
angry”, is in no way simply the combination of individual meanings of its
component morphemes : Heart-be, good = I
made him/her angry.
Contextual
Modulation Of Meaning
The examples of noun-incorporation we have just seen show the
meaning of words and other morphemes varying according to their collocation, the immediate linguistic
context in which they occur. This sort of variation is found throughout
language. We can see a similar phenomenon in English, where the meanings of
verbs seem to vary slightly depending on the noun which they govern. If I cut my foot, for example, I am doing
something that is rather different from what I am doing when I cut the grass, or when I cut a cake, cut someone’s hair, cut the
wood, cut a diamond, cut a deck ofcards, cut a disc or cut a notch. The nature of the event,
the means by which it is accomplished, its typical object, and the extent to
which it is deliberate may all vary in these different uses. The degree of
semantic ‘distance’ gets even greater if we consider more ‘extended’ meanings,
like cut a deal, cut corners,
cut a paragraph or cut prices.
The following
two possibilities gives the best semantic description of English:
· One which lists
the meanings of cut, foot, grass, cake, hair, etc., and sees the specific
meanings of the collocations cut one’s
foot, cut the grass, cut a cake, etc. as derived compositionally from
the meanings of the parts; or
· One which just
lists all the different collocations in which cut appears, and specifies a different meaning for the entire
collocation?
First
Possibility: Compositionality
The first possibility is that the meanings of cut one’s foot, cut the grass, cut a Cake,
etc. result compositionally from the meaning of the verb cut and themeanings of its noun
objects. The meaning of cut the grass just
is the meaningof cut combined with the meaning of grass. This might work in one ofTwo
ways.
· The general
meaning hypothesis: Cut might
have the same vagueor General
meaning in all its different collocations: it refers to some act of
accomplishing a material breach in a surface, with the particular details of
each type of breach being inferred by the listener, rather than being built
into the meaning of the verb itself.
Alternatively,
· The multiple
meaning hypothesis: Cut might
have a separate meaning In each collocation: the cut in cut one’s foot has
its own entry in the Mental lexicon.
Problems with the general meaning hypothesis The problem with the first option is that describing this common
core of general meaning supposedly present in all cases of cut is not
necessarily an easy matter. The Concise Oxford 2004 edition gives ‘make an
opening, incision,
or wound with a
sharp tool or object’ as its definition, but this is not involved when someone
cuts butter, for example, nor when a whip cuts someone’s flesh :
The cutting object in these situations need not be sharp. Perhaps,
then, we need to dismiss these uses as in some way special or extended and
therefore absolve them from the scope of the vague definition:
Perhaps ‘make an opening, incision, or wound with a sharp tool or
object’ will work for all the others. Even if it does, though, we still have a
problem: the definition does not adequately distinguish cut from chop, slit,
stab or unpick: to chop a sausage, slit a letter, stab someone’s side or unpick
a seam is equally to ‘make an opening, incision, or wound with a sharp tool or
object’, but we could not also describe these actions as cutting.
Problems
with the multiple meaning hypothesisThe second option is to propose multiple meanings for cut, a separate one for each
collocation. In cut one’s foot,
for example, cut could be
described as meaning something like ‘partially breach a surface with a sharp
instrument, typically accidentally :
when one cuts one’s foot,
one typically does not detach one’s foot from the rest of the body. In cut the grass, and cut someone’s hair, on the other
hand, the verb conveys the meaning of more than just a partial breach in the
surface of the object: the meaning of these collocations is that one part of
the object is completely detached from the rest. Now consider cut a notch: here the object is brought into being by the action of
the verb: if I cut a notch into
a stick, the notch did not exist before I created it. As a result, the meaning
of cut in cut a notch could be paraphrased as
‘create by breaching with a sharp instrument’, an entirely different meaning
from that found in the other collocations, which all presuppose the prior
existence of the object being cut. Again, when we talk of a whip cutting someone’s skin, we have the
meaning of breach to a surface, as in cutting
one’s foot, but without the usual element of ‘sharp object’: being made
of leather, whips are not normally considered as sharp.
List of
different meanings of cut:
· Partially
breach surface with a sharp instrument, typically accidentally
· Create by
partially breaching the surface with a sharp instrument
· Detach one part
of object from another with one’s hands
· Detach one part
of object from another with a sharp instrument etc.
These will all
have highly specific Collocation restrictions:
The meaning
‘partially breach surface with a sharp instrument, typically accidentally, for
example, will be a very likely sense of cut
in collocation with foot,
but not with cake: cutting a cake is usually an entirely
deliberate action.
The first is the sheer number of the different senses to be
attributed to cut. Since the action of cutting in each of the examples
in question is slightly different, we seem to need a very large range of
different senses. While it is clearly impossible to define the meaning of cut
in just a single paraphrase extended meanings like cut text, cut a disc,
etc.
The second problem is related: given this variety of different
possible meanings of cut, how
does the correct specific meaning get chosen in a given case? How does a hearer
know that the appropriate interpretation of cut in cut a deck of
cards is ‘detach one part of object from another with one’s hands’ and
not ‘create by partially breaching the integrity of a surface with a sharp
instrument’? The second option would clearly be wrong, and our theory of the
meaning of the expressions needs some way to exclude it.
Second
possibility: non-compositionality
This avoids
several of the problems of the compositional solution:
· We do not have
to advance a general definition of cut that will work in every context,
as we do in the general-meaning version of the compositional solution
· We do not have
the problem of word-sense disambiguation, since each collocation carries its
own definition.
Here is another consideration in favour of non-compositionality. It
is not just cut whose meaning
is determined by its collocation environment: the collocation also determines
what reading is operative for cut’s
object. Thus, English speakers
know that cutting the grass refers
to the grown grass blades, whereas planting
the grass refers to grass seeds or shoots, and smoking grass refers to the leaves of a completely different
plant.
Figure 2.1:Options for analyzing collocations
cut a cake 
cut someone’s hair cut
has the same
vague/general
cut
the wood compositional meaning meaning
in every collocation
 |
|||
 |
|||
cut a diamond
cut
a deck of cards cut
has a different
meaning in
cut
a disc non-compositional every
collocation
meaning
cut
a notch,
etc.
These arguments are obviously shaped by many assumptions about the
nature and limits of linguistic competence. In the absence of a clear
understanding of how the brain actually
doesprocess and store language, linguists have assumed that their
description of assumed linguistic
competence
should reflect the same criteria of economy and non-redundancy that operate in
real paper dictionaries. Thus, much linguistic research has assumed that the
mental lexicon does not contain a huge number of independently listed entries,
but that it extracts the maximum number of generalizations about the meaning of
a verb like cut across all its collocation contexts, in order to present
the most economical, least redundant entry. As a result, it has been the
topmost solution in Figure 2.1 that has traditionally been considered
preferable.
Differents ways
of defining meaning
1.
Real and nominal definition.
posterior analytics, a treatise devoted to the explanation of the
structure of scientific knowledge. A definition can therefore be considered
either as a sort of summation of the essence or inherent nature of a thing
(real definition latinres’thing) or as a description of the meaning of the word
(nominal definition latinnomen’name,noun’).
The
situation which promp people to utter speech, include every object and
happening in their universe. In order to give a scientifically accurate
definition of meaning for every form of a language, we should have to have a
scientifically accurate knowledge of everything in the speakers’world. We can define the names of minerals, for
example, in terms of chemistry and mineralogy, as when we say that the ordinary
meaning of the English word salt is ‘sodium chloride’ (NaCI).
Linguistics should appeal to
technical scientific disciplines in formulating definitions, the true meaning
of natural language word. according to bloomfield, it to be identified with yhe
scientific ‘definition’ or best possible teory of its denotation. As a result,
whenever a scientifically establisheddefinition of a denotation is
missing,there is simply, nothing that linguistics can say with any certainly
about the word’s meaning. Many actual definitions aspire to fulfill both these
function simultaneously. The two functions are, however, rather different, and
they should be kept apart..in order to differentiate between them, let us call
the first type of definition extensional definition, and the second type
cognitive definition.
2.
Definition by ostension.
The most obvious way to define many words is, simply, by ostension,
or by pointing out the objects which they denotate. In soite of the apparent
obviousness of this method, it is beset by difficulties. None of these question can, in fact, be settled by
obstensive definition: every attempt to make the devinition more precise
ostensivelly would give rise to a new set of question.
The only way to overcome the problems of ostensive definition would
seem to be to use language itself as the medium in which definitions can be
phrased.
3.
Definition by synonym.
to
define words by providing synonyms, in either the same language as the world
being defined or in a different one. Thus , one could give mad and furious as
English definition of angry, and kulu as a walpri one. The problem with this
strategy is that it is usually possible to challenge the identity between the difiniens
and the definiendum.s
Definition by context or typical exemplar
Another way to
define a word is to situate it in a system of wider relations through which the
specificity of the definiendum can be seen.
This is an
example of definition by context:
the definition identifies the event of scratching by placing it in relation to
another event, being itchy, whose meaning is assumed to be already known, and
which is taken as a typical context for the definiendum.
Definition by typical exemplar is another example of this relational strategy: here, the
definition is a list of typical examples or instances of the definiendum. If,
given the German definiendum Vogel, I supply a list like ‘swans, robins, geese,
hens, magpies, etc.’
Definition by genus and differentia
The two
preceding types of definition are essentially relational, defining a word’s
meaning through its connections with other words. They may often be workable as
cognitive definitional strategies, but they are unlikely to be successful as
extensional definitions.
According to Aristotle,
definition involves specifying the broader class to which the definiendum
belongs (often called the definiendum’s genus), and then showing the
distinguishing feature of the definiendum (the differentia) which distinguishes
it from the other members of this broader class.
A different
kind of problem affects cognitive and extensional GD definitions equally, in
those cases where it is not clear that the definiendum does belong to any broader
class. Self and time are two possible examples.
Definition and substitutability
For most
semantic theories, substitution of the definiens for the definiendum should be
truth preserving in all contexts.
Substituting
‘keep in equilibrium’ into these sentences will change their register, and the
resulting utterances will often sound considerably less idiomatic and more
technical
(e.g. Now,
children, you have to keep the egg inequilibrium on the spoon).
Preservation of
truth is not the only possible criterion for the regulation of definitions.
Instead, the criterion of preservation of meaning (in an infor-mal sense of
this term) is also conceivable. On this view, a defnition is accepted if it can
be substituted for the definiendum ‘with sense intact’ (salvosensu): if, that
is, it involves neither addition nor loss of meaning with respect to the
meaning of the definiendum. This suggestion raises an important problem,
however: since it is the definitionitself that is supposed to reveal an
expression’s meaning, the best way to determine that two words have the same
meaning is to compare their definitions. Preservation of meaning as a criterion
of definitional adequacy is therefore circular.
Semantic
primitives
Impossible to
give a definition of every word in a language using other words of the same
language at some point the chain of definition must come to an end. Since the
vocabulary of any language is limited, the metalanguage will eventually have to
include object language definienda, thereby leaving some of the letter without
independent definition. This is a problem for any attempt, such as thatade in
linguistic semantic theories, to specify the meaning of every lexeme in
language.
I give you
hundred crowns, to be received from Titus, Titus will send you to Caius, Caius
to Maevius, but if you prepetually sent on in this way you will never be said
to have received anything. (Parkinson,
1973)
One of these
was the conceptual theory of meaning, which identified meanings with concepts.
Given such an identification, we can imagine several different possibilities
for the relation between lexemes and concepts. The two concepts are, that is,
semantic primitives, in spite of appearances, they cannot be completely broken
down into anything conceptually simpler. Something approaching this view has
been advocated by fodor, who argues for a lexicon where each lexical item is a
semantic primitive or atom no internal definitional structure.
...I take
semantic facts with full ontological, and I can't think of a better way to say
what 'keep' means than to say that it meand keep. If as I suppose, the
concept KEEP is an atom, it's hardly surprising that there's no better way to
say what 'keep' means than to say it means 'keep'. I know of no reason,
emprical or a priori, to suppose that the expressive power of English can be
captured in a language whose stock of morphologically primitive expressions is
interestingly smaller than the lexicon of english. (Fodor, 1998:55)
These semantic
primitives are the basic building blocks of meaning out of which all other
meanings can be constructed.
The belief that
responsible semantic analysis must be grounded in a level of elementary,
primitive units is implicity or explicity held bymany semantics (Filmore 1971,
Jeckendoff 1983, Allan 2001). Example of theory semantics primitives in modern
linguistics is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) theory of Wierzbicka and
Goddard. List of semantic primitives which the NSM approach uses for the
definition of meaning :
I, you,
someone, people, something/thing, body; this, the same, other; one, two, some,
all, much/many; good, bad; big, small; think know, want, feel, see, hear, say,
words, true; do, happen, move; there is, have; live, die; when/time, now,
before, after a long lime, a short time, for some time; where/place, here,
above, below, far, near, side, inside; not, maybe, can, because, if; very,
more; kind of, part of; like. (Goddard 2002: 4)
The semantic
primitives can be used to define other members of the vocabulary of a language,
the primitives themselves are immpossible to define in terms of anything
simpler.
NSM theory
claims that the indefinable nature of its primitives derives from their status
as conceptual primitives, the primitives are hyphothesized in other words, to
express the set of fundamental human concepts (Wierzbicka 1996: 13) considered
to be both innate and universal. What this means is that every natural language
prosseses an identical semantic core of primitive concepta from which all the
other lexicalized concepts of the language can be built up.
Problemas with
definition
One of the most
frequent criticism of definitional theories of semantics is that no satisfying
definition of a word has ever actually been formulated. The scepticism about
the existence of definition is so widespread. In fact, that many researchers in
disciplines closly related to linguistics, such as cognitive science and
artificial inteligence, have completely abandoned the idea that definitions
even exist the emphasis on definitions in linguistics strikes many from these other disciplines as
misguided. Many of the derive fromthe problems involved in a psychologistic
interpretation of definition as concepts, in which the structure of definition reflects the
structure of the undelying concept. For example, the concept BACHELOR could be
said to be the combination of the concept UNMERRIED and MAN in just the same
way as the definition of bachelor might be thought to be 'unmerried man'.
A classic case
of definition inadequency is the proposed 'definition' we have mentioned of
bachelor as 'unmerried man' this is the type of definition found in many
popular dictionaries. One problem here is there are many types of unmerried
male, such as widowers, the pope and tarzan, whom we would not describe as
bachelors. As result, 'unmerried male' is not substituble for bachelor salva
veritate, and definition therefore fails. If a definer tries hard enough,
satisfactory definitions can be achieved, it is just that no one has yet taken
the time to do so. This is exactly the point made by Wierzbicka (1996).
According to her, the true definitions of most ordinary words are significantly
longer than the brief statements we are used to reading in dictionaries.
Example imperfect first approximation definition of paint:
X painted Y
with Z =
(a) X did
something to Y
(b) like people
do
(c) when they
want something to look good
(d) when X did
it
(e) X put some
stuff Z on all parts of Y that one could see
(f) if someone
looked at Z at that time
(g) this person
could say what colour Z was
(h) at the same
time, this person could think that part of Z was water
(i) X wanted Z
to be like part of Y
(j) after X did
it, Z was like part of Y. (Wierzbicka 1996)
As Wierzbicka
points out, this definition is both longer, and structurally different from the
type of definition familiar from dictionaries. It is essentially a definition
by context, specifying 'a fairly complex scenario, with a number of temporal
and causal links between the components'.
The proper
ground rule to be that one expression defines another only if the two
expressions are synonymous and take it to be a necessary condition for their
synonymy that whatever one expression applies to, the other does too.
Under this
view, a definition has to be substitutable for the definiendum in every single
context. The infinite variety of language use, it would seem that any word can
be used in any context as a result, a comprehensive definition would seem
unattainable.
Definition,
understanding and use
What is the
point of defining meaning? In some domains of human activity, definition
fuction as the guarantors of the consistency of language. This is particularly
so in science and technology. I can define the meaning of 'water' extansionally
as H2O, but if the addressee of the definition has no knowledge of chemistry
this definitio will not be effective in bringing about an understanding of the
word's meaning.
But definitions
do take on a central role in language use if we take concepts are or to be
essentially definition in nature, and assume that concepts are or enter into
the meanings of words. If concepts correspond to word meanings, and word
meanings can be captured in definition, then it is the definition which is in
some sense actived during language use. To claim that definitions are involved
in language use in this way is not to claim that they are involved
'consciously'. We may be quite able to use a word appropriately, without being
able to phrase a satisfactory definition of it.
CHAPTER
III
CLOSSING
CONCLUSION
The concept of a word’s meaning is closely linked to
the concept of definition. Many linguists identify the task of linguistic
semantics with the task of describing the entries stored in the mental lexicon, a stock of words and
meanings stored in long-term memory: the definition of a word is part of its
entry in the mental lexicon, and the process of matching a meaning with a
word-form is assumed to be analogous to that involved in consulting a
dictionary. In order to serve the purposes of serious linguistic description,
the definitions in the lexicon must be much more detailed than is usual in
ordinary dictionaries.
What units need to receive definition?
Any attempt to analyze the meanings of language must
specify what the meaning-bearing units are. Individual lexemes are the central
examples of units with individually describable meanings. Morphemes also have
meanings, as do phrasal verbs and compounds. Ambiguities about the level of
grammatical structure to which meaning is correctly attributed are not
infrequent: sound symbolism and idioms exemplify cases where the correct level
for the analysis of a meaning may not be clear.
Definition of the essence of a thing (real definition), or definition of the
meaning of a word (nominal definition).
Most linguists take nominal definition to be the type that is of interest to
linguistic semantic research. Cognitive and extensional definition A
nominal definition may be of two types: Cognitive
(aimed to inculcate an understanding of the word’s correct use), or Extensional (aimed at delimiting the
denotation of the word).
Modes of definition Cognitive nominal definition can take a number of
forms. It may beDefinition by ostension, Definition by synonymy,Definition by
context or typical exemplar, orDefinition by genus and differentia.Often,
definitions combine these means. Definitions are typically required to be
truth-preserving under substitution for their defineendum.
REFERENCE
Allan,
Keith. 1986. Linguistic meaning. London:Routledge and Kegan Paul
Carnap,
R. 1942. Introduction to semantics, Cambridge, MA
Ullmann,
Stephen. 1972. A basic kukatja to English dictionary.
Taylor,
John. 2002. Cognitive grammar, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Nick
Riemer, Introducing semantic, Cambridge
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A.
Background
Meaning and Defenition, focuses on
defenition and the part it playsin how we understand and describe meaning.
Riemerfirst discuses the differencess
between different conceptions of defeintions, such as those found insemanticsvs
those found in lexicography. He also introduces the concept of themental
lexicography. He also intoduces the concept of themental lexicon. He then goes
no to introduce basic units of meaning :word,morphemes, and also onomatopoeia
and idioms. After discussing the effect of context on meaning and the idea of
compositionality, this paper into the meatof the discussion and looks at
deifferent ways to define meanings: real andnominaldefenitions, and defenition
by ostension, context, exemplars, and genus. He also discussion
substitutability as a measure of accuracy for defenitions, aswell as problems
with defeitions and the influence of usage on definitions.
Based on the problems describe in the background. So it can be
formulated problems in this study are as follows:
-
What is meaning and definition
-
What other aspects of the meaning and use of pour are not made
explicit by the quote definition?
-
Would it be possible to eliminate these uncertainties purely
ostensively? If so, how? If not, why?
-
Can you think of other words for which a GD definition seems
difficult? What cause the difficulty?
C.
Purpose
The purpose of
writing this paper is :
1. Explained about meaning and the dictionary
2. Explained about the units of meaning
3. Explained about different ways of defining
meanings
BAB II
DISCUSSION
- Meaning and Dictionary
The conceptof a word`s meaning is closely linked to the
concept of definition, which was first made explicit in Greek philosophy by
Aristotle. Defenitions have been particuarly important for conceptual theories
of meaning. A result, an understanding of definition is necessary for any
attempt to develop a conceptual theory of word meaning. Furthermore, when
people think of a word`s maning, they are inclined to think of something like
its definition in a dictionary.
1. Semantics and Lexicography
Semantics is the linguistic and philosophical studyof meaning in
language, programming languages, formal logics and semiotic. It is concerned
with the relationship between signifiers-like words, phrases,signs,and symbols
and what they stand for reality, their denotation.
Lexicography is the process of writing,editing,and/or compiling a
dictionary.
In process of matchng a meaning with a word is analogous to that involved
in consulting a dictionary. Just as language-learner discovers the meaning of
an unknown word by looking it up in dictionary, yhe production and
understanding of ordinary speech is conceived of as a process of matching
between stored word-forms and the stored meaning representations associated
with them in long-term memory. Like dictionary definitions, these meaning
representations are imagined as discrete and relatively fixed. And just as
dictionaries aim for a maximum degree of concision, it has been assumed that
the mental lexicon also seeks the most efficient, least redundant listing of
lexemes` meaning.
Example: shall I pour
- a) I was pouring the tea when the phone rang.
b) They were pouring the concrete when the phone rang
- a) I was pouring the rainwater when the phone rang.
b)
I was pouring the mud when the phone rang.
- a) I was pouring the raintwater over the ground when the phone
b)
I was pouring the mud down the hole when the phone rang
Furthermore, the
dictionary is silent about the conditions under which pour in sense one is
usually followed by a preposition or prepositional phrase. Whereas 1a and 1b
are quite acceptable without any following
propositional phrase, 2a and 2b seem more questionable, whereas 3a and 3b are
perfectly acceptable.
Word-based
and meaning-based approaches to definition
The definitions
found in dictionaries are the result of a word-based, or semasiological approach
to meaning. This sort of approach starts with a language’s individual lexemes,
and tries to specify the meaning of each one. This is not the only possibility,
however, for the analysis of meaning in linguistics. The other approach, the
onomasiological one, has the opposite logic: start with a particular meaning,
and list the various forms available in the language for its expression. Thus,
whereas a semasiological analysis would start with a list of verbs, say scare,
frighten, terrify, startle, spook, and panic, and specify a slightly different
meaning for each (startle, for instance,referring to a considerably weaker form
of alarm than panic), an onomasiological analysis would start with a general
concept, FRIGHTEN, and list all of these verbs as its possible realizations.
The difference between the two approaches corresponds to the difference between
a dictionary and a thesaurus. As a semasiological tool, a dictionary is a list
of words, and one accesses meanings through words. A thesaurus, on the other hand,
is a list of concepts: for a particular concept, the thesaurus gives access to
the different words through which the concept could be expressed.Semasiological
and onomasiological analysis are in no way exclusive: the semasiological
approach emphasizes differences between lexemes, the onomasiological one
similarities. Furthermore, both are necessary to a full description of the
processes underlying communication. A complete description of linguistic
performance will show how a speaker achieves the mapping between the concept or
meaning she wishes to express and the word forms actually chosen: given the
need to express the concept or meaning FRIGHTEN, for example, what are the
onomasiological principles according to which one of the possible verbs listed
above is chosen? For the hearer, however, a semasiological approach is called
for. Hearing or reading the word frightenin a particular context, what is the
meaning which the hearer will assign to this verb?
- The Units Of Meaning
I.
Words and Morphemes
What is the
word? Ferdinan de Saussure said
that a word is like a coin because it has two sides to it that can never be
separated. One side of this metaphorical coin is the form of a word: the sounds
(or letters) that combine to make the spoken or written word. The other side of
the coin is the meaning of the word: the image or concept we have in our mind
when we use the word. So a word is something that a given form with a given
meaning.
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unitin a language. A morpheme
is not identical to a word. The main difference between them is that a morphem
sometimes does not stand alone, but a word, by definition, always stands alone.
Ex:
· “Unbreakable” is composed of
three morphemes: un- (a bound
morpheme signifying “not”), -break-
(the root, a free morpheme), and –able (a
free morpheme signifing “can be done’)
· Allomorphs
of the plural morpheme for regular
nouns: /s/ (e.g. in cats /kæts/), /ɪz, əz/ (e.g. in dishes /dɪʃɪz/), and /z/
(e.g. in dogs /dɒɡz/).
Meaning Below the Morpheme : Sound Symbolism
The question of what level of
grammatical sructure a meaning should be attributed to may often be
problematic, and boundary cases, where meanings seem to straddle several
different grammatical units, occur quite frequently. One such boundary case is
sound symbolis, ( also known as ideophony or onomatopoeia ). This is existence
of semi-systematic corespondences between of the individual morpheme, such as
English clas, clang, clatter,
etc. Such associations may sometimes
have a clear imitative basis, as with English click, thwack,meow, etc. Sond symbolism is by no means limited to
English, of course. In Ilocano (Cordilleran, Philippines), for instance,a high
front vowel is often used in words denoing high pitched sounds, like :
singgit ‘high pitched voice’ :
sing-i ‘sobbing (of a child)’ ; sultip ‘whistle’; riri ‘whimper’ (Rubino
2001:304).
Here the choice of vowel imitates
the characteristic timbre of the sound referred to. Similarly, the alveolar
fricative is often found nword representing rustling sounds or the sound of
water:
- Karasaka
‘rustling sound of leaves’
- Saraisi ‘sound
of rippling water’
- Barasabas
‘sound of heavy rain’
A possible connection might be
discerned here between theacoustic quality of the fricative and irregular, sound
of the refeent. But theimitative basis of such associations is often
lessobvious,at east to English speakers. For example,docments the fact that
many words indicating ‘smallness’ contain kp in Emain 9 Niger-congo, Nigeria):
Kpuku‘pointed’ :small,compact and
round, short
Kpdo‘round’ : small, circular and
supple, proportional
Kpeke ‘petit’: small,thin, short.
In all cases we have a sound-meaning
correspondence which existsbelowthe level of the individual mopheme. Neither
the high front vowel nor the alveolar fricative in Ilocano, nor kp in Emacan,
formally, be considered as individual morphemes,since once cannot remove them
from the ideophonic words in the (examples) and retain possible roots to which
other morphemes could attach.
Meanings Above the Word Level : Idioms
Idioms constitute another boundary
case where it is not clear what the correct level is for the chracterization of
meaning. we defined idioms asnon-compositional phrases-phrases like throw in the
towel whose overall meaning is not the same as the combined meaning of the
individual parts. However, it is often possible to advance an interpretation of
the individual words of an idiom which removes its idiomatic or
non-comositionalcharacer.
For example, the english idiom “to
scoop the pool”, which means something like ‘to winor gain everything’ with the
entire unit scoop the pool, without trying to break the phrase down further.
Neverthless, if we imagine scoop as having a meaning like ‘quickly gather up a
large quantity ofsomething in a single movement’, and pool as meaning ‘the
entire set o available items’. Then the arbitrarines and non-compositionality
of the expressionis reduced, and the interpretation ‘win or gain everything’can
follow unproblemaically from the combined meanings of the expression’s
elements. The fact that a variety of possible interpretations is availabe for
each component of theidiom, with consequent defferences in the overall
interpretation of the expresion,only adds to the ambiguity. Thus, other
speakers of English might associate scoop with a scoop in jounalism (a news
story abtained exclusively by a single journalist), while others might analyse
pool as in some way referring to a body of water.
As we have been using the term, an
idiom is non-compositional combination of words. But if we define an idiom as a
non-compositional combination of morpheme, then idiom can also exist on the
sublexical level. In following xample from Lakota (Siouan, Mississippi Valley;
Rankin et al.2002: 181-182), a noun stem ‘heart’ is compounded with the verb
stem meaning ‘be good’; the meaning of the resulting compound, ‘I made him/her
angry”, is in no way simply the combination of individual meanings of its
component morphemes : Heart-be, good = I
made him/her angry.
Contextual
Modulation Of Meaning
The examples of noun-incorporation we have just seen show the
meaning of words and other morphemes varying according to their collocation, the immediate linguistic
context in which they occur. This sort of variation is found throughout
language. We can see a similar phenomenon in English, where the meanings of
verbs seem to vary slightly depending on the noun which they govern. If I cut my foot, for example, I am doing
something that is rather different from what I am doing when I cut the grass, or when I cut a cake, cut someone’s hair, cut the
wood, cut a diamond, cut a deck ofcards, cut a disc or cut a notch. The nature of the event,
the means by which it is accomplished, its typical object, and the extent to
which it is deliberate may all vary in these different uses. The degree of
semantic ‘distance’ gets even greater if we consider more ‘extended’ meanings,
like cut a deal, cut corners,
cut a paragraph or cut prices.
The following
two possibilities gives the best semantic description of English:
· One which lists
the meanings of cut, foot, grass, cake, hair, etc., and sees the specific
meanings of the collocations cut one’s
foot, cut the grass, cut a cake, etc. as derived compositionally from
the meanings of the parts; or
· One which just
lists all the different collocations in which cut appears, and specifies a different meaning for the entire
collocation?
First
Possibility: Compositionality
The first possibility is that the meanings of cut one’s foot, cut the grass, cut a Cake,
etc. result compositionally from the meaning of the verb cut and themeanings of its noun
objects. The meaning of cut the grass just
is the meaningof cut combined with the meaning of grass. This might work in one ofTwo
ways.
· The general
meaning hypothesis: Cut might
have the same vagueor General
meaning in all its different collocations: it refers to some act of
accomplishing a material breach in a surface, with the particular details of
each type of breach being inferred by the listener, rather than being built
into the meaning of the verb itself.
Alternatively,
· The multiple
meaning hypothesis: Cut might
have a separate meaning In each collocation: the cut in cut one’s foot has
its own entry in the Mental lexicon.
Problems with the general meaning hypothesis The problem with the first option is that describing this common
core of general meaning supposedly present in all cases of cut is not
necessarily an easy matter. The Concise Oxford 2004 edition gives ‘make an
opening, incision,
or wound with a
sharp tool or object’ as its definition, but this is not involved when someone
cuts butter, for example, nor when a whip cuts someone’s flesh :
The cutting object in these situations need not be sharp. Perhaps,
then, we need to dismiss these uses as in some way special or extended and
therefore absolve them from the scope of the vague definition:
Perhaps ‘make an opening, incision, or wound with a sharp tool or
object’ will work for all the others. Even if it does, though, we still have a
problem: the definition does not adequately distinguish cut from chop, slit,
stab or unpick: to chop a sausage, slit a letter, stab someone’s side or unpick
a seam is equally to ‘make an opening, incision, or wound with a sharp tool or
object’, but we could not also describe these actions as cutting.
Problems
with the multiple meaning hypothesisThe second option is to propose multiple meanings for cut, a separate one for each
collocation. In cut one’s foot,
for example, cut could be
described as meaning something like ‘partially breach a surface with a sharp
instrument, typically accidentally :
when one cuts one’s foot,
one typically does not detach one’s foot from the rest of the body. In cut the grass, and cut someone’s hair, on the other
hand, the verb conveys the meaning of more than just a partial breach in the
surface of the object: the meaning of these collocations is that one part of
the object is completely detached from the rest. Now consider cut a notch: here the object is brought into being by the action of
the verb: if I cut a notch into
a stick, the notch did not exist before I created it. As a result, the meaning
of cut in cut a notch could be paraphrased as
‘create by breaching with a sharp instrument’, an entirely different meaning
from that found in the other collocations, which all presuppose the prior
existence of the object being cut. Again, when we talk of a whip cutting someone’s skin, we have the
meaning of breach to a surface, as in cutting
one’s foot, but without the usual element of ‘sharp object’: being made
of leather, whips are not normally considered as sharp.
List of
different meanings of cut:
· Partially
breach surface with a sharp instrument, typically accidentally
· Create by
partially breaching the surface with a sharp instrument
· Detach one part
of object from another with one’s hands
· Detach one part
of object from another with a sharp instrument etc.
These will all
have highly specific Collocation restrictions:
The meaning
‘partially breach surface with a sharp instrument, typically accidentally, for
example, will be a very likely sense of cut
in collocation with foot,
but not with cake: cutting a cake is usually an entirely
deliberate action.
The first is the sheer number of the different senses to be
attributed to cut. Since the action of cutting in each of the examples
in question is slightly different, we seem to need a very large range of
different senses. While it is clearly impossible to define the meaning of cut
in just a single paraphrase extended meanings like cut text, cut a disc,
etc.
The second problem is related: given this variety of different
possible meanings of cut, how
does the correct specific meaning get chosen in a given case? How does a hearer
know that the appropriate interpretation of cut in cut a deck of
cards is ‘detach one part of object from another with one’s hands’ and
not ‘create by partially breaching the integrity of a surface with a sharp
instrument’? The second option would clearly be wrong, and our theory of the
meaning of the expressions needs some way to exclude it.
Second
possibility: non-compositionality
This avoids
several of the problems of the compositional solution:
· We do not have
to advance a general definition of cut that will work in every context,
as we do in the general-meaning version of the compositional solution
· We do not have
the problem of word-sense disambiguation, since each collocation carries its
own definition.
Here is another consideration in favour of non-compositionality. It
is not just cut whose meaning
is determined by its collocation environment: the collocation also determines
what reading is operative for cut’s
object. Thus, English speakers
know that cutting the grass refers
to the grown grass blades, whereas planting
the grass refers to grass seeds or shoots, and smoking grass refers to the leaves of a completely different
plant.
Figure 2.1:Options for analyzing collocations
cut a cake cut someone’s hair cut
has the same
vague/general
cut
the wood compositional meaning meaning
in every collocation
|
|||
|
|||
cut a diamond
cut
a deck of cards cut
has a different
meaning in
cut
a disc non-compositional every
collocation
meaning
cut
a notch,
etc.
These arguments are obviously shaped by many assumptions about the
nature and limits of linguistic competence. In the absence of a clear
understanding of how the brain actually
doesprocess and store language, linguists have assumed that their
description of assumed linguistic
competence
should reflect the same criteria of economy and non-redundancy that operate in
real paper dictionaries. Thus, much linguistic research has assumed that the
mental lexicon does not contain a huge number of independently listed entries,
but that it extracts the maximum number of generalizations about the meaning of
a verb like cut across all its collocation contexts, in order to present
the most economical, least redundant entry. As a result, it has been the
topmost solution in Figure 2.1 that has traditionally been considered
preferable.
Differents ways
of defining meaning
1.
Real and nominal definition.
posterior analytics, a treatise devoted to the explanation of the
structure of scientific knowledge. A definition can therefore be considered
either as a sort of summation of the essence or inherent nature of a thing
(real definition latinres’thing) or as a description of the meaning of the word
(nominal definition latinnomen’name,noun’).
The
situation which promp people to utter speech, include every object and
happening in their universe. In order to give a scientifically accurate
definition of meaning for every form of a language, we should have to have a
scientifically accurate knowledge of everything in the speakers’world. We can define the names of minerals, for
example, in terms of chemistry and mineralogy, as when we say that the ordinary
meaning of the English word salt is ‘sodium chloride’ (NaCI).
Linguistics should appeal to
technical scientific disciplines in formulating definitions, the true meaning
of natural language word. according to bloomfield, it to be identified with yhe
scientific ‘definition’ or best possible teory of its denotation. As a result,
whenever a scientifically establisheddefinition of a denotation is
missing,there is simply, nothing that linguistics can say with any certainly
about the word’s meaning. Many actual definitions aspire to fulfill both these
function simultaneously. The two functions are, however, rather different, and
they should be kept apart..in order to differentiate between them, let us call
the first type of definition extensional definition, and the second type
cognitive definition.
2.
Definition by ostension.
The most obvious way to define many words is, simply, by ostension,
or by pointing out the objects which they denotate. In soite of the apparent
obviousness of this method, it is beset by difficulties. None of these question can, in fact, be settled by
obstensive definition: every attempt to make the devinition more precise
ostensivelly would give rise to a new set of question.
The only way to overcome the problems of ostensive definition would
seem to be to use language itself as the medium in which definitions can be
phrased.
3.
Definition by synonym.
to
define words by providing synonyms, in either the same language as the world
being defined or in a different one. Thus , one could give mad and furious as
English definition of angry, and kulu as a walpri one. The problem with this
strategy is that it is usually possible to challenge the identity between the difiniens
and the definiendum.s
Definition by context or typical exemplar
Another way to
define a word is to situate it in a system of wider relations through which the
specificity of the definiendum can be seen.
This is an
example of definition by context:
the definition identifies the event of scratching by placing it in relation to
another event, being itchy, whose meaning is assumed to be already known, and
which is taken as a typical context for the definiendum.
Definition by typical exemplar is another example of this relational strategy: here, the
definition is a list of typical examples or instances of the definiendum. If,
given the German definiendum Vogel, I supply a list like ‘swans, robins, geese,
hens, magpies, etc.’
Definition by genus and differentia
The two
preceding types of definition are essentially relational, defining a word’s
meaning through its connections with other words. They may often be workable as
cognitive definitional strategies, but they are unlikely to be successful as
extensional definitions.
According to Aristotle,
definition involves specifying the broader class to which the definiendum
belongs (often called the definiendum’s genus), and then showing the
distinguishing feature of the definiendum (the differentia) which distinguishes
it from the other members of this broader class.
A different
kind of problem affects cognitive and extensional GD definitions equally, in
those cases where it is not clear that the definiendum does belong to any broader
class. Self and time are two possible examples.
Definition and substitutability
For most
semantic theories, substitution of the definiens for the definiendum should be
truth preserving in all contexts.
Substituting
‘keep in equilibrium’ into these sentences will change their register, and the
resulting utterances will often sound considerably less idiomatic and more
technical
(e.g. Now,
children, you have to keep the egg inequilibrium on the spoon).
Preservation of
truth is not the only possible criterion for the regulation of definitions.
Instead, the criterion of preservation of meaning (in an infor-mal sense of
this term) is also conceivable. On this view, a defnition is accepted if it can
be substituted for the definiendum ‘with sense intact’ (salvosensu): if, that
is, it involves neither addition nor loss of meaning with respect to the
meaning of the definiendum. This suggestion raises an important problem,
however: since it is the definitionitself that is supposed to reveal an
expression’s meaning, the best way to determine that two words have the same
meaning is to compare their definitions. Preservation of meaning as a criterion
of definitional adequacy is therefore circular.
Semantic
primitives
Impossible to
give a definition of every word in a language using other words of the same
language at some point the chain of definition must come to an end. Since the
vocabulary of any language is limited, the metalanguage will eventually have to
include object language definienda, thereby leaving some of the letter without
independent definition. This is a problem for any attempt, such as thatade in
linguistic semantic theories, to specify the meaning of every lexeme in
language.
I give you
hundred crowns, to be received from Titus, Titus will send you to Caius, Caius
to Maevius, but if you prepetually sent on in this way you will never be said
to have received anything. (Parkinson,
1973)
One of these
was the conceptual theory of meaning, which identified meanings with concepts.
Given such an identification, we can imagine several different possibilities
for the relation between lexemes and concepts. The two concepts are, that is,
semantic primitives, in spite of appearances, they cannot be completely broken
down into anything conceptually simpler. Something approaching this view has
been advocated by fodor, who argues for a lexicon where each lexical item is a
semantic primitive or atom no internal definitional structure.
...I take
semantic facts with full ontological, and I can't think of a better way to say
what 'keep' means than to say that it meand keep. If as I suppose, the
concept KEEP is an atom, it's hardly surprising that there's no better way to
say what 'keep' means than to say it means 'keep'. I know of no reason,
emprical or a priori, to suppose that the expressive power of English can be
captured in a language whose stock of morphologically primitive expressions is
interestingly smaller than the lexicon of english. (Fodor, 1998:55)
These semantic
primitives are the basic building blocks of meaning out of which all other
meanings can be constructed.
The belief that
responsible semantic analysis must be grounded in a level of elementary,
primitive units is implicity or explicity held bymany semantics (Filmore 1971,
Jeckendoff 1983, Allan 2001). Example of theory semantics primitives in modern
linguistics is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) theory of Wierzbicka and
Goddard. List of semantic primitives which the NSM approach uses for the
definition of meaning :
I, you,
someone, people, something/thing, body; this, the same, other; one, two, some,
all, much/many; good, bad; big, small; think know, want, feel, see, hear, say,
words, true; do, happen, move; there is, have; live, die; when/time, now,
before, after a long lime, a short time, for some time; where/place, here,
above, below, far, near, side, inside; not, maybe, can, because, if; very,
more; kind of, part of; like. (Goddard 2002: 4)
The semantic
primitives can be used to define other members of the vocabulary of a language,
the primitives themselves are immpossible to define in terms of anything
simpler.
NSM theory
claims that the indefinable nature of its primitives derives from their status
as conceptual primitives, the primitives are hyphothesized in other words, to
express the set of fundamental human concepts (Wierzbicka 1996: 13) considered
to be both innate and universal. What this means is that every natural language
prosseses an identical semantic core of primitive concepta from which all the
other lexicalized concepts of the language can be built up.
Problemas with
definition
One of the most
frequent criticism of definitional theories of semantics is that no satisfying
definition of a word has ever actually been formulated. The scepticism about
the existence of definition is so widespread. In fact, that many researchers in
disciplines closly related to linguistics, such as cognitive science and
artificial inteligence, have completely abandoned the idea that definitions
even exist the emphasis on definitions in linguistics strikes many from these other disciplines as
misguided. Many of the derive fromthe problems involved in a psychologistic
interpretation of definition as concepts, in which the structure of definition reflects the
structure of the undelying concept. For example, the concept BACHELOR could be
said to be the combination of the concept UNMERRIED and MAN in just the same
way as the definition of bachelor might be thought to be 'unmerried man'.
A classic case
of definition inadequency is the proposed 'definition' we have mentioned of
bachelor as 'unmerried man' this is the type of definition found in many
popular dictionaries. One problem here is there are many types of unmerried
male, such as widowers, the pope and tarzan, whom we would not describe as
bachelors. As result, 'unmerried male' is not substituble for bachelor salva
veritate, and definition therefore fails. If a definer tries hard enough,
satisfactory definitions can be achieved, it is just that no one has yet taken
the time to do so. This is exactly the point made by Wierzbicka (1996).
According to her, the true definitions of most ordinary words are significantly
longer than the brief statements we are used to reading in dictionaries.
Example imperfect first approximation definition of paint:
X painted Y
with Z =
(a) X did
something to Y
(b) like people
do
(c) when they
want something to look good
(d) when X did
it
(e) X put some
stuff Z on all parts of Y that one could see
(f) if someone
looked at Z at that time
(g) this person
could say what colour Z was
(h) at the same
time, this person could think that part of Z was water
(i) X wanted Z
to be like part of Y
(j) after X did
it, Z was like part of Y. (Wierzbicka 1996)
As Wierzbicka
points out, this definition is both longer, and structurally different from the
type of definition familiar from dictionaries. It is essentially a definition
by context, specifying 'a fairly complex scenario, with a number of temporal
and causal links between the components'.
The proper
ground rule to be that one expression defines another only if the two
expressions are synonymous and take it to be a necessary condition for their
synonymy that whatever one expression applies to, the other does too.
Under this
view, a definition has to be substitutable for the definiendum in every single
context. The infinite variety of language use, it would seem that any word can
be used in any context as a result, a comprehensive definition would seem
unattainable.
Definition,
understanding and use
What is the
point of defining meaning? In some domains of human activity, definition
fuction as the guarantors of the consistency of language. This is particularly
so in science and technology. I can define the meaning of 'water' extansionally
as H2O, but if the addressee of the definition has no knowledge of chemistry
this definitio will not be effective in bringing about an understanding of the
word's meaning.
But definitions
do take on a central role in language use if we take concepts are or to be
essentially definition in nature, and assume that concepts are or enter into
the meanings of words. If concepts correspond to word meanings, and word
meanings can be captured in definition, then it is the definition which is in
some sense actived during language use. To claim that definitions are involved
in language use in this way is not to claim that they are involved
'consciously'. We may be quite able to use a word appropriately, without being
able to phrase a satisfactory definition of it.
CHAPTER
III
CLOSSING
CONCLUSION
The concept of a word’s meaning is closely linked to
the concept of definition. Many linguists identify the task of linguistic
semantics with the task of describing the entries stored in the mental lexicon, a stock of words and
meanings stored in long-term memory: the definition of a word is part of its
entry in the mental lexicon, and the process of matching a meaning with a
word-form is assumed to be analogous to that involved in consulting a
dictionary. In order to serve the purposes of serious linguistic description,
the definitions in the lexicon must be much more detailed than is usual in
ordinary dictionaries.
What units need to receive definition?
Any attempt to analyze the meanings of language must
specify what the meaning-bearing units are. Individual lexemes are the central
examples of units with individually describable meanings. Morphemes also have
meanings, as do phrasal verbs and compounds. Ambiguities about the level of
grammatical structure to which meaning is correctly attributed are not
infrequent: sound symbolism and idioms exemplify cases where the correct level
for the analysis of a meaning may not be clear.
Definition of the essence of a thing (real definition), or definition of the
meaning of a word (nominal definition).
Most linguists take nominal definition to be the type that is of interest to
linguistic semantic research. Cognitive and extensional definition A
nominal definition may be of two types: Cognitive
(aimed to inculcate an understanding of the word’s correct use), or Extensional (aimed at delimiting the
denotation of the word).
Modes of definition Cognitive nominal definition can take a number of
forms. It may beDefinition by ostension, Definition by synonymy,Definition by
context or typical exemplar, orDefinition by genus and differentia.Often,
definitions combine these means. Definitions are typically required to be
truth-preserving under substitution for their defineendum.
REFERENCE
Allan,
Keith. 1986. Linguistic meaning. London:Routledge and Kegan Paul
Carnap,
R. 1942. Introduction to semantics, Cambridge, MA
Ullmann,
Stephen. 1972. A basic kukatja to English dictionary.
Taylor,
John. 2002. Cognitive grammar, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Nick
Riemer, Introducing semantic, Cambridge
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