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Semantics

Prepared by
Dr. Amel Omar
Associate Professor of Linguistics
Department of English Language and Literature
College of Arts
Benha University

2024
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Contents

Preface

Chapter One Introduction: The Domain of Semantics

Chapter Two: What meaning is

Chapter Three: Speaker’s Meaning and Semantic Meaning

Chapter Four: Lexical Relations

Chapter Five Geoffery Leech: Types of Meaning

Chapter Six: Different Approaches to the Investigation of Meaning.

Chapter Seven Cognitive semantics

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reface

This course book is intended to introduce principles of linguistic semantics. I hope

it will be useful for imparting a knowledge of semantics to students specializing
in linguistics. The Focus of this book is on the English language and in the
attention, it gives to the lexical and grammatical devices that English employs to
express meanings. Students should finish the course with a sense of what
semantics is about and how semantic analysis is done; they should also have a
deeper appreciation of English and of the nature of language in general. Learning
linguistics requires a heavy involvement with data—words, phrases, sentences and
more extended discourse—and I have tried to provide these both in the
presentation of concepts and in material for practice. The discussion, throughout
the book, is carried along through numerous illustrative sentences which serve as
points of departure for the concepts and definitions introduced. Technical terms
are given in bold when they are first introduced. When an asterisk precedes a
phrase or sentence, it indicates that the construction is not acceptable; it is
something that speakers of English do not say. Practice exercises in every chapter
call on students to participate continually in the development of topics, mainly by
leading them to examine their own use of the English language. Some of the
exercises have obvious answers; in other instances, it will be found that speakers
of the language do not entirely agree about some meaning, or are not sure. Here
group discussion can be a valuable part of the learning experience.
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Chapter 1 Introduction

The Domain of Semantics

What does semantics study?

Semantics is the study of meaning, but what do we mean by ‘meaning’?

Meaning has been given different definitions in the past.

Meaning = Connotation?
Is meaning simply the set of associations that a word evokes, is the meaning of a
word defined by the images that its users connect to it? So ‘winter’ might mean
‘snow’, ‘sledging’ and ‘mulled wine’. But what about someone living in the
amazon? Their ‘winter’ is still wet and hot, so its original meaning is lost. Because
the associations of a word don’t always apply, it was decided that this couldn’t be
the whole story.
It has also been suggested that the meaning of a word is simply the entity in the
World which that word refers to. This makes perfect sense for proper nouns like
‘New York’ and ‘the Eiffel Tower’, but there are lots of words like ‘sing’ and
‘altruism’ that don’t have a solid thing in the world that they are connected to. So,
meaning cannot be entirely denotation either.
Meaning = Extension and Intension
So meaning, in Semantics, is defined as being Extension: The thing in the world
that the word/phrase refers to, plus Intension: The concepts/mental images that
the word/phrase evokes.[3]
Semantics is interested in:
How meaning works in language:
The study of semantics looks at how meaning works in language, and because of
this it often uses native speaker intuitions about the meaning of words and
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phrases to base research on. We all understand semantics already on a

subconscious level, it’s how we understand each other when we speak.
How the way in which words are put together creates meaning:
One of the things that Semantics looks at, and is based on, is how the meaning of
speech is not just derived from the meanings of the individual words all put
together. The Principle of Compositionality says that the meaning of speech is
the sum of the meanings of the individual words plus the way in which they are
arranged into a structure.[5]
The relationships between words:
Semantics also looks at the ways in which the meanings of words can be related
to each other. Here are a few of the ways in which words can be semantically
related:
• Synonymy – Words are synonymous/ synonyms when they can be used
to mean the same thing (at least in some contexts – words are rarely fully
identical in all contexts). Begin and start, Big and large, Youth and
adolescent.
• Antonymy Words are antonyms of one another when they have opposite
meanings (again, at least in some contexts). Big and small, Come and go,
Up and down.
• Polysemy – A word is polysemous when it has two or more related
meanings. In this case the word takes one form but can be used to mean
two different things. In the case of polysemy, these two meanings must be
related in some way, and not be two completely unrelated meanings of the
word. Bright (shining) and bright (intelligent). Mouse (animal) and mouse
(computer hardware).
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• Homophony – Homophony is similar to polysemy in that it refers to a

single form of word with two meanings, however a word is a homophone
when the two meanings are entirely unrelated. Bat (flying mammal) and
bat (sports equipment). Pen (writing instrument) and pen (small cage).
The relationships between sentences:
Sentences can also be semantically related to one-another in a few different
ways.
• Paraphrase – Paraphrases have the same truth conditions; if one is true, the
other must also be true. ‘The boys like the girls’ and ‘the girls are liked by
the boys’, ‘John gave the book to Chris’ and ‘John gave Chris the book’.
• Mutual entailment – Each sentence must be true for the other to be true.
‘John is married to Rachel’ and ‘Rachel is John’s wife’,
‘Chris is a man’ and ‘Chris is human’.
• Asymmetrical entailment – Only one of the sentences must be true for the
other to be true, but that sentence may be true without the other sentence
necessarily having to be true. ‘Rachel is John’s wife’ entails ‘John is
married’ (but John is married does not entail Rachel being his wife),
‘Rachel has two brothers’ entails ‘Rachel is not an only child’ (but Rachel
not being an only child does not entail Rachel having two brothers).
• Contradiction – Sentences contradict each other when one sentence is true
and the other cannot be true. ‘Rachel is an only child’ and ‘Rachel’s
brother is called Phil’, ‘Alex is alive’ and ‘Alex died last week’.
Ambiguity: One of the aspects of how meaning works in language is ambiguity.
A sentence is ambiguous when it has two or more possible meanings, but how
does ambiguity arise in language? A sentence can be ambiguous for either of the
following reasons:
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Lexical Ambiguity: A sentence is lexically ambiguous when it can have two or

more possible meanings due to polysemous (words that have two or more related
meanings) or homophonous (a single word which has two or more different
meanings) words.
Example of lexically ambiguous sentence: Prostitutes appeal to the Pope. This
sentence is ambiguous because the word ‘appeal’ is polysemous and can mean
‘ask for help’ or ‘are attractive to’.
Structural Ambiguity: A sentence is structurally ambiguous if it can have two or
more possible meanings due to the words it contains being able to be combined in
different ways which create different meanings. Example of structurally
ambiguous sentence: Enraged cow injures farmer with axe. In this sentence the
ambiguity arises from the fact that the ‘with axe’ can either refer to the farmer, or
to the act of injuring being carried out (by the cow) ‘with axe’.
Semantics in the field of Linguistics
Semantics looks at these relationships in language and looks at how these
meanings are created, which is an important part of understanding how language
works as a whole. Understanding how meaning occurs in language can inform
other sub-disciplines, such as Language Acquisition, to help us to understand how
speakers acquire a sense of meaning, and Sociolinguistics, as the achievement of
meaning in language is important in language in a social situation. Semantics is
also informed by other sub-disciplines of linguistics, such as Morphology, as
understanding the words themselves is integral to the study of their meaning, and
Syntax, which researchers in semantics use extensively to reveal how meaning is

Semantics is the study of meaning. Seen by Breal, in the late 19th century, as an
emerging science (French, „semantique‟) opposed to phonetics („phonetique‟) as
a science of sounds: similarly for Bloomfield in 1930, it was a field covering, as
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one account of meaningful forms, and the lexicon. Also seen more narrowly, in a
traditional lasting into the 1960s, as the study of meaning in the lexicon alone,
including changes in word meaning. Later, in accounts in which the study of
distribution was divorced from that of meanings, opposed either to grammar in
general; or, within grammar and especially within a generative grammar from the
1960s onwards, to syntax specifically. Of the uses current at the beginning of the
21st century, many restrict semantics to the study of meaning is abstraction from
the contexts in which words and sentences are uttered: in opposition, therefore, to
pragmatics. Others include pragmatics as one of its branches. In others its scope is
in practice very narrow: thus, one handbook of „contemporary semantic theory‟,
in the mid-1990s deals almost solely with problems in formal semantics, even the
meanings of lexical units being neglected.

Conclusion
Semantics is the study of meaning in language. We know that language is used to
express meanings which can be understood by others. But meanings exist in our
minds and we can express what is in our minds through the spoken and written
forms of language (as well as through gestures, action etc.). The sound patterns of
language are studied at the level of phonology and the organization of words and
sentences is studied at the level of morphology and syntax. These are in turn
organized in such a way that we can convey meaningful messages or receive and
understand messages. „How is language organized in order to be meaningful?‟
This is the question we ask and attempt to answer at the level of semantics.
Semantics is that level of linguistic analysis where meaning is analyzed. It is the
most abstract level of linguistic analysis, since we cannot see or observe meaning
as we can observe and record sounds. Meaning is related very closely to the human
capacity to think logically and to understand. So when we try to analyze meaning,
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we are trying to analyze our own capacity to think and understand our own ability
to create meaning. Semantics concerns itself with „giving a systematic account of
the nature of meaning‟ (Leech, 1981).
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Chapter Two: What meaning is

Philosophers have puzzled over this question for over 2000 years. Their thinking
begins from the question of the relationship between words and the objects which
words represent. For example, we may ask: What is the meaning of the word
„cow‟? One answer would be that it refers to an animal who has certain properties,
that distinguish it from other animals, who are called by other names. Where do
these names come from and why does the word „cow‟ mean only that particular
animal and none other? Some thinkers say that there is no essential connection
between the word „cow‟ and the animal indicated by the word, but we have
established this connection by convention and thus it continues to be so. Others
would say that there are some essential attributes of that animal which we perceive
in our minds and our concept of that animal is created for which we create a
corresponding word. According to this idea, there is an essential correspondence
between the sounds of words and their meanings, e.g., the word „buzz‟ reproduces
„the sound made by a bee‟. It is easy to understand this, but not so easy to
understand how „cow‟ can mean‟ a four-;egged bovine‟ – there is nothing in the
sound of the word „cow‟ to indicate that, (Children often invent words that
illustrate the correspondence between sound and meaning: they may call a cow
„moo-moo‟ because they hear it making that kind of sound.)

The above idea that words in a language correspond to or stand for the actual
objects in the world is found in Plato‟s dialogue Cratylus. However, it applies only
to some words and not to others, for example, words that do not refer to objects,
e.g., “love”, “hate”. This fact gives rise to the view held by later thinkers, that the
meaning of a word is not the object it refers to, but the concept of the object that
exists in the mind. Moreover, as de Saussure pointed out, the relation between the
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word (signifier) and the concept (signified) is an arbitrary one, i.e., the word does
not resemble the concept. Also, when we try to define the meaning of a word, we
do so by using other words. So, if we try to explain the meaning of “table” we need
to use other words such as “four”, “legs”, and “wood” and these words in turn can
be explained only by means of other words.

In their book, The Meaning of Meaning (1923), C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards
made an attempt to define meaning. When we use the word „mean‟, we use it in
different ways. „I mean to do this‟ is a way of expressing our intention. „The red
signal means stop‟ is a way of indicating what the red signal signifies. Since all
language consists of signs, we can say that every word is a sign indicating
something-usually a sign indicates other signs. Ogden and Richards give the
following list of some definitions of „meaning‟. Meaning can be any of the
following:
1. An intrinsic property of some thing
2. Other words related to that word in a dictionary
3. The connotations of a word (that is discussed below)
4. The thing to which the speaker of that word refers
5. The thing to which the speaker of that word should refer
6. The thing to which the speaker of that word believes himself to be referring
7. The thing to which the hearer of that word believes is being referred to.
These definitions refer to many different ways in which meaning is understood.
One reason for the range of definitions of meaning is that words (or signs) in a
language are of different types. Some signs indicate meaning in a direct manner,
e.g., an arrow (→) indicates direction. Some signs are representative of the thing
indicated, e.g., onomatopoeic words such as „buzz‟, „tinkle‟, „ring‟; even
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„cough‟, „slam‟, „rustle‟ have onomatopoeic qualities. Some signs do not have
any resemblance to the thing they refer to, but as they stand for that thin, they are
symbolic.
WORDS AND MEANINGS
„When I use a word‟, Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, „it means
just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less.‟ „The question is‟ said Alice,
„whether you can make words mean so many different things.‟ (Lewis Carroll.
Alice through the Looking Glass. Macmillan 1871)
We distinguish between a word and its meaning. We will start with an ordinary
word pen. What does the word pen mean? Pen is a concept in your mind and you
know a variety of facts about it – the fact that it is spelt „pen‟, that it is a noun,
and so on. Let us make this word bold and call it pen. The name of your concept
for pen is just pen. One other fact that you know about pen is that it means: „an
apparatus for writing, …. This is also part of your knowledge. Therefore, it must
be another concept. Now we have two concepts and it is essential to keep these
concepts distinct, so we shall call this second concept „pen‟; i.e., by single quotes.
In fact, when we use the word as a name for its meaning, we are actually using it
in the normal way. That is what words are: names for their meanings. So, we could
say pen mean „pen’.

SENSE AND REFERENT

In the above discussion we assumed that the word pen always has the same
meaning, namely “pen”. To use a technical term, we could say pen has “pen” as
its sense.
Now look at the following sentence:
1) Jack put his pen next to Bettye’s pen.
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What is the meaning of the word pen in this sentence? On the one hand we could
agree that it has the same meaning each time it is used, but on the other hand we
would also agree that it is used to mean two different things, Jack’s pen and Betty’s
pen. Thus, we are using the word meaning in two different ways. When we agreed
that both examples of pen have the same meaning we meant that they have the
same sense. But when we think of pen as meaning specifically Jack’s pen, we have
a different kind of meaning in mind – something like “the particular pen the
speaker has in mind when saying that word.”
There is a technical term which we could easily use for „having something
particular in mind when saying a word‟, which is the verb refer. This allows us to
say that the speaker of (1) was referring to Jack’s pen when saying his pen, but to
Betty’s when saying Betty’s pen. The thing referred to is called the word’s
referent, so the two pens in (1) have the same sense but different referents. In short,
we can recognize two parts to the meaning of a word like pen: its sense which lives
permanently in the dictionary, and its referent, which varies from occasion to
occasion.

REFERENCE
The study of reference, like the study of sense, can be divided into two areas:
speaker-reference and linguistic-reference. Speaker-reference is what the speaker
is referring to by using some linguistic expression. For example, if someone utters
the sentence Here comes Queen Elizabeth facetiously, to refer to a snobbish
acquaintance, then the speaker-reference of the expression Queen Elizabeth is the
acquaintance. Speaker-reference, because it varies according to the speaker and
context, is outside the domain of semantics; instead, it is part of pragmatics.
Linguistic-reference, on the other hand, is the systematic denotation of some
linguistic expression as part of a language. For example, the linguistic expression
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Queen Elizabeth in the sentence Here comes Queen Elizabeth refers in fact to the
public figure Queen Elizabeth. Linguistic-reference, in contrast to speaker-
reference, is within the domain of semantics, since it deals with reference that is a
systematic function of the language itself, rather than of the speaker and context.
Let’s now consider some concepts that seem useful in thinking and talking about
reference (referent, extension, prototype, and stereotype); then we will take a look
at some different types of linguistic reference (coreference, anaphora, and deixis).

Referent: The entity identified by the use of a referring expression such as a

noun or noun phrase is the referent of that expression. If, for example, you point
to a particular robin and say That bird looks sick, then the referent for the
referring expression That bird is the particular robin you are pointing at.
Extension. Extension refers to the set of all potential referents for a referring
expression. For example, the extension of bird is the set of all entities (past,
present, and future) that could systematically be referred to by the expression
bird. In other words, the extension of bird is the set of all birds.
Prototype. A typical member of the extension of a referring expression is a
prototype of that expression. For example, a robin or a bluebird might be a
prototype of bird; a pelican or an ostrich, since each is somewhat atypical, would
not be.
Stereotype. A list of characteristics describing a prototype is said to be a
stereotype. For example, the stereotype of bird might be something like the
following: has two legs and two wings, has feathers, is about six to eight inches
from head to tail, makes a chirping noise, lays eggs, builds nests, and so on.
Coreference. Two linguistic expressions that refer to the same real-world entity
are said to be coreferential. Consider, for example, the sentence Jay Leno is the
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host of the Tonight Show. The expression Jay Leno and The host of the Tonight
Show are coreferential because they both refer to the same entity, namely the
person Jay Leno. Not, however, the coreferential expressions do not “mean” the
same thing; that is, they are not synonymous. For example, before Jay Leno hosted
the Tonight show, Johnny Carson held that position; thus, there was a period of
time when Johnny Carson was coreferential with host of the tonight show.
However, we cannot describe Johnny Carson and Jay Leno as “meaning” the same
thing. The fact that they are not synonymous is illustrated by the unacceptability
of the sentence *Jay Leno used to be Johnny Carson.

Anaphora. A linguistic expression that refers to another linguistic expression is

said to be anaphoric or an anaphor. Consider the sentence Mary wants to play
whoever thinks himself capable of beating her. In this sentence the linguistic
expression himself necessarily refers to whoever; thus, himself is being used
anaphorically in this case. Note, moreover, that it would be inaccurate to claim
that whoever and himself are coreferential (i.e., that they have the same
extralinguistic referent). This is because there may in fact not be anyone who
thinks himself capable of beating Mary; that is, there may not be any
extralinguistic referent for Whoever and himself.
It is common, however, for coreference and anaphora to coincide. Consider, for
example, the sentence The media reported that Congress voted themselves a raise.
The expressions Congress and themselves are coreferential since they refer to the
same real-world entity, namely the legislative branch of the federal government.
At the same time, themselves is an anaphor since it necessarily refers to the
expression congress. Note that there is no reading of this sentence such that
themselves can be construed as referring to the expression the media. In sum,
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coreference deals with the relation of a linguistic expression to some entity in the
real world, past, present, or future; anaphora deals with the relation between two
linguistic expressions.

Deixis (pronounced DIKE-sis). A deictic expression has one meaning but can refer
to different entities depending on the speaker and his or her spatial and temporal
orientation. Obvious examples are expressions such as you and I, here and there,
and right and left. Assume, for instance, that Jack and Jill are speaking to each
other face to face. When Jack is speaking, I refers to Jack, and you refers to Jill.
When Jill is speaking, the referents for these expressions reverse. Likewise, when
Jack is speaking, here refers to a position near Jack, and there refers to a position
near Jill. When Jill speaks, the referents for these expressions reverse. Similarly,
right and left can refer to the same location, depending upon whether Jack or Jill
is speaking; his left is her right, and vice versa. Likewise, expressions such as Jack
or Jill is speaking; his left is her right, and vice versa. Likewise, expressions such
as yesterday, today, and tomorrow are deitic. Jack may say to Jill, Yesterday I told
you I would pay you tomorrow, which is today.

Note, moreover, that deixis can intersect with anaphora. Consider, for example,
the sentence Members of Congress believe they deserve a raise. The expression
they can refer either to the expression members of Congress or to some other plural
entity in the context of the utterance. When, as in the first case, a pronoun refers
to another linguistic expression, it is used anaphorically; when, as in the second
case, it refers to some entity in the extralinguistic context, it is used deictically.
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Chapter Three: Speaker’s Meaning and Semantic Meaning

Everyone knows that language can be used to express meaning, but it is not easy
to define meaning. One problem is that there are several dimensions of meaning.
Imagine that I ask you, “Can you give me an apple?” while looking at bowl of
apples on the table beside you. What I literally asked is whether you have the
ability to give me an apple; this is the semantic meaning of what I said. Sometimes
people will make an annoying joke by responding only to the semantic meaning
of such a question; they’ll just answer, “Yes, I can.” But what I almost certainly
want is for you to give me one of the apples next to you, and I expect you to know
that this is what I want. This speaker’s meaning is what I intend to communicate,
and it goes beyond the literal, semantic meaning of what I said.

Linguists study both semantic meaning and speaker’s meaning. Let’s look at
semantic meaning first. To understand semantic meaning, we have to bring
together three main components: the context in which a sentence is used, the
meanings of the words in the sentence, and its morphological and syntactic
structure. For example, suppose you say to me:
1) My dog chased a cat under the house.
Because (1) contains the pronoun my, part of its meaning depends on the fact that
you uttered it, my refers to you. So, to some extent the semantic meaning of a
sentence depends on the context of use – the situation in which the sentence was
uttered, by a particular speaker, to a particular addressee, at a particular time, and
so forth. The semantic meaning of (1) also depends on the meanings of the
individual words dog, chased, a, cat, etc.; therefore, semantic meaning depends on
the lexicon of English. In addition, the morphological and syntactic structure of
sentence (1) is crucial to its meaning. If the words were rearranged to A cat Under
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the house chased my dog, it would mean something different. So semantic

meaning depends on the grammatical structure of the sentence.

Now let’s think about the speaker’s meaning of (1). Suppose that you know I’ve
lost my cat and you say (1) to me. In that case, it would be likely that your
speaker’s meaning is to inform me that my cat may be hiding under the house, and
to suggest that I go there to look for it. To understand where this meaning comes
from, we need to bring together two components. First, the semantic meaning is
certainly part of the picture; there is some kind of connection between your saying
that your dog chased a cat under the house and your suggestion that I look for my
lost cat under the house. But in order for me to understand your speaker’s meaning,
I have to assume that we both know my cat is missing, that you know I want to
find it, and that you want to see that my cat is safely back home. These are
additional aspects of the context of use which help to determine your speaker’s
meaning.

THE TWO MAIN BRANCHES OF SEMANTICS

Grammar (morphology and syntax) generate novel words, phrases, and sentences
– in fact an infinite number of them. This gives us an infinite number of words,
phrases, and sentences that can have meaning. In order to explain how an infinite
number of pieces of language can be meaningful, and how we, as language users,
can figure out the meanings of new ones every day, semanticists apply the
Principle of Compositionality.
The Principle of Compositionality: The semantic meaning of any unit of language
is determined by the semantic meanings of its parts along with the way they are
put together. According to the Principle of Compositionality, the meaning of a
sentence like Mary liked you is determined by (a) the meanings of the individual
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morphemes that make it up (Mary, like, you, “past”) and (b) the morphological
and syntactic structures of the sentence.

The Principle of Compositionality doesn’t just apply to sentences. It also implies

that the meaning of the verb phrase liked you is determined by the meanings of its
parts and the grammatical structure of the verb phrase, and that the meaning of the
word liked is determined by the meanings of the two morphemes that make it up
(like and (e)d). The subfield of semantics known as compositional semantics (or
formal semantics) is especially concerned with how the Principle of
Compositionality applies, and consequently formal semanticists study the variety
of grammatical patterns which occur in individual languages and across the
languages of the world. Formal semantics developed in linguistics during the early
1970s under the influence of philosophers, especially Richard Montague
(Montague 1974).

Linguists who are interested in the meanings of words, and the relations among
words‟ meanings, study lexical semantics. Thematic roles provide one very
popular framework for investigating lexical semantics, in particular the lexical
semantics of verbs, but not the only one. Lexical semantics is very interesting to
syntacticians, because the meaning of a word often influences how it fits into
syntax; for example, the fact that ripen can have two different patterns of thematic
role explains why it can be used grammatically either with or without an object.

DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF MEANING OF A WORD

(i) Denotative meaning. The logical meaning, which indicates the essential
qualities of a concept which distinguish it from other concepts.
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(ii) Connotative meaning. The additional or associated meaning, which is

attached to the denotative, conceptual meaning. It consists of associations made
with a concept whenever that concept is referred to.
(iii) Social meaning. It is the meaning that a word possesses by virtue of its use in
particular social situations and circumstances.
(iv) Thematic meaning. It lies in the manner in which a message is organized for
emphasis.

THEORIES OF MEANING
Here, we will briefly discuss the theories concerned with semantics.
1. The Theory of Naming; This theory, explained in Plato‟s dialogue Cratylus
maintains that language is a communication system which works with two
elements; the signifier, and the signified. Plato says that the signifier is a word in
the language and the signified is the object in the world that it „stands for‟ or
„refers to‟. Thus, according to this theory words and things are directly related.
Traditional grammar was based on the assumption that the word was the basic unit
of syntax and semantics. The word was a „sign‟ composed of two parts, or
components: the form (signifier) and its meaning (signified).

There are some difficulties with this view, however. Firstly, it seems to apply to
some nouns only. You may locate the signified (object) which the signifier (word)
„chair‟ refers to. However, there are some nouns which do not refer to objects in
this world: examples are Unicorn and Raxsh (Rostam‟s special horse in the Iranian
epic written by Ferdousi). Secondly, there are other nouns that do not refer to
physical objects at all. Thus, what are the objects which love and hatred refer to?
Thirdly, with a noun we can draw a picture of the object that is denoted (referred
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to). But this is impossible with verbs. How should we show run, hesitate, and
annoy? The same problem remains regarding adjectives and adverbs, as well.

2. The Conceptual Theory of Meaning: In the theory of meaning, just explained,

words and things are directly related. But in the conceptual theory of meaning
words and things are related through the mediation of concepts of the mind.

the symbol = the linguistic element; the word, phrase, sentence

the referent = the object in the world
thought or reference = concept

Thus, according to this theory there is no direct link between the symbol and
referent – the link is through reference or thought (our concepts). The problem
with this view is that we do not precisely know the nature of the link or bond
between symbol and concept. The conceptual theory of meaning or mentalistic
theory is maintained by Chomsky. He believes that intuition and introspection
must play a crucial part in our investigation of language.

3. The Behavioristic Theory of Meaning: The term context of situation is used by

two scholars, first by an anthropologist called Malinowski, and later by a British
linguist called Firth. Both of these scholars stated meaning in terms of the context
in which language is used. These two maintained that the description of a language
is not complete without some reference to the context of situation in which the
language operated. A more extreme view sees the meaning of the linguistic
elements AS the situation in which the word is used. Bloomfield, the structuralist,
maintained this behavioristic view. He explained his view through his famous
account of Jack and Jill. As we know, Bloomfield is a follower of Skinner‟s
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school of psychology called behaviorism. However, Skinner‟s model has been

severely criticized by Chomsky, a proponent of the conceptual theory of meaning.
SEMANTIC FEATURES
One obvious way in which the study of basic conceptual meaning might be helpful
in the study of language would be as a means of accounting for the „oddness‟ we
experience when we read sentences such as the following:

The hamburger ate the boy.

The table listens to the radio.
The horse is reading the newspaper.

We should first note that the oddness of these sentences does not derive from
their syntactic structure. According to the basic syntactic rules for forming
English sentences, we have well-formed structures.
NP V NP
The hamburger ate the boy
This sentence is syntactically good, but semantically odd. Since the sentence: The
boy ate the hamburger is perfectly acceptable, we may be able to identify the
source of the problem. The components of the conceptual meaning of the noun
hamburger must be significantly different from those of the noun boy, thereby
preventing one, and not the other, from being used as the subject of the verb ate.
The kind of noun that can be the subject of the verb ate must denote an entity that
is capable of eating. The noun hamburger does not have this property and the noun
boy does.

We can make this observation more generally applicable by trying to determine

the crucial element or feature of meaning that any noun must have in order to be
 23

used as the subject of the verb ate. Such an element may be as general as „animate
being‟. We can then use this idea to describe part of the meaning of words as
having either plus (+) or minus (-) that particular feature. So, the feature that the
noun boy has is +animate (= denotes an animate being) and the feature that the
noun hamburger has is in-animate‟ (= does not denote an animate being).
From a feature analysis like this, we can say that at least part of the meaning of the
word girl in English involves the elements [+human, +female, - adult]. We can
also characterize the feature that is crucially required in a noun in order for it to
appear as the subject of a particular verb, supplementing the syntactic analysis
with semantic features.
This approach would give us the ability to predict which nouns make this sentence
semantically odd. Some examples would be table, horse and hamburger, because
none of them have the required feature [+human].
The approach just outlined is a start on analyzing the conceptual components of
word meaning, but it is not without problem. For many words in a language, it
may not be as easy to come up with neat components of meaning. If we try to think
of the components or, features we would use to differentiate the nouns advice,
threat and warning, for example, we may not be very successful. Part of the
problem seems to be that the approach involves a view of words in a language as
some sort of „containers‟ to carry meaning components. There is clearly more to
the meaning of words than these basic types of features.

SEMANTIC ROLES
Agent: The entity that performs the action.
Theme: The entity that is involved in or affected by the action.
Instrument: if an agent uses another entity in performing an action, that other
entity takes the role of instrument. For example, consider the following:
 24

The boy kicked the ball. The man opened the door with a key.
Agent theme agent theme instrument
The theme can also be an entity that is simply being described.
The ball was red.
theme
Although agents are typically human, they can also be non-human forces,
machines, or creatures. The wind blew the ball away.
agent
The car ran over the ball.
agent
The dog caught the ball.
agent
The theme can also be human.
The boy kicked himself.
theme
Benefactive: The noun or noun phrase that refers to the person or animal who
benefits, or is meant to benefit, from the action of the verb. For example, in the
sentence John baked a cake for Louise, Louise is in the benefactive case.
Experiencer: When an NP designates an entity as the person who has a feeling,
apperception or a state, it fills the role of experience. If we see, know or enjoy
something, we don’t perform an action, but we are experiencers.
Did you hear that noise?
Experiencer
Location: It explains where an entity is.
Source: From where an entity moves.
Goal: Where an entity moves to.
 25

She borrowed a magazine from George.

source
She handed the magazine back to George.
Goal
 26

Chapter Four: Lexical Relations

Not only words can be treated as „containers‟ or as fulfilling „roles‟, they can also
have „relationships‟. The types of lexical relations are as follows:
Synonymy: Two or more forms with very closely related meanings, which are
often, but not always, intersubstitutable in sentences. For example, Broad = Wide.
It should be noted that the idea of „sameness of meaning‟ in synonymy is not
necessarily „total sameness‟.
Antonymy: Two forms with opposite meanings are called antonyms. Antonyms
are usually of two main kinds:
1) Gradable: They can be used in comparative constructions. The negative of one
member does not necessarily imply the other; e.g. not old doesn‟t mean young.
2) Non-Gradable (complementary pairs): They are not normally used in
comparative constructions and the negative of one member does imply the other;
e.g. not dead means alive. But it is important to avoid describing most antonym
pairs as one word meaning the negative of another. Consider the opposites tie-
untie. The word untie doesn‟t mean not tie. It means „do the reverse of tie‟. Such
pairs are called reversives. Pack-unpack; raise-lower; dress-undress; and lengthen-
shorten.
Hyponymy: When the meaning of one form is included in the meaning of another,
the relationship is called hyponymy. In this category, we are looking at the
meaning of words in some type of hierarchical relationship e.g. animal-horse,
animal-dog. We can say that two or more terms which share the same
superordinate (higher up) term are called co-hyponyms. So, dog and horse are co-
hyponyms, and animal is superordinate. The Hyponymy captures the idea of „is a
kind of‟ e.g., Asp is a kind of snake.
 27

Terms for actions can also be hyponyms; e.g., cut, punch, shoot, and stab can all
be found as co-hyponyms of the superordinate term injure.
Prototype: It explains the meaning of certain words like bird not in terms of
component feature (e.g., “has wings”) but in terms of resemblance to the clearest
example; e.g., native speakers of English might wonder if ostrich or penguin
should be hyponyms of bird, but have no trouble deciding about sparrow or pigeon.
The last two are prototypes.
Homophony: When two or more differently written forms have the same
pronunciation but different meaning; e.g., sea-see.
Homography: When two or more forms are the same only in writing but different
in pronunciation and meaning they are described as homographs such as lead
([lid]) and lead ([led]).
Homonymy: It is when one form (written or spoken) has two or more unrelated
meanings, but have the same pronunciation and spelling; e.g. bank (of a river) and
bank (financial institution). They have quite different meanings but accidently
have the same form.
Polysemy: It can be defined as one form (written or spoken) having multiple
meanings which are all related by extension. e.g. head refers to top of your body,
top of a glass of beer, top of a company. If two words are treated as homonyms,
they will typically have two separate entities.
Metonymy: This relationship is essentially based on a close connection in
everyday experience. It may be container-content relation (can-juice); a whole-
part relation (car-wheels); or a representative-symbol relation (king-crown).
Sometimes making sense of many expressions depends on context, background
knowledge and inference.
 28

Collocation: Those words which tend to occur with other words; e.g. hammer
collocates with nail; wife with husband and knife with fork. XIV. TRUTH.
The study of truth or truth conditions in semantics falls into two basic categories:
the study of different types of truth embodied in individual sentences (analytic,
contradictory, and synthetic) and the study of different types of truth relations that
hold between sentences (entailment and presupposition).
Analytic Sentences. An analytic sentence is one that is necessarily true simply by
virtue of the words in it. For example, the sentence A bachelor is an unmarried
man is true not because the world is the way it is, but because English language is
the way it is. Part of our knowledge of ordinary English is that bachelor “means”
an unmarried man, thus to say that one is the other must necessarily be true. We
do not need to check on the outside world to verify the truth of this sentence. We
might say that analytic sentences are “true by definition.” Analytic sentences are
sometimes referred to as linguistic truths, because they are true by virtue of the
language itself.

Contradictory Sentences. Contradictory sentences are just the opposite of

analytic sentences. While analytic sentences are necessarily true as a result of the
words in them, contradictory sentences are necessarily false for the same reason.
The following sentences are all contradictory: A bachelor is a married man, A blue
gas is colorless, A square has five equal sides. In each case, we know the sentence
is false because we know the meaning of the words in it: part of the meaning of
bachelor is „unmarried‟; part of the meaning of blue is „has color‟; part of the
meaning of square is „four-sided.‟ It is not necessary to refer to the outside world
in order to judge each of these sentences false. Consequently, contradictory
 29

sentences are sometimes referred to as linguistic falsities, because they are false
by virtue of the language itself.

Synthetic Sentences. Synthetic sentences may be true or false depending upon

how the world is. In contrast to analytic and contradictory sentences, synthetic
sentences are not true or false because of the words that comprise them, but rather
because they do or do not accurately describe some state of affairs in the world.
For example, the sentence, My next door neighbor, Bud Brown, is married is a
synthetic sentence. Note that you cannot judge its truth or falsity by inspecting the
words in the sentence. Rather, you must verify the truth or falsity of this sentence
empirically, for example by checking the marriage records at the courthouse. Other
examples of synthetic sentences include Nitrous oxide is blue, Nitrous oxide is not
blue, Bud Brown’s house has five sides, and Bud Brown’s house does not have
five sides. In each case, the truth or falsity of the sentence can be verified only by
consulting the state of affairs that holds in the world. Thus, synthetic sentences are
sometimes referred to as empirical truths or falsities, because they are false by
virtue of the state of the extralinguistic world.
ENTAILMENT.
An entailment is a proposition (expressed in a sentence) that follows necessarily
from another sentence. For example, Martina aced chemistry entails Martina
passed chemistry, because one cannot ace chemistry without passing chemistry.
The test for entailment is as follows; sentence (a) entails sentence (b) if the truth
of sentence (a) ensures the truth of sentence (b) and if the falsity of sentence (b)
ensures the falsity of sentence (a). Our example sentences pass both tests. First,
the truth of sentence (a) ensures the truth of sentence (b). Note that if Martina aced
chemistry, she necessarily passed chemistry. Second, the falsity of sentence (b)
 30

ensures the falsity of sentence (a). If Martina didn’t pass chemistry, she necessarily
didn’t ace chemistry.
Note, however, that the relation of entailment is unidirectional. For instance,
consider our example sentences again, but in the opposite order: (b) Martina
passed chemistry and (a) Martina aced chemistry. In this case, sentence (b) does
not entail (a) (if Martina passed chemistry, she did not necessarily ace chemistry
– she may have made a C); and the falsity of (a) does not ensure the falsity of (b)
(if Martina did not ace chemistry, it is not necessarily the case that she did not pass
chemistry – she may, once again, have made a C). In short, then, it should be clear
that the relation of entailment is unidirectional.
This is not to say, however, that there cannot be a pair of sentences such that each
entails the other. Rather, when such a relation holds, it is called paraphrase. For
example, the sentences Martina passed chemistry and What Martina passed was
chemistry are paraphrases of each other. Note, incidentally, that entailment
describes the same relationship between sentences that hyponymy describes
between words. Likewise, paraphrase describes the same relationship between
sentences that synonymy describes between words. These relations are illustrated
in the following section.

Thus, if sentence (a) Martina aced chemistry presupposes sentence (b) Martina
took chemistry, the denial of sentence (a) Martina did not ace chemistry also
presupposes sentence (b) Martina took chemistry. If Martina did not take
chemistry, then Martina did not ace chemistry cannot be judged true or false.
The relationship between entailment and presupposition is illustrated in this figure.
This figure should be read as follows: Martina aced chemistry entails Martina
 31

passed chemistry. Both of those sentences, in turn, presuppose Martina took

chemistry.

PRESUPPOSITION.
A presupposition is a proposition (expressed in a sentence) that must be assumed
to be true in order to judge the truth or falsity of another sentence. For example,
Martina aced chemistry presupposes Martina took chemistry, because acing
chemistry assumes the person in question actually took chemistry. The simplest
test for presupposition depends upon the fact that a sentence and its denial (i.e.,
the negative version of the sentence) have the same set of presuppositions. This
test is known as constancy under negation.
 32

Chapter Five Geoffery Leech: Types of Meaning

The Classification of “Meanings”

Leech created seven types of meaning (1981, 9):
1) Conceptual meaning
2) Connotative meaning
3) Social meaning
4) Affective meaning
5) Reflected meaning
6) Collocative meaning
7) Thematic meaning

1 Conceptual Meaning
As Leech underlines in “Semantics. The Study of Meaning”, the emphasis in this
classification should be put on the logical or conceptual meaning (also called
“denotative” or “cognitive”) (1981, 9). The reason for this is his statement that
conceptual meaning “is widely assumed to be the central factor in linguistic
communication”. (Leech 1981, 9)
He goes further to explain that conceptual meaning plays an enormous role in
linguistic communication for it “has a complex and sophisticated organization
which may be compared with, and cross-related to, a similar organization on the
syntactic and phonological levels of language”. (Leech 1981, 9) This is
connected, according to Leech, with “two principles of all linguistic patterning”
(1981, 9), i.e. the principle of contrastiveness and the principle of structure.
(1981, 9)
Leech asserts that contrastiveness is based on the classification of sounds in
phonology, namely the binary opposition of characteristics of sounds – positive
 33

(present) and negative (absent) features. He depicts that using the example of the
sound /b/ and, furthermore, with the example of the meaning of the word
“woman”. According to these two comparable subjects, the sound /b/ can be
described as +bilabial, + voice, + stop, - nasal, whereas the word “woman”
includes following elements: + human, - male, + adult. (1981, 10)
The principle of structure, on the other hand, is in this case simply described as
“the principle by which larger linguistic units are built up out of smaller units”.
(Leech 1981, 10)

In addition to this, Leech expresses that, in order to comprehend or generate a

linguistic utterance, at least three levels of language need to be present. These are:
A) the level of phonology (a phonological representation), B) the level of syntax
(a syntactic presentation) and C) the level of semantics. In what order these three
levels are going to be used depends on the role in linguistic communication. As a
speaker, the process starts from the level of semantics, undergoes structural
formation on the level of syntax and becomes phonologically formed. This C-B-
A order is called “encoding”. Unlike in “speaker-situation”, the whole process is
upside-down in the role of the listener when the order is A-B-C, i.e. grasping the
phonological structure, thereafter the syntactic one and in the end realizing the
meaning of the utterance. The A-B-C order is then called “decoding”. (1981, 11)
However, this idea has progressed over years and therefore this Leech’s structure
can be regarded as somewhat obsolete.2

2 Connotative Meaning
For the sake of precisely defining this type of meaning, Leech’s book on semantics
needs to be consulted once again: “Connotative meaning is the communicative
 34

value an expression has by virtue of what it refers to, over and above its purely
conceptual content.” (Leech 1981, 12)
As it can be seen from the definition, connotative meaning unavoidably overlaps
with certain aspects of the conceptual meaning. Therefore, the “reference”
overlaps with the elements of conceptual meaning, as in when the contrastive
features of conceptual meaning become attributes of the “real world” referent. But
additional attributes expected from the referent depend on various other factors,
such as age or society, and they can also depend on the individual, as claimed by
Leech. (1981, 12)
In this context, the relationship between conceptual and connotative meaning can
easily be compared to the one between the language (conceptual) and the “real
world” (connotative). For this reason, connotative meaning can be seen as an open-
ended and unstable category in comparison to conceptual meaning. (Leech 1981,
12)

3. Social Meaning
Leech stresses that the social type of meaning includes all the social circumstances
regarding the use of a piece of language. (1981, 14) Since these are closely related
to various social groups who are parts of those circumstances, David Crystal and
Derek Davy established a classification of socio-stylistic variations which vary
according to3(1969, 66):
1) Dialect (The language of a geographical region or social class)

2) Time (e.g. The language of the 18th century)

3) Province (Language of law, science, advertising, etc.)

4) Status (Polite, colloquial, slang, etc.)

5) Modality (Language of memoranda, lectures, jokes, etc.)

 35

6) Singularity (The style of Dickens, Hemingway, etc.)

Therefore, it can be said that the words with the same conceptual and social
meaning are particularly rare, and, to prove that point, Leech introduces a number
of examples while contrasting conceptual synonyms with different stylistic
meanings. (1981, 14)
Depending on the situation the social meaning can also include what is called the
illocutionary force of an utterance, which can then be interpreted as a request, an
apology, a threat, etc., as stated by Leech. (1981, 15)

4 Affective Meaning
Another type of meaning which is closely related to the social meaning is the one
which, according to Leech, deals with the way a language can reflect personal
feelings of the speaker that may include attitude to a listener or something he is
talking about. (1981, 15)

Furthermore, affective meaning can be expressed directly and indirectly, once

again depending on the context.4
1) You are a horrible person and I hate you. (Direct message)

2) Boyfriend: “What’s wrong?”

Girlfriend (in a clearly nervous tone): “Nothing.”

As it can be seen from the examples mentioned above, the factors such as tone of
voice, mimic and gestures can be significant when “decoding” the message of an
utterance. (Leech 1981, 16)
 36

5 Reflected Meaning

In a case of reflected meaning, it can be explained as the one appearing in

situations of multiple conceptual meanings, when one sense of a word influences
our response to another sense, as stated by Leech. (1981, 16)
Furthermore, he exemplifies the statement above in the cases of The Comforter
and The Holy Ghost where, although both terms refer to the third element in the
Holy Trinity, there are certain semantic differences between those two
expressions. Thereby is The Comforter described by Leech as something “warm
and comforting” while The Holy Ghost he perceives as “awesome”. (1981, 16)
Lastly, he points out that in similar cases words can also impose the suggestive
power with a little help of the power of associations. (1981, 16)

6 Collocative Meaning
To clearly define what constitutes the collocative type of meaning a quotation from
Leech needs to be mentioned:
“Collocative meaning consists of the associations a word acquires on account of
the meanings of words which tend to occur in its environment.” (Leech 1981, 17)
To clarify his definition, he used the examples of the adjectives “pretty” and
“handsome” and the words which usually find themselves in their vicinity.
 37

Illust. Leech 1981, 17

In the case of collocative meaning, the quasi-synonyms need to be

mentioned, such as “to wander” and “to stroll”, whereby Leech explains that
“cows may wander, but may not stroll”. (1981, 17) Besides that, a person can only
“tremble” with fear and, on the other hand, only “quiver” with excitement. (1981,
17)
7 Thematic Meaning
The thematic type of meaning provides an answer to the question: “What is
communicated by the way the author formed and organized the message?”, i.e. can
be considered as a part of sentence semantics. (Leech 1981, 19) There are multiple
examples of these occurrences, such as the ones where the active and passive
sentence constructions are confronted, e.g. Mr. X donated the first prize. (Active)
vs. The first prize was donated by Mr. X. (Passive) (Leech 1981, 19)
In its core, however, Leech states that thematic meaning is “matter of choice
between alternative grammatical construction”, for instance in sentences “A man
is here to see you.” and “There is a man here to see you”. (1981, 19) Moreover,
emphasis by substituting one element with another or stress and intonation can
also be of great importance when dealing with this type of meaning. (1981, 19-20)
Summary
The recap of the seven types of meaning described in this work can best be outlined
in a tabular form.
 38

It is noticeable that Leech introduced another term in his illustration – the

associative meaning. This was done in order to establish a summary term for
connotative, social, affective, reflected and collocative meaning which are,
excluding the first one, much closer to connotative than to conceptual meaning
because of certain factors they incorporate, such as open-endedness, variable
character, etc. (1981, 18) The associative meaning is, as Leech states, comprised
of “so many imponderable factors that it can be studied systematically only by
approximative statistical techniques.” (1981, 18)
Leech discusses demarcation problems between certain types of meaning as well,
and most of those include the conceptual type of meaning on one side, and other,
more peripheral categories, on the other side. (1981, 20)
 39

Chapter Six
Different Approaches to the Investigation of Meaning.

In this chapter we consider different approaches to the investigation

of meaning. Linguistic semantics, the approach taken in this book,
is concerned with what knowledge individual speakers of a language
possess which makes it possible for them to communicate with one
another. This leads us to a brief consideration of what language is
and how a child acquires it. Finally, we demonstrate some of the
knowledge that all speakers have about the nature and expression of
meaning in their language.
1 The systematic study of meaning
We are all necessarily interested in meaning. We wonder about the
meaning of a new word. Sometimes we are not sure about the
message we should get from something we read or hear, and we are
concerned about getting our own messages across to others. We find
pleasure in jokes, which often depend for their humor on double
meanings of words or ambiguities in sentences. Commercial
organizations spend a lot of effort and money on naming products,
devising slogans, and creating messages that will be meaningful to
the buying public. Legal scholars argue about the interpretation—
that is, the meaning—of a law or a judicial decision. Literary
 40

scholars quarrel similarly over the meaning of some poem or story.

Three disciplines are concerned with the systematic study of
‘meaning’ in itself: psychology, philosophy and linguistics. Their
particular interests and approaches are different, yet each borrows
from and contributes to the others.

Psychologists are interested in how individual humans learn, how

they retain, recall, or lose information; how they classify, make
judgements and solve problems—in other words, how the human
mind seeks meanings and works with them. Philosophers of
language are concerned with how we know, how any particular fact
that we know or accept as true is related to other possible facts—
what must be antecedent (a presupposition) to that fact and what is
a likely consequence, or entailment of it; what statements are
mutually contradictory, which sentences express the same meaning
in different words, and which are unrelated. (There is more about
presupposition and entailment later in this chapter.)
Linguists want to understand how language works. Just what
common knowledge do two people possess when they share a
language— English, Swahili, Korean or whatever—that makes it
possible for them to give and get information, to express their
feelings and their intentions to one another, and to be understood
with a fair degree of success? Linguistics is concerned with
 41

identifying the meaningful elements of specific languages, for

example, English words like paint and happy and affixes like the -
er of painter and the un- of unhappy. It is concerned with describing
how such elements go together to express more complex
meanings—in phrases like the unhappy painter and sentences like
The painter is unhappy—and telling how these are related to each
other. Linguistics also deals with the meanings expressed by
modulations of a speaker’s voice and the processes by which hearers
and readers relate new information to the information they already
have.

Semantics is the systematic study of meaning, and linguistic

semantics is the study of how languages organize and express
meanings. Linguistic semantics is the topic of this book, but we need
to limit ourselves to the expression of meanings in a single language,
English. Here and there throughout the book we make comparisons
with other languages, but these are meant to be illustrative of
language differences, not full accounts of what differences exist.

2 The nature of language

All animals have some system for communicating with other
members of their species, but only humans have a language which
allows them to produce and understand ever-new messages and to
 42

do so without any outside stimulus. Bees, birds, dolphins and

chimpanzees, among other animals, transmit and interpret a fixed
number of messages that signal friendliness or hostility, the presence
of food or of danger, or have to do with mating and care of spring.
But human language differs from these animal communication
systems in two crucial ways (Hockett 1957:574–85; Bickerton)
First, animals can communicate only in response to some particular
stimulus. Bees, when they have located a source of nectar in some
group of plants, fly back to their hive and report this discovery by
doing a dance that indicates the approximate direction and distance
to the site, but in general non-human communication takes place on
the spot, and is concerned with what is immediately present. No
animal can tell another one about past experiences, and still less are
they able to communicate their plans for the future. Humans alone
are able to talk about vast numbers of things which come from
accumulated knowledge, memory and imagination.

Human language is stimulus-free. Second, while animals have only

a fixed repertoire of messages, human language is creative: we are
always producing new utterances which others understand;
we comprehend new sentences which others have produced (as you
understand this sentence, though it is not likely you have
 43

read it before). The importance of stimulus-freedom and creativity

is often overlooked. Throughout history various thinkers have tried
to describe and explain language as if language is only related to the
phenomenal world, the objects and events that we can observe
through our senses. The simple fact is that the human mind deals
easily and frequently with what does not exist, or what does not yet
exist. Nobody can explain just how people are able to abstract
elements from their sensory world and put these elements together
in ways that are partly familiar, partly new. Yet that is just what
happens when the architect envisions a building not yet erected, the
composer puts together a concerto that is still to be played, a writer
devises a story about imaginary people doing imaginary things, or
when all of us take delight in nonsense and concoct names for things
that might exist or might not.

The productivity of language is due to another feature which

distinguishes our communication from that of other animals. While
some bird songs are different arrangements of a repertory of
elements, generally each signal emitted by a dog or donkey or
dolphin is an indivisible unit, different from any other signal that the
animal may utter. Human utterances, on the other hand, are
composed of interchangeable units on two levels. An utterance
consists of words in a particular sequence (at least one word and
 44

usually more than one), and a word consists of sound-units, or

phonemes, in a particular order. A fairly small number of phonemes,
which are meaningless, combine to make a vast number of
meaningful words; for example, the English words pat, tap and apt
consist of the same three phonemes, differently arranged, and these
three phonemes occur over and over in combinations with a
relatively small number of other phonemes to make up thousands of
combinations that we call words.

This freedom from context is possible only because language is

conventional, or has the feature of arbitrariness. There is no natural
relation between the word goat, for instance, and what that
word designates. Since ancient times people have been arguing
about whether language is ‘natural’ or not. We can only conclude
that it is natural for humans to have language—that a human child
has a natural propensity to acquire the language which is used by the
members of its family. But the ways in which meanings are
communicated through language are not natural, nor is one language
more natural than another.

All human societies have language and—contrary to some popular

but unfounded opinions—every known language is complex and
 45

subtle, capable of expressing whatever its speakers need to express

and capable of changing to meet the changing needs of the speakers.
3 Language and the individual
Every human child, with a few pathological exceptions, learns the
language of the society in which it grows up. A child acquires the
fundamentals of that language in the first five or six years of life—
perhaps the greatest intellectual feat of its lifetime. How the child
does this is one of the most intriguing puzzles in the study of human
nature. All we know is that the child follows a general timetable in
the process of acquisition. Just as the baby sits up, then crawls,
stands and walks according to an innate timetable, so the child, at
about the age of twelve months, begins to imitate its parents’ ways
of naming what is in the environment (bed, bottle, doll, baby, mama,
etc.) and of telling the characteristics and events in which these
things can be observed (wet, empty, up, sit, all-gone). Children who
can hear learn speech and deaf children learn sign language,
provided they are exposed to a medium which they can perceive. By
the age of eighteen months the child is likely to be producing two-
word utterances (Baby up, Daddy bye bye, Mama shoes, Dolly sit).
Soon utterances become more and more complex, and these
utterances are clearly invented, not just repetitions of what parents
may have said. Processes like making questions and negative
statements are acquired—processes that go
 46

beyond a mere reflection of what is in the environment and make it

possible for the child to express himself and interact with others
(Lenneberg 1967; Clark and Clark 1977:295–403).

The child acquires the ability to make use, as speaker and hearer, of
the most important communication system of the community.
Through this possession the individual enjoys a life of being able to
inform, to express feelings and thoughts, perhaps to influence others
in smaller or larger ways, and to learn.

Our ability to use language and our ability to think and

conceptualize, develop at the same time and these abilities depend
on each other. So, while we may retain some memory of learning to
read and write, which we began around the age of six, we do not
remember learning to understand what was spoken to us in the first
four or five years of life and still less our struggles to speak. Thus it
happens that the knowledge which each of us has about our native
language is partly conscious and explicit but to a large extent
unconscious and implicit.

We know the language but we do not fully know what we know. We

know in the sense that we successfully communicate our intentions
to others and we correctly interpret what others tell us—we know
 47

how to use the language. But we are not likely to be cognizant of the
multiple meanings that common words can have, of the ways in
which words are related to one another, of all the potential
ambiguities that are always lurking in language. Because language
is creative, our communication is not restricted to a fixed set of
topics; we constantly produce and understand new messages in
response to new situations and new experiences. At the same time,
language use is subject to very specific rules and constraints. There
seems to be an infinite number of things we can say, but a language
does not have an infinite number of words nor an infinite number of
ways of combining words. If it had, we could not learn it. What is
the knowledge that a speaker of a language has about that language?
Quite simply, a vocabulary and the ways to use it. More specifically,
speakers have two vocabularies, one that they use in producing
utterances and a somewhat larger one that is needed for
understanding a variety of people.

The vocabulary contains numerous names of people and places, as

well as what we might think of as ordinary words. The productive
vocabulary grows rapidly in early childhood, and for most people
changes somewhat throughout life. And what knowledge does one
have that makes one capable of using the vocabulary, productively
and receptively? We have to know how to combine the vocabulary
 48

items into utterances that will carry meanings for others and we have
to grasp the meanings of complex utterances that others produce.
With this goes the knowledge of how to pronounce words and
utterances and how to recognize the pronunciation of words and
utterances produced by others. So, for every word that speakers
know, for production or recognition, they must know the
pronunciation, how it fits into various utterances, and what it means.

Because we acquire our native language so early in life, our

knowledge is mostly implicit. The linguist’s task is to explicate this
implicit knowledge. To describe a language the linguist writes a
grammar. As Chomsky and Halle (1968:1) put it, we use the term
grammar to mean two things: the implicit knowledge that a
speaker has and the explicit description and explanation of it by
the linguist. Whether we think of the grammar of a language as the
knowledge that every speaker of the language has, or the explicit
description made by a linguist, or both, the grammar must contain
three parts. One part, of course, is semantics, the knowledge (from
the point of view of the individual who speaks and hears others
speaking), or the description (from a linguist’s point of view), of
meaningful units like words and meaningful combinations of words
like sentences.
4 Demonstrating semantic knowledge
 49

How can we explain the speaker’s knowledge of meanings?

Certainly, we cannot expect that speakers can clearly define all the
words they know. If that were our criterion, we should also expect
speakers to be able to explain the meaning of every utterance they
will ever produce or comprehend, which is, for all practical
purposes, an infinite number. But the obvious thing is that speakers
can make their thoughts and feelings and intentions known to other
speakers of the language and can understand what others say. This
ability requires possession of a vocabulary and for speakers to know
how to pronounce every item in this vocabulary and how to
recognize its pronunciation by other speakers. They know how to
use the production vocabulary in meaningful sentences and to
understand the sentences produced by others. And of course, they
know meanings—how to choose the items that express what they
want to express and how to find the meanings in what other people
say. If it is hard to say what meaning is, it is fairly easy to show what
knowledge speakers have about meanings in their language and
therefore what things must be included in an account of semantics
(Bierwisch 1970:167–75; Dillon 1977:1–6). The next ten
paragraphs demonstrate ten aspects of any speaker’s semantic
knowledge.
 50

1- Speakers know, in a general way, whether something is or is not

meaningful in their language. For example, speakers of English can
tell which of the following are meaningful in English.
1a Henry drew a picture.
1b Henry laughed.
1c The picture laughed.
1d Picture a Henry drew.
It is certainly not too much to assume that 1a and 1b are meaningful
to speakers of English, while 1c and 1d are anomalous (examples
of anomaly). Sentence 1c has the appearance of being meaningful
and it might attain meaning in some children’s story or the like,
while 1d is merely a sequence of words.

2- Speakers of a language generally agree as to when two sentences

have essentially the same meaning and when they do not.
2a Rebecca got home before Robert.
2b Robert got home before Rebecca.
2c Robert arrived at home after Rebecca.
2d Rebecca got home later than Robert.
Sentences that make equivalent statements about the same entities,
like 2a and 2c, or 2b and 2d, are paraphrases (of each other).

3- Speakers generally agree when two words have essentially the

 51

same meaning—in a given context. In each sentence below one

word is underlined. Following the sentence is a group of words, one
of which can replace the underlined word without changing the
meaning of the sentence.
3a Where did you purchase these tools?- Use, buy, release, modify,
take
3b At the end of the street we saw two enormous statues- pink
smooth, nice, huge, original
Words that have the same sense in a given context are synonyms—
they are instances of synonymy and are synonymous with each
other.
4- Speakers recognize when the meaning of one sentence
contradicts another sentence. The sentences below are all about the
same person, but two of them are related in such a way that if one is
true the other must be false.
4a Edgar is married.
4b Edgar is fairly rich.
4c Edgar is no longer young.
4d Edgar is a bachelor.
Sentences that make opposite statements about the same subject are
contradictory.
5- Speakers generally agree when two words have opposite
meanings in a given context. For example, speakers are able to
 52

choose from the group of words following 5a and 5b the word which
is contrary to the underlined word in each sentence.
5a Betty cut a thick slice of cake, Bright, new, soft, thin, wet
5b The train departs at 12:25. Arrives, leaves, waits, swerves
Two words that make opposite statements about the same subject
are antonyms; they are antonymous, instances of antonymy.
6- Synonyms and antonyms have to have some common element of
meaning in order to be, respectively, the same or different. Words
can have some element of meaning without being synonymous or
antonymous. For example, we should all agree that in each of the
following groups of words, 6a and 6b, all but one of the words have
something in common. Which is the word that doesn’t belong?
6a street lane road path house avenue
6b buy take use steal acquire inherit
The common element of meaning, shared by all but one word in 6a
and by all but one item in 6b, is a semantic feature.
7- Some sentences have double meanings; they can be interpreted
in two ways. Speakers are aware of this fact because they appreciate
jokes which depend on two-way interpretation, like the following.
A sentence that has two meanings is ambiguous—an example of
ambiguity is the following:
7a Marjorie doesn’t care for her parakeet.
(doesn’t like it; doesn’t take care of it)
 53

7b Marjorie took the sick parakeet to a small animal hospital.

(small hospital for animals; hospital for small animals)
8- Speakers know how language is used when people interact. If
one person asks a question or makes a remark, there are various
possible answers to the question or replies one might make to the
remark. Thus, for the question in 8a some answers are suggested, of
which all but one might be appropriate. Similarly, the statement in
8b is followed by several possible rejoinders, all but one of which
could be appropriate.
8a When did you last see my brother?
Ten minutes ago. Last Tuesday. Very nice.Around noon. I think
it was on the first of June.
8b There’s a great new comedy at the Oldtown Playhouse.
So, I’ve heard. What’s it called? When did it open?
So, do I. Are you sure it’s a comedy?
When a question and an answer, or any two utterances, can go
together in a conversation and the second is obviously related to the
first, they constitute an adjacency pair. The ability to deal with
adjacency pairs is part of any speaker’s implicit knowledge.

9- Speakers are aware that two statements may be related in such a

way that if one is true, the other must also be true.
9a There are tulips in the garden.
 54

9b There are flowers in the garden.

9c The ladder is too short to reach the roof.
9d The ladder isn’t long enough to reach the roof.
These pairs of sentences are examples of entailment. Assuming that
9a and 9b are about the same garden, the truth of 9a entails the truth
of 9b, that is, if 9a is true, 9b must also be true. Likewise, assuming
the same ladder and roof, the truth of 9c entails the truth of 9d. 10
Speakers know that the message conveyed in one sentence may
presuppose other pieces of knowledge. For instance, if 10a is
accepted as true, 10b–10e must also be accepted as true.
10a Andy Murfee usually drives his Datsun to work.
10b There is a person named Andy Murfee.
10c Andy Murfee works.
10d There is a Datsun that belongs to Andy Murfee.
10e Andy Murfee knows how to drive an automobile.
The meaning of sentence 10a presupposes what is expressed in 10b,
c, d and e. The latter are presuppositions of 10a. Note that a
presupposition does not establish the truth of anything. Sentence 10a
is meaningful as it is, but it is true only if there is a person named
Andy Murfee, who works and owns a Datsun, etc. The sentence is
presented AS IF there is a person named Andy Murfee. (There
probably is not since we created the sentence for demonstration, just
 55

as the writer of a child’s arithmetic textbook turns out problems that

begin “Timmy Blake has four apples…”)
These ten terms have been introduced to show the latent knowledge
that people have about their language. We are not suggesting that
the points illustrated make up a test that anyone can deal with
successfully.

People differ considerably, and circumstances differ considerably,

so that the way individuals behave in a given situation is not
necessarily an indication of what their deeper competence is.
Personality factors, such as willingness to cooperate, memory,
attention, recent experience, can greatly affect performance. We
only want to indicate the general implicit knowledge that speakers
have about meaning in their language.
Summary
The study of meaning can be undertaken in various ways. Linguistic
semantics is an attempt to explicate the knowledge of any speaker
of a language which allows that speaker to communicate facts,
feelings, intentions and products of the imagination to other
speakers and to understand what they communicate to him or her.
Language differs from the communication systems of other animals
in being stimulus-free and creative. Early in life every human
acquires the essentials of a language—a vocabulary and the
 56

pronunciation, use and meaning of each item in it. The speaker’s

knowledge is largely implicit. The linguist attempts to construct a
grammar, an explicit description of the language, the categories of
the language and the rules by which they interact. Semantics is one
part of the grammar; phonology, syntax and morphology are other
parts.

Speakers of a language have an implicit knowledge about what is

meaningful in their language, and it is easy to show this. In our
account of what that knowledge is, we introduced ten technical
terms:
anomaly; paraphrase; synonymy; semantic feature; antonymy;
contradiction; ambiguity; adjacency pairs; entailment and
presupposition.

PRACTICE
Below are ten pairs of sentences. In each pair assume that the
first sentence is true. Then decide what we know about the
second sentence, which has the same topic(s). If the first is
true, must the second also be true (T)? Or if the first is true,
must the second be false (F)? Or does the truth of the first tell
us nothing about the truth of the second (X)?
1a Rose is married to Tom.
 57

1b Rose is Tom’s wife.

2a David is an unmarried adult male.
2b David is a bachelor.
3a This knife is too dull to cut the rope.
3b This knife isn’t sharp enough to cut the rope.
4a Victoria likes to sing.
4b Victoria doesn’t sing.
5a Harold has been here for an hour.
5b Harold is tired of waiting.
6a Mr Bond has given up smoking.
6b Mr Bond used to smoke.
7a Mr Bond still smokes.
7b Mr Bond used to smoke.
8a Oil paintings are more expensive than watercolors.
8b Watercolors cost more than oil paintings.
9a The Carlson Hotel is more than a century old.
9b The Carlson Hotel has operated for more than a century.
10a Alice invited some friends to lunch.
10b Alice has friends.
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Chapter Seven Cognitive semantics

Introduction
Like the larger enterprise of cognitive linguistics, cognitive
semantics is not a unified theory. It represents an approach to the
study of mind and its relationship with embodied experience and
culture. It proceeds by employing language as a key methodological
tool for uncovering conceptual organisation and structure.
What is cognitive semantics? we examine the four guiding
principles that collectively characterise the collection of approaches
that fall within cognitive semantics. These principles can be stated
as follows:
1. Conceptual structure is embodied.
2. Semantic structure is conceptual structure.
3. Meaning representation is encyclopaedic.
4. Meaning-construction is conceptualisation.
We examine each of these principles in turn, and provide a
preliminary overview of how they are reflected in the concerns
addressed by cognitive semanticists. The subsequent chapters
address specific theories within cognitive semantics that, to varying
degrees, reflect these guiding principles.
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What is cognitive semantics?

Cognitive semantics began in the 1970s as a reaction against the
objectivist world-view assumed by the Anglo-American tradition
in philosophy and the related approach, truth-conditional
semantics, developed within formal linguistics. Eve Sweetser, a
leading cognitive linguist, describes the truth conditional approach
in the following terms: ‘By viewing meaning as the relationship
between words and the world, truth-conditional semantics
eliminates cognitive organization from the linguistic system’
(Sweetser 1990: 4). In contrast to this view, cognitive semantics sees
linguistic meaning as a manifestation of conceptual structure: the
nature and organisation of mental representation
in all its richness and diversity, and this is what makes it a distinctive
approach to linguistic meaning. Leonard Talmy, one of the original
pioneers of cognitive linguistics in the 1970s, describes cognitive
semantics as follows:
‘[R]esearch on cognitive semantics is research on conceptual
content and its organization in language’ (Talmy 2000: 4). In this
chapter, we will try to give a broad sense of the nature of cognitive
semantics as an approach to conceptual structure and linguistic
meaning. Cognitive semantics, like the larger enterprise of cognitive
linguistics of which it is a part, is not a single unified framework.
 60

Those researchers who identify themselves as cognitive semanticists

typically have a diverse set of foci and interests. However, there are
a number of principles that collectively characterise a cognitive
semantics approach.
In section 3.1 we will identify these guiding principles as we see
them. In section 3.2 we will explore some of the major lines of
investigation pursued under the ‘banner’ of cognitive semantics. As
we will see, although cognitive semantics began life as a reaction
against formal theories of meaning deriving from twentieth-century
analytic philosophy and objectivism, the guiding principles adopted
within cognitive semantics open up a range of phenomena for direct
investigation that transcend the initial point of departure for research
in cognitive semantics. In other words, these approaches now go
significantly beyond refuting the tradition of truth-conditional
semantics. In section 3.3, we will look in more detail at the
methodology adopted by cognitive semanticists in investigating
these phenomena, and in section 3.4 we will make some explicit
comparisons between cognitive approaches and formal approaches
to linguistic meaning, setting the scene for some of the more detailed
discussions that follow in this the book.
Conceptual structure is embodied
A fundamental concern for cognitive semanticists is the nature of
the relationship between conceptual structure and the external world
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of sensory experience. In other words, cognitive semanticists set out

to explore the nature of human interaction with and awareness of the
external world, and to build a theory of conceptual structure that is
consonant with the ways in which we
experience the world. One idea that has emerged in an attempt to
explain the nature of conceptual organisation on the basis of
interaction with the physical
world is the embodied cognition thesis, this thesis holds that the
nature of conceptual organisation arises from bodily experience, so
part of what makes conceptual structure meaningful is the bodily
experience with which it is associated.
Let’s illustrate this idea with an example. Imagine a man in a locked
room. A room has the structural properties associated with a
bounded landmark: it has enclosed sides, an interior, a boundary
and an exterior. As a consequence of these properties, the bounded
landmark has the additional functional property of containment: the
man is unable to leave the room. Although this seems rather
obvious, observe that this instance of containment is partly a
consequence of the properties of the bounded landmark and partly a
consequence of the properties of the human body. Humans cannot
pass through minute crevices like gas can, or crawl through the gaps
under doors like ants can. In other words, containment is a
meaningful consequence of a particular type of
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physical relationship that we have experienced in interaction with

the external world.

The concept associated with containment is an instance of what

cognitive linguists call an image schema. In the cognitive model,
the image-schematic concept represents one of the ways in which
bodily experience gives rise to meaningful concepts. While the
concept CONTAINER is grounded in the directly embodied
experience of interacting with bounded landmarks, image schematic
conceptual structure can also give rise to more abstract kinds of
meaning. For example, consider the following examples from
Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 32):
(1) a. He’s in love.
b. We’re out of trouble now.
c. He’s coming out of the coma.
d. I’m slowly getting into shape.
e. He entered a state of euphoria.
f. He fell into a depression.
Lakoff (1987) and Johnson (1987) both argue that examples like the
ones in (1)
are licensed by the metaphorical projection of the CONTAINER
image schema onto the abstract conceptual domain of STATES, to
which concepts like LOVE, TROUBLE and HEALTH belong. This
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results in the conceptual metaphor STATES ARE CONTAINERS.

The idea behind metaphorical projection is that meaningful structure
from bodily experience gives rise to concrete concepts like the
CONTAINER image schema, which in turn serves to structure more
abstract conceptual domains like STATES. In this way, conceptual
structure is embodied.
Semantic structure is conceptual structure
This principle asserts that language refers to concepts in the mind of
the speaker rather than to objects in the external world. In other
words, semantic structure (the meanings conventionally associated
with words and other linguistic units) can be equated with concepts.,
these conventional meanings associated with words are linguistic
concepts or lexical concepts: the conventional form that conceptual
structure requires in order to be encoded in language. However, the
claim that semantic structure can be equated with conceptual
structure does not mean that the two are identical. Instead, cognitive
semanticists claim that the meanings associated with words, for
example, form only a subset of possible concepts. After all, we have
many more thoughts, ideas and feelings than we can conventionally
encode in language. For example, we have a concept for the place
on our faces below our nose and above our mouth where moustaches
go. We must have a concept for this part of the face in order to
understand that the hair that grows there is called a moustache.
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However, as Langacker (1987) points out, there is no English word

that conventionally encodes this concept (at least not in the non-
specialist vocabulary of everyday language). It follows that the set
of lexical concepts is only a subset of the entire set of concepts in
the mind of the speaker.

For a theory of language, this principle is of greater significance than

we might think. Recall that semantic structure relates not just to
words but to all linguistic units. A linguistic unit might be a word
like cat, a bound morpheme such as -er, as in driver or teacher, or
indeed a larger conventional pattern, like the structure of an active
sentence (2) or a passive sentence (3):
(2) William Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet. [active]
(3) Romeo and Juliet was written by William Shakespeare. [passive]
Because active and passive constructions are conventionally
associated with a functional distinction, namely the point of view
we are adopting with respect to the subject of the sentence, cognitive
linguists claim that the active and passive structures are themselves
meaningful: in active sentences we are focusing on the active
participant in an event by placing this unit at the front of the
construction. In passive sentences, we are focusing on the
participant that undergoes the action. The conventional meanings
associated with these grammatical constructions are admittedly
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schematic, but they are nevertheless meaningful. According to the

view adopted in cognitive semantics, the same
holds for smaller grammatical units as well, including words like the
and tense morphemes like -ed in wondered.
The idea that grammatical categories or constructions are essentially
conceptual in nature entails that closed-class elements as well as
open-class elements fall within the purview of semantic analysis.
Indeed, Talmy (2000) explicitly focuses upon closed-class
semantics. One of the properties that makes cognitive semantics
different from other approaches to language, then, is that it seeks to
provide a unified account of lexical and grammatical organisation
rather than viewing these as distinct subsystems.
There are two important caveats that follow from the principle that
semantic structure represents a subpart of conceptual structure.
Firstly, it is important to point out that cognitive semanticists are
not claiming that language relates to concepts internal to the mind
of the speaker and nothing else. This would lead
to an extreme form of subjectivism, in which concepts are divorced
from the world that they relate to (see Sinha 1999). Indeed, we have
concepts in the first place either because they are useful ways of
understanding the external world, or because they are inevitable
ways of understanding the world, given our cognitive architecture
and our physiology. Cognitive semantics therefore steers a path
 66

between the opposing extremes of subjectivism and the

objectivism encapsulated in traditional truth-conditional
semantics by claiming that concepts relate to lived experience.
Let’s look at an example. Consider the concept BACHELOR.
This is a much discussed example in the semantics literature. This
concept, which is traditionally defined as an ‘unmarried adult male’,
is not isolated from ordinary experience because we cannot in fact
apply it to all unmarried adult males. We understand that some adult
males are ineligible for marriage due either to vocation or to sexual
preference (at least while marriage is restricted to occurring between
members of the opposite sex). It is for this reason that we would find
it odd to apply the term bachelor to either the Pope or a homosexual
male, even though they both, strictly speaking, meet the ‘definition’
of BACHELOR.
The second caveat concerns the notion of semantic structure. We
have assumed so far that the meanings associated with words can be
defined: for example, BACHELOR means ‘unmarried adult male’.
However, we have already begun to see that word meanings, which
we are calling lexical concepts, cannot straightforwardly be defined.
Indeed, strict definitions like ‘unmarried adult male’ fail to
adequately capture the range and diversity of meaning associated
with any given lexical concept. For this reason, cognitive
 67

semanticists reject the definitional or dictionary view of word

meaning in favour of an encyclopaedic
view. We will elaborate this idea in more detail below
Meaning representation is encyclopaedic
The third central principle of cognitive semantics holds that
semantic structure is encyclopaedic in nature. This means that
words do not represent neatly packaged bundles of meaning (the
dictionary view), but serve as ‘points of access’ to vast repositories
of knowledge relating to a particular concept or conceptual domain
(e.g. Langacker 1987). We illustrated this idea above in relation to
the concept BACHELOR. Indeed, not only do we know that certain
kinds of unmarried adult males would not normally be described as
bachelors, we also have cultural knowledge regarding the behaviour
associated with stereotypical bachelors. It is ‘encyclopaedic’
knowledge of this kind that allows us to interpret this otherwise
contradictory sentence:
(4) ‘Watch out Jane, your husband’s a right bachelor!’
On the face of it, identifying Jane’s husband (a married man) as a
bachelor would appear to be contradictory. However, given our
cultural stereotype of bachelors, which represents them as sexual
predators, we understand the utterance in (4) as a warning issued to
Jane concerning her husband’s fidelity. As this example illustrates,
 68

the meanings associated with words often draw upon complex and
sophisticated bodies of knowledge. We will look in detail at the
encyclopaedic view of meaning in Chapter 5. Of course, to claim
that words are ‘points of access’ to encyclopaedic meaning is not to
deny that words have conventional meanings associated with
them. The fact that example (5) means something different from
example (6) is a consequence of the conventional range of meanings
associated with safe and happy.
(5) John is safe.
(6) John is happy.
However, cognitive semanticists argue that the conventional
meaning associated with a particular word is just a ‘prompt’ for the
process of meaning construction: the ‘selection’ of an appropriate
interpretation against the context of the utterance. For example, the
word safe has a range of meanings, and the meaning that we select
emerges as a consequence of the context in which the word occurs.
To illustrate this point, consider the examples in (7) against the
context of a child playing on the beach.
(7) a. The child is safe.
b. The beach is safe.
c. The shovel is safe.
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In this context, the interpretation of (7a) is that the child will not
come to any harm. However, (7b) does not mean that the beach will
not come to harm.
Instead, it means that the beach is an environment in which the risk
of the child coming to harm is minimised. Similarly, (7c) does not
mean that the shovel will not come to harm, but that it will not cause
harm to the child. These examples illustrate that there is no single
fixed property that safe assigns to the words child, beach and shovel.
In order to understand what the speaker means, we draw upon our
encyclopaedic knowledge relating to children, beaches and shovels,
and our knowledge relating to what it means to be safe. We then
‘construct’ a meaning by ‘selecting’ a meaning that is appropriate in
the context of the utterance.

Just to give a few examples, the sentence in (7b) could be interpreted

in any of the following ways, given an appropriate context. Some of
these meanings can be paraphrased as ‘safe from harm’, and others
as ‘unlikely to cause harm’:
(1) this beach has avoided the impact of a recent oil spill; (2) this
beach is not going to be dug up by property developers; (3) due to
its location in a temperate climate, you will not suffer from sunburn
on this beach; (4) this beach, which is prone to crowding, is free of
 70

pickpockets; (5) there are no jellyfish in the sea; (6) the miniature
model beach with accompanying model luxury hotels,
designed by an architect, which was inadvertently dropped before
an important meeting, has not been damaged.
Meaning construction is conceptualisation
In this section, we explore the process of meaning construction in
more detail. The fourth principle associated with cognitive
semantics is that language itself does not encode meaning. Instead,
as we have seen, words (and other linguistic units) are only
‘prompts’ for the construction of meaning. According to this view,
meaning is constructed at the conceptual level: meaning
construction is equated with conceptualisation, a dynamic process
whereby linguistic units serve as prompts for an array of conceptual
operations and the recruitment of background knowledge. It follows
from this view that meaning is a process rather than a discrete ‘thing’
that can be ‘packaged’ by language. Meaning construction draws
upon encyclopaedic knowledge, as we saw above, and involves
inferencing strategies that relate to different aspects of conceptual
structure, organisation and packaging (Sweetser 1999). The
dynamic quality of meaning construction has been most extensively
modelled by Gilles Fauconnier (e.g. 1994, 1997), who emphasises
the role of mappings: local connections between distinct mental
 71

spaces, conceptual ‘packets’ of information, which are built up

during the ‘on-line’ process of meaning construction.

Let’s look at an example that illustrates the conceptual nature of

meaning construction. Consider the following example from Taylor
(2002: 530):
(8) In France, Bill Clinton wouldn’t have been harmed by his
relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
Sentences of this kind are called counterfactuals, because they
describe a scenario that is counter to fact. This sentence prompts us
to imagine a scenario in which Bill Clinton, the former US
President, is actually the President of France, and that the scandal
that surrounded him and the former Whitehouse intern, Monica
Lewinsky, took place not in the United States but in France. In
the context of this scenario, it is suggested that Bill Clinton would
not have been politically harmed by his extramarital affair with
Lewinsky. According to Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (e.g.
2002), we actually have to engage in conceptual feats of
breathtaking complexity in order to access this kind of meaning.
These conceptual feats are performed on a second-by-second basis
in the ongoing construction of meaning in discourse, and without
conscious awareness.
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According to this view, which is called Conceptual Blending

Theory, the sentence in (8) prompts us to set up one mental space,
a ‘reality space’, in which Clinton is the US President, Lewinsky is
his intern, they have an affair, they are found out and scandal ensues.
We also set up a second ‘reality space’, which contains the President
of France together with knowledge about French culture which
deems it permissible for French presidents to have extra-marital
relations, and ‘public’ and ‘private’ families. In a third blended
space, Clinton is the President of France, he has an affair with
Lewinsky, they are found out, but there is no scandal. Because of
the conceptual mappings that relate the first two spaces to the third
blended space, we come to understand something additional about
the original ‘input’ or reality spaces. We learn that the cultural and
moral sensitivities regarding extramarital affairs between politicians
and members of their staff are radically different in the United States
and France.

This meaning is constructed on the basis of complex mapping

operations between distinct reality-based scenarios, which combine
to create a new counterfactual scenario. The blended space, then,
gives rise to a new meaning, albeit counterfactual, which is not
available from encyclopaedic knowledge. This new meaning rests
upon Clinton as French President escaping scandal despite his affair
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with Lewinsky. We will look in detail at mental spaces and the idea
of conceptual blending in Chapters 9–10.
Phenomena investigated within cognitive semantics
Having established the guiding principles that underpin cognitive
semantics, we turn in this section to a brief overview of some of the
phenomena investigated within this approach. This provides some
elaboration on issues addressed in the previous section, and gives a
flavour of the nature and scope of cognitive semantics.

The bodily basis of meaning

Given the thesis of embodied cognition that we discussed earlier, a
key area of investigation within cognitive semantics concerns the
bodily basis of meaning (see Chapter 4). Given the assumption that
conceptual structure is meaningful by virtue of being tied to directly
meaningful preconceptual (bodily) experience, much research
within the cognitive semantics tradition has been directed at
investigating conceptual metaphors. According to this approach,
conceptual metaphors give rise to systems of conventional
conceptual mappings, held in long-term memory, which may be
motivated by image-schematic structure. If image schemas arise
from bodily experience, then we may be able to explain conceptual
metaphor on the basis that it maps rich and detailed structure from
concrete domains of experience onto more abstract concepts and
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conceptual domains. We have seen several examples of this

phenomenon already. Consider example (9), which was first
(9) The number of shares has gone up.
According to Lakoff and Johnson, examples like this are motivated
by a highly productive conceptual metaphor that is also evident in
(10).
(10) a. John got the highest score on the test.
b. Mortgage rates have fallen.
c. Inflation is on the way up.
This metaphor appears to relate the domains of QUANTITY and
VERTICAL ELEVATION. In other words, we understand greater
quantity in terms of increased height, and decreased quantity in
terms of lesser height. The guiding principles of cognitive
semantics Conceptual structure is embodied. The nature of
conceptual organisation arises from bodily experience. Semantic
structure is conceptual structure Semantic structure (the meanings
conventionally associated with words and other linguistic units) is
equated with concepts.
Meaning representation is encyclopaedic Words (and other
linguistic units) are treated as ‘points of access to vast repositories
of knowledge relating to a particular concept. Meaning construction
is conceptualisation Meaning construction is equated with
conceptualisation, a dynamic process whereby linguistic units serve
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as prompts for an array of conceptual operations and the recruitment

of background knowledge scholars like Lakoff and Johnson argue
that this conventional pattern of conceptual mapping is directly
grounded in ubiquitous everyday experience.

For example, when we pour a liquid into a glass, there is a

simultaneous increase in the height and quantity of the fluid. This is
a typical example of the correlation between height and quantity.
Similarly, if we put items onto a pile, an increase in height correlates
with an increase in quantity. This experiential correlation between
height and quantity, which we experience from an early age, has
been claimed to motivate the conceptual metaphor MORE IS UP,
also known as QUANTITY IS VERTICAL ELEVATION.

Conceptual structure
As we have seen, an important line of investigation within cognitive
semantics focuses on how language encodes (and reflects)
conceptual structure. This line of investigation concerns the
conceptual structuring mechanisms apparent in linguistic structure.

One way of uncovering conceptual structure in language is by

investigating the distinct functions associated with open-class and
closed class semantic systems. Talmy (2000) argues that these two
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systems encode our Cognitive Representation (CR) in language.

The closed-class semantic system (the system of meaning associated
with grammatical constructions, bound morphemes and
grammatical words like and and the) provides scene structuring
representation. The open-class semantic system (the system of
meaning associated with content words and morphemes) provides
the substantive content relating to a particular scene. We illustrated
the distinction between the open-class and closed-class subsystems
with the following example:
(11) The hunter tracked the tigers
The elements marked in bold, as well as the declarative word order
(as opposed to the interrogative Did the hunter track the tigers? for
example) form part of the system of closed-class semantics. They
provide the ‘concept structuring’ elements of the meaning described
in this scene, and provide information about when the event
occurred, how many participants were involved, whether the
participants are familiar to the speaker and hearer in the current
discourse, whether the speaker asserts the information (rather than,
say, asking a question about it) and so on. We can think of these
closed-class elements as providing a kind of frame or scaffolding,
which forms the foundations of the meaning in this sentence. The
open-class semantic system relates to words like hunter, track and
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tiger, which impose rich content full meaning upon this frame: who
the participants are and the nature of event described in the scene.
Mappings
Another prominent theme in cognitive semantics is the idea of
conceptual mappings. Fauconnier (1997) has identified three kinds
of mapping operations: (1) projection mappings; (2) pragmatic
function mappings; and (3) schema mappings.
A projection mapping projects structure from one domain (source)
onto another (target). We mentioned this kind of mapping earlier in
relation to conceptual metaphor. Another example is the metaphor
TIME IS THE MOTION OF OBJECTS, where TIME is
conceptualised in terms of MOTION (recall the discussion of the
‘moving time’ model in Chapter 3). Consider the examples
in (14).
(14) a. Summer has just zoomed by.
b. The end of term is approaching.
c. The time for a decision has come.
In these sentences, temporally framed concepts corresponding to the
expressions summer, the end of term and the time for a decision are
structured in terms of MOTION. Of course, temporal concepts
cannot undergo literal motion because they are not physical entities.
However, these conventional metaphoric mappings allow us to
understand abstract concepts like TIME in terms of MOTION.
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Pragmatic function mappings are established between two entities

by virtue of a shared frame of experience. For example, metonymy,
which depends upon an association between two entities so that one
entity can stand for the other, is an instance of a pragmatic function
mapping. Consider example (15).
(15) The ham sandwich has wandering hands.
Imagine the sentence in (15) uttered by one waitress to another in a
restaurant. In this context, the salient association between a
particular customer and the food he orders establishes a pragmatic
function mapping.
Schema mappings relate to the projection of a schema (another
term for frame) onto particular utterances, a frame is a relatively
detailed knowledge structure derived from everyday patterns of
interaction. For instance, we have an abstract frame for
PURCHASING GOODS, which represents an abstraction over
specific instances of purchasing goods, such as buying a stamp in a
post office, buying groceries in a supermarket, ordering a book
through an on-line retailer, and so on. Each instance of
PURCHASING GOODS involves a purchaser, a vendor,
merchandise, money (or credit card) and so on. Consider example
(16):
(16) The Ministry of Defence purchased twenty new helicopters
from Westland. We make sense of this sentence by mapping its
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various components onto the roles in the PURCHASING GOODS

frame. This frame enables us to understand the role assumed by each
of the participants in this example: that the Ministry of Defence is
the PURCHASER, the contractor Westland is the VENDOR and the
helicopters are the MERCHANDISE. We look in more detail at
schema mappings in the next chapters, where we address two
theories that rely upon this idea:

Summary
In this chapter we have presented the four fundamental principles
that characterise the approach to linguistic meaning known as
cognitive semantics. In contrast to objectivist semantics, cognitive
semantics adopts the position that language refers not to an objective
reality, but to concepts: the conventional meanings associated with
words and other linguistic units are seen as relating
to thoughts and ideas. Hence, the first main assumption of cognitive
semantics concerns the nature of the relationship between
conceptual structure and human interaction with, and awareness of,
the external world of sensory experience.

Cognitive semanticists posit the embodied cognition thesis: the

idea that the nature of conceptual organisation arises from bodily
experience. In other words, conceptual structure is meaningful in
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part because of the bodily experiences with which it is associated.

The second assumption is that semantic structure is conceptual
structure. The third assumption associated with cognitive
semantics holds that meaning representation is encyclopaedic:
words (and other linguistic units) are ‘points of access’ to vast
repositories of knowledge concerning a particular lexical concept.
The fourth assumption holds that language itself does not encode
meaning. Instead, words (and other linguistic units) serve as
‘prompts’ for the construction of meaning. This gives rise to the
thesis that meaning construction is conceptualisation,
a dynamic process whereby linguistic units serve as prompts for an
array of conceptual operations and the recruitment of background
knowledge.
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References

Allan, Keith (1986). linguistic Meaning (2 vols).

Dillon, George (1977). Introduction to Contemporary Linguistic Semantics.

Hofmann, Th. R. (1993). Realms of Meaning: An Introduction to Semantics.

Hurford, J.R. and Brendan Heasley (1983). Semantics: A Coursebook.

Leech, Geoffrey N. (1981). Semantics. 2nd edn.

Lyons, John (1995). Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction.

Nilsen, D.L.F. and Nilsen, A. (1975) Semantic Theory: A Linguistic

Perspective.

Palmer, Frank R. (1981). Semantics. 2nd edn.