Language and Media Dictionary of Key Terms (April 2016) Martin Montgomery

semantics LANG n. study of meaning from linguistic perspective. Semantics aims to analyse and explain how meanings are expressed in language. Current inquiry seems to be organised around three important distinctions.

Sense versus reference. The meaning of a linguistic expression – a word, for instance – can be treated in terms of its connection with extra-linguistic reality. Thus, the meaning of the word ‘chair’ lies in its capacity to refer outwards form the language to objects such as the one on which you may be sitting as you read this entry. From a different perspective, however, the meaning of a word can be considered in terms of its relationship to other words in the language. Thus, the meaning of the word ‘chair’ lies in its relationship with other words such as ‘furniture’, ‘table’, ‘seat’, ‘bench’, etc. A famous example of the distinction between sense and reference is the way in which, objectively, the same planet - Venus – can be referred to equally appropriately as ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’, since it has the capacity to shine brightly both in the morning sky and in the evening sky. Consequently, the two expressions – ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’ – have an identical referent, although the sense of each expression is of course quite different. More attention in semantics has been given to the area of sense relations than to that of reference, in line with Wittgenstein’s dictum: ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language’.

But ignoring either side of the contrast between sense and reference tends to lead to unbalanced theories of meaning, and this can have consequences that go beyond the domains of linguistic theory. It is worth nothing, for instance, that rival aesthetic theories can be divided into two camps depending upon whether they tend to favour one or the other side of the distinction between reference and sense: realist theories favour art that appears to mirror or reflect reality in as direct a way as possible; other more Formalist theories, however, stress the conventionality of artistic representation and see art, and more particularly literature, as a continual experiment with meaning (or ‘sense’). Contemporary literary theory tends to be very strong on the conventional bases of meaning, so much so that at times it seems to deny the possibility of any reality at all outside language. At the very least, it insists that reality is not mediated to us directly, but is constructed through acts of meanings, so that we have no direct access to it outside of language. One pitfall of this position is that it can lead to a species of idealism in which reality is spoken into existence through language, and arguments about interpretation become avowedly subjective, to the exclusion of culture and history as material process.

In modern semantics sense relations have been treated in terms of the following major relationships that words can have with each other.

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  Synonomy: expressions which can be used in identical ways are considered synonymous, by which criterion an expression such as to ponder is held to be synonymous with to meditate, or loutish is held to be synonymous with uncouth.
  
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  Antonymy: expressions which reverse the meaning of each other in some way are considered to be antonymous. Thus, the pairs woman/man, fast/slow, up/down, good/bad all express relations of antonymy.
  
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  Hyponomy: expressions may also operate in hierarchical relations of meaning where the meaning of the expression includes that of another. Thus, the expression ‘dog’ is a hyponym of the expression ‘animal’, the latter being a superordinate term for a range of hyponyms with dog, such as cat, monkey, giraffe, rabbit. Dog itself, of course, is a superordinate term for another range of hyponyms such as terrier, hound, retriever, etc.
  

Synonymy, antonymy and hyponomy consist, therefore, of differing kinds of sense relations possible within the vocabulary of a language. They provide a way of conceptualising the construction of meaning as it goes on within the linguistic system. In this respect it is worth emphasizing that they display linguistic and not ‘real-world’ classification. There is no reason in real world why terms for animals should be organised in the particular types of sense relation adopted in English, as becomes immediately apparent when comparisons in particular areas of meaning are made between languages. According to Whorf (1956), the Hopi tribe of North America used one word masaytaka to designate all flying objects except birds. Thus, they actually designated an insect, and aeroplane and an aviator by the same word, whereas English provides quite separate lexical items.

Word meaning versus sentence meaning. Other approaches to the meaning of words involve notions such as semantic features and collocation. Whatever approach is adopted, however, it does not seem possible to account for the meaning of a sentence merely by building upwards from the individual words that make it up. Otherwise ‘Man bites dog’ would mean the same thing as ‘Dog bites man’. Nonetheless, it seems possible that there may be parallels between the kind of sense relation we have described between words and those that exist between sentences. A sense relation such as synonymy, for instance, may be considered to hold not only between individual words but also between whole sentences. Thus ‘Sidney sold the book to Sheila’ may be considered to be synonymous with ‘Sheila bought the book from Sidney’, and the same kind of relation can be claimed between ‘The police arrested the miners’ and ‘The miners were arrested by the police’. Other kinds of relationship that can hold between sentences are those of entailment and presupposition. Entailment is a relation whereby, given two sentences A and B, A semantically entails B if under all conditions in which A is true, B is also true. Thus, a sentence such as ‘Achilles killed Hector’ entails ‘Hector is dead’. In such cases B follows form A as a logical consequence. If it is true that Achilles killed Hector, then Hector must as a logical consequence be dead. Pre-suppositional relations are somewhat different. Basically, whereas negation will alter a sentence’s entailment, it will leave presuppositions in place. Consider the sentence: (i) ‘Sidney managed to stop in time’. From this we may infer both that (ii) ‘Sidney stopped in time’ and also that (iii) ‘Sidney tried to stop in time’. These inferred sentences, however, do not behave in quite the same way. Sentence (i) – an entailment – and it does not survive under the negation of (i) – ‘Sidney did not manage to stop in time’. Sentence (iii), however, is a presupposition, and whilst the original entailment now no longer holds, the presupposition that (iii) ‘Sidney tried to stop in time’ still survives intact.

These kinds of distinctions are important for the analysis of meaning in all kinds of discourse. Ideological claims, for instance, are often promoted implicitly rather than explicitly, covertly rather than overtly; and they often need to be recovered from the presuppositions or entailments of a discourse rather than form its surface assertions. Thu, when a Ministry of Defence pamphlet urged that ‘Britain must do everything in its power… to deter Russia from further acts of aggression’, various unargued propositions were merely presupposed; notably, for example: (i) ‘Britain has power’ and (ii) ‘Russia is committing acts of aggression’.

Text versus context. The third major area of inquiry and debate is addressed to issues such as how much of meaning is created and carried by the linguistic system and how much and in what way it is determined by crucial characteristics of the context in which any considered to be semantic – i.e., part of the linguistic system itself –a re now being treated as part of pragmatics.

The history of linguistics during the last sixty years can be read in terms of a continual deferral of the study of meaning. Indeed, the progression during this time has been very much from the smaller units of linguistic organization, such as the phoneme to the larger, such as the sentence or text; it has also been a progression from substance (phonology) to significance (semantics). Meaning, however, has at last come centre stage, and the last ten years has seen an immense burgeoning of work in both semantics and pragmatics. Meaning, of course, cannot be other than the ultimate goal of linguistic inquiry, and findings in this area undoubtedly have important consequences for associated areas of scholarship such as media studies, literary criticism, interpretive society or cognitive science, in all of which issues of meaning are often at the centre of debate. mmo

sexism media n. discrimination against a person or persons on the grounds of their sexual identity; traditionally applies to discrimination against women but can in principle be applied to other forms of sexual identity. mmo