Contextual semantic functions of the nuclear sentence patterns in expending the communicative intention of the speaker and ways of their teaching

Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning, and is the area of linguistics which is closest to the philosophy of language. The main difference between the linguist’s and the philosopher’s way of dealing with the question of meaning is that the linguist tends to concentrate on the way in which meaning operates in language, while the philosopher is more interested in the nature of meaning itself – in particular, in the relationship between the linguistic and the non-linguistic. Since the 1980s, however, linguists have become increasingly interested in the phenomenon of deixis –the way in which participants in linguistic encounters relate what they say to the time, place and participants in the discourse; in other words, in exactly the relationship between language and what it is about that has long exercised philosophers of language.
Unfortunately, it is not easy to endow the term ‘meaning’ with the type of precise definition we may feel that the term for the grammarian’s topic of investigation, ‘structure’, is capable of. We are fairly clear about what structure is – it is the way in which various pieces of something are put together. Every time, in whatever connection, the term ‘structure’ is used in English, we know that it has this sametype of meaning – it has to do with how something is put together to form a whole. A body has structure; a car’s engine has structure; a molecule has structure. But the term ‘meaning’ and its associates, ‘mean’, ‘means’, etc. are used in a variety of ways in naturally occurring English. Lyons and Palmer between them offer examples like the following:
(1) I didn’t mean to drop the brick on your foot.
(2) She meant to become a solicitor.
(3) He means well, but he always makes a mess of things.
In each of these cases, what seems to be at issue is a person’s intentions to do something; cases like these are not examples of the sense of ‘meaning’ we are interested in as semanticists. Nor are cases like
(4) Her life lost all meaning with the disappearance of the cat
(5) Money means nothing to a true sportsman where the topic seems to be what is of importance to someone.
In neither type of case is the term ‘meaning’ being used with reference to any linguistic aspect of the situation. Compare these to the following:
(6) Those black clouds mean rain (7) Those spots mean chickenpox
Again, no linguistic aspects are essentially involved in the relationships set up between features of the two situations. But they differ from the previous five situations in that it is possible here to perceive a relationship of signification between black clouds, on the one hand, and rain on the other, and between spots and chickenpox. Cases like these, therefore, fall under semiotics, the study of signs and signification, but they are too general to be studied in semantics, where it is linguistic meaning in particular which is of interest. Now compare these cases with
(8) The red light means ‘stop’. Here we are beginning to approach more closely what we want, because in this case a linguistic expression, the quoted word ‘stop’, is part of the subject matter of the utterance. In addition, there is no natural connection between a red light and the word stop as there is between clouds and rain and spots and chickenpox. The red light gets its meaning purely by convention among humans, and is a case of non-natural meaning. Linguists (and philosophers of language), as opposed to semioticians, are interested only in non-natural meaning. The traffic-light case is very like cases of dictionary definition, where the meaning of one term is given by other terms. In such cases, the terms ‘meaning’ and ‘means’ are used to say things like
(9) What is the meaning of ‘semantics’? (10) Bachelor means ‘unmarried man’
(11) Ungkarl means ‘bachelor’ (12) Rot means ‘rød’
Clearly the study of this type of meaning falls within semantics, because the theory of linguistic meaning must explain the relationships between the various parts of language and languages. But it is insufficient in and for itself to constitute the subject matter of the discipline. Consider case (12) and, by implication, cases (11) and (10). To a monolingual English speaker enquiring after the meaning of the German word rot, a reply like (12) would be of no use at all. To such a speaker enquiring after the meaning of the Danish word ungkarl, a reply like (11) would be useful only if s/he already knew what bachelor meant. And (10) is illuminating only to someone who already knows the meaning of one of the terms given. In other words, dictionary definitions are circular – all the terms in a dictionary are defined by other terms in the dictionary (unless illustrations are used). Definitions like these say what terms mean the same as. Semanticists in general wish to break out of the definition circularity; they want, so to speak, to be able to remove the quotation marks from one of the terms in the definition, to gain an extralinguistic foothold – something which can function as the semantic coin. There is one further usage of ‘meaning’ in English which ought to be mentioned here:
(13) He never means what he says (14) She never says what she means
In these cases, an opposition is set up between what a speaker means and what her/his words mean. It is worth mentioning here that if it is true that speakers can mean something other than their words seem to suggest, and if we are able to discover this, then we must, first, have a reasonably good grasp of the meaning of the words; otherwise we could hardly come to feel that their meaning was inappropriate in some cases.