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CHAPTER 7
Semantics
CHAPTER OVERVIEW
Of all aspects of language, words seem most familiar to students.
Nonetheless, semantics is often counterintuitive, and many students find it
difficult to accept some basic semantic principles and even more difficult
to consider the interrelationship of lexical meaning and syntactic
structures proposed in recent semantic theory. Students who have taken
philosophy or psychology courses may have some background in formal
and cognitive problems of meaning. Most, however, will rely on high
school notions of meaning and reference, and they may struggle with some
of the conceptual schemes presented here.
The initial sections of the chapter on what is essentially the philosophy of
language invite students to discard naïve assumptions about referential
meaning. Because many students will ultimately teach language and
literature, considerable time is spent on lexical semantics. Many
semanticists would point out, correctly, that lexical semantics alone is
insufficient to explain linguistic meaning. Yet lexical semantics is part of a
thorough account of meaning, and it still governs discussion of meaning in
school curricula. Sections on cognitive theories of meaning and model-
theoretic semantics, though cursory, introduce students to more
sophisticated semantics, and instructors can easily expand on the material
here, if they wish to do so. Throughout the chapter we keep morphological,
syntactic, and discourse structures in view, as well as matters of
acquisition and linguistic competence, so that student’s experience of
linguistics is appropriately synthetic.
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LEARNING OBJECTIVES
By the end of this chapter, students should be able to:
• Outline the problems entailed in a referential theory of meaning.
• Explain the nature and limits of deixis.
• Explain the relationship of word meaning to syntactic meaning and
meaning in discourse.
• Construct a valid lexical field and a valid hyponymic tree.
• Distinguish hyponymy, meronymy, synonymy, antonymy, and
homonymy.
• Illustrate the dynamics of semantic development and change.
• Describe the possible relationships between language and culture,
including the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
• Identify the intersection of semantics and questions of authority in
language.
NEW VOCABULARY TERMS
agent
amelioration
analogical mapping
antonym
antonymy
collocates
complementary antonyms
compositionality
connotative meaning
converseness
defining vocabulary
deixis (personal/spatial/temporal)
denotative meaning
dysphemism
euphemism
generalization
gradable/nongradable antonyms
homonym
homonymy
homograph
homophone
hypernym
hyponym
hyponymy
instrument
lexical field
lexical gap
lexical prototype semantics
linguistic determinism
linguistic relativism
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meronym
meronymy
metaphorical extension
objectivism
patient
pejoration
percept
polysemy
presupposition
priming
projection rule
prototype
reappropriation
specialization
superordinate
synonym
synonymy
thematic role
truth condition
WHERE STUDENTS ARE
• As suggested above, most students know relatively little about
semantics, though they assume that they know more about it than they
know about phonology or syntax. They have an intuitive
understanding of semantics, but as they will discover, their intuitions
are often misleading.
• Nearly all students have been introduced to contrastive lexical
semantic categories: antonym, homonym, synonym, etc. This previous
knowledge is something on which to build. Most students have not
considered that semantic relationships are systematic, in any sense, or
that such relationships can be hierarchical (they rarely have any
previous experience of hyponymic relationships, for instance). Yet
their awareness of lexical semantic relationships is a point from which
to start. A more sophisticated approach to lexical semantics will serve
those who become teachers well, not only as teachers of grammar and
composition, but also as teachers of literature (see Chapter 9).
• Many English majors have relatively little exposure to philosophy and
psychology. Depending on how much time you would like to spend on
semantic matters, this lack of exposure may prove an opportunity.
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IN-CLASS ACTIVITIES
Semantic Change
Students typically enjoy and profit from discussion of the social
motivations for semantic change—for instance, euphemism, dysphemism,
amelioration, pejoration, and reclamation. The more heterogeneous the
class, the more likely a class discussion is to bring out current
disagreements about the use of a term like playa or the historical issues
that underlie current use of the C-, F-, or N-words. Much of this discussion
will be useful to recall in when covering the material in Chapters 11, 12,
13, and 14. Exercise 7.4, #2 can be used as preparation for such a
discussion or as a prompt for independent work following such a
discussion. In order to consider questions of change and acceptability,
students can consult not only dictionaries and their own experience (as
they are invited to do in Exercise 7.4, #2) but also various corpora
introduced in Chapter 2.
Politically Correct Language
The special focus section on politically correct language can stimulate
lively discussion or, if one is inclined to organize it, debate. Issues raised
in such a debate easily intersect with Chapters 2 and 14. Indeed, the box
that asks the question “Should Dictionaries Ever Prescribe?” in Chapter 2
is an excellent prompt for discussion of material in Chapter 7.
Conceptual Metaphor
Instructors interested in discussing the social and political implications of
some conceptual metaphors could have students generate everyday
expressions that depend on these underlying conceptual metaphors:
DATING IS A GAME, WOMEN ARE FOOD, and WOMEN ARE SMALL ANIMALS.
What are the implications of talking about women and dating in these
ways? (Caitlin Hines has written two articles about the metaphors used for
women; we include the references under Extra Resources.)
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Homonyms
Some students may have heard a rumor about the “buffalo sentence,” and
it can be an engaging brain-teaser and introduction to homonyms.
Professor William J. Rappaport first used this sentence to show how
homonyms can create unlikely but grammatical sentences made up
entirely of homonyms: “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo
Buffalo buffalo.” This sentence makes sense if we take the phrase Buffalo
buffalo to refer to animals from that part of the country and the sentence to
mean: ‘Buffalo buffalo, whom (other) Buffalo buffalo buffalo [baffle],
buffalo [baffle] (other) Buffalo buffalo.’ This will work better as an in-
class activity as students can quickly locate “the answer” to this puzzle on
the Internet.
Sound and Meaning
One issue not covered much in any chapter is the somewhat mystical
connection between sound and meaning. The issue obviously impinges on
Chapters 1, 3, and 9, although Chapter 1 is able to give onomatopoeia only
a cursory treatment. An instructor who wants to consider this issue,
perhaps in conjunction with discussion of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis,
should turn to the remarkably lucid and persuasive presentation of sound
symbolism in Anatoly Liberman’s Word Origins…And How We Know
Them (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 7–43.
INTEGRATING THE HOMEWORK
Much of the material in Chapter 7 coordinates well with that of other
chapters. For instance, Exercise 7.4, #2 intersects with Chapters 1 and 2
(e.g., how the social sanctions on the word bitch intersect or interact with
the semantic shifts it has undergone) and Chapter 11 (because, within
certain communities of practice or certain linguistic markets, the term may
be more or less acceptable). Exercises 7.3, #2-4 deal with metaphor and
intersect with issues raised in Chapter 9. Exercise 7.3, #1 has
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morphological significance. In any of these cases, the exercises in Chapter
7 help show how material in other chapters connects to semantic matters.
Most of the exercises deal with lexical semantic issues on the surface, but
the instructor can fine-tune expectations for answers, to include cognitive
explanations of meaning and change or not, just as suits the instructor, the
course’s function within a department’s curriculum, the career interests of
students enrolled, etc.
EXTRA RESOURCES
Many lexical semantic issues can be discovered or “worked out” from
dictionaries of various types—this is true for instructors looking for
classroom examples, as well as for students working through assignments.
A critical view of dictionaries (and usage books) and what they offer to
the amateur semanticist is presented in Chapter 2.
We recommend one of our favorite books, a perfect instructional resource
with regard to semantic development and change: C. S. Lewis’s Studies in
Words (Cambridge University Press, 1960). Lewis’s book is not a
linguistic text, but a philological one: it examines the history of
“keywords” in English and how they change in literature, broadly
construed, and sometimes in natural speech. The book includes chapters
on words like nature, free, sad, sense, simple, and wit (as discussed in this
chapter). Any of these words, but of course many others treated along the
same lines (such as peace, the subject of Exercise 7.4, #1), make
wonderful classroom examples that touch on every semantic issue,
whether lexical, syntactic, cognitive, etc. For example, we’ve had success
discussing silly with our classes, because its development involves
historical phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, discourse,
stylistic, and dialectal issues.
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Two articles by Caitlin Hines about conceptual metaphors used to describe
women include:
Hines, Caitlin. 1999. Foxy Chicks and Playboy Bunnies: A Case Study in
Metaphorical Lexicalization. In Cultural, Typological, and
Psychological Perspectives in Cognitive Linguistics, edited by
Masako K. Hiraga, Chris Sinha, and Sherman Wilcox, 9-23.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Hines, Caitlin. 1999. Rebaking the Pie: The WOMAN AS DESSERT Metaphor.
In Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse, edited
by Mary Bucholtz, A. C. Liang, and Laurel A. Sutton, 145-163.
New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.