Meaning

Chapter 5 showed that a sentence has structure. This chapter asks what that structure is for: what words and sentences mean. The study of meaning is semantics. It is the area most people think of first when they think about language, and also one of the hardest to pin down, because meaning is partly in the language and partly in the speaker's world. This chapter keeps to the part that belongs to the language: the meaning of words, the relations between them and how they combine. Chapter 7 deals with what speakers mean beyond the words.

Sense and Reference

A word relates to the world in two ways, a distinction drawn by the philosopher Gottlob Frege. Its reference is the thing it picks out: the actual person, object or place. Its sense is the way it picks it out: the concept or description attached to it. Two expressions can have the same reference and a different sense.

The first two expressions refer to the same planet, yet it was a genuine discovery that they do. If meaning were only reference, "the morning star is the evening star" would say nothing. Because the senses differ, it is informative. Some words, such as unicorn, have a sense but no reference at all, and we still understand them perfectly well.

Relations Between Words

A word's meaning depends partly on how it relates to other words in the same language. Linguists describe the main relations:

Esperanto builds some of these relations into its word-formation. The prefix mal- (Chapter 4) turns any adjective into its opposite: alta "tall", malalta "short"; bona, malbona. This works smoothly for gradable pairs, but notice that mal- always makes the opposite on a scale: Esperanto does not have a separate affix for "not".

One Word, Several Meanings

Many words have more than one meaning, and linguists distinguish two kinds. In homonymy the words are unrelated in meaning and just happen to sound or be spelled the same: bank (money) and bank (of a river) have different origins. In polysemy a single word has several related senses: mouth of a person and mouth of a river, run a race and run a business. The dictionary test is whether the senses feel connected. This matters because lexical ambiguity (a word with two meanings) is a different thing from the structural ambiguity of Chapter 5, though both produce sentences with two readings. I went to the bank is ambiguous because of one word, not because of any grouping.

From Words to Sentences

The meaning of a sentence is built from the meanings of its words and the structure that combines them. This is the principle of compositionality. It explains why you understand a sentence you have never heard, and why changing the structure (Dog bites man / Man bites dog) changes the meaning.

Compositionality has exceptions: idioms are phrases whose meaning cannot be built from the parts. Kick the bucket means "die", not "strike a pail with the foot". Idioms behave as single units and often resist normal grammar: *The bucket was kicked by him loses the idiomatic meaning.

A key idea at the sentence level is entailment: sentence A entails sentence B if B must be true whenever A is.

Metaphor

Much of our everyday language is metaphorical, and not only in poetry. The linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson argued that metaphor is a way of thinking: we talk about arguments in terms of war (defend a position, attack a claim, win the argument) and about time in terms of money (spend time, save time, waste time). Metaphors are one of the commonest ways that word meanings change over time (Chapter 8).

Different Languages, Different Divisions

The world does not come pre-divided into words. Each language divides experience in its own way, and comparing languages shows where.

Colour

Languages differ in how many basic colour terms they have, from a handful to a dozen or so. A famous study by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay (1969) argued that languages add basic colour terms in a roughly fixed order (black and white first, then red, and so on). English has eleven basic terms. Other languages cut the spectrum differently:

Kinship

Kinship terms show the same thing. English brother covers any male sibling, while Hungarian distinguishes báty (older brother) from öcs (younger brother). Hungarian goes the other way for cousins: one word, unokatestvér, covers male and female cousins and means literally "grandchild-sibling". Mandarin distinguishes a father's older brother, a father's younger brother and a mother's brother, three relatives for which English has the single word uncle.

Does Language Shape Thought?

The idea that the language you speak shapes how you think is called linguistic relativity (or the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis). The strong version, in which language determines thought so that speakers cannot think what their language cannot say, is rejected by nearly all linguists: you can invent or borrow words, and people think things they have no single word for. A weaker version has some experimental support. For example, studies of Russian speakers suggest that they are slightly faster at telling apart two blues that fall on opposite sides of the голубой / синий boundary. Such effects are small, and the debate over how far language influences thought is still open.

Hands-On Exercises