Linguistics, Semantics and Pragmatics - Coursework Example

 Linguistics Introduction Linguistics is the study of language. Words in a language are finite, but sentences are infinite. A sentence is a grammatical component of one or more words used to express a statement, question, command, request or exclamation. A sentence articulates a complete idea. In spoken word, it displays intonation patterns that are recognizable as well as communicative. In written word, it begins with a capital letter and with the appropriate punctuation1. ‘The meaning of a sentence is determined by the meanings of the words it contains and the order in which these words occur’ is an adequate statement. The presence of certain words in a sentence may lead to ambiguity. This could mean a perceived confusion with what is being conveyed by the sentence and may lead to different interpretations of the meaning. Words like ‘light’ could mean both not dark and not heavy. The presence of these words in a sentence can have both a lexical and structural basis of ambiguity. Meaning of a Sentence The meaning of a sentence is an important part of learning linguistics. The meaning of a sentence in linguistics is the message the source articulates to the recipient. Some of the factors that may affect meaning are pragmatics, semantics, ambiguity and conceptual meaning. Studying sentence meaning raises important issues on the relevant data, on the relationship between this data and theories and the use concepts as intuitions about the data in the sentence. Sentence meaning is a complex and difficult aspect of linguistics. Its study should be introduced gradually. It should begin with an overall view of linguistic theory and how a semantic representation can be interpreted in context. The meaning of a sentence is influenced by both the linguistics and the non-linguistic factors of language. The linguistic factors include morphology, lexicon, phonology and syntax. The non-linguistic factors include semantics and pragmatics. Morphology is the study of morphemes which are the minimal units of linguistic meaning and form that make up words. Morphemes determine words and words are the backbone of any sentence. Morphology in the English language influences the meaning of words according to how they are expressed. There are two types of morphemes, free and bound. Free morphemes can occur alone, such as, the word bad, however bound occur together, such as, ‘ly’. The bound morphemes are sometimes called affixes. They are bound because their meaning will only be understood if it does not stand alone, for example, badly. These include prefixes, suffixes, infixes and circumfixes. A prefix is added to the beginning of a word, a suffix at the end, an infix is inserted into other morphemes and circumfix are attached to another morpheme. The use of a prefix or a suffix is part of the word morphology. For instance, the use of the prefixes 'un-' indicates negativity. Such as in the word unavoidable, the recipient will already process the speaker means not avoidable. Also, the use of '-ify' in a word like iconify illustrates to make something into. This may influence the meaning of a sentence2. Certain morphemes indicate singularity, plurality and meaning. The word 'cats’ implies that the speaker means more than one cat. This indicates plurality and the recipient already infers the speaker means more than one cat. Lexicon is certain words or specific phrases that are present in the mind of the speaker. These include phrases such as idioms. The use of lexicon allows was a speaker to construct and convey a sentence with its appropriate meaning. Lexical words are new words, such as, nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs that illustrate content. Another type of word is functional or grammatical words that are closed meaning the speaker cannot add onto them like vocabulary. These words include conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns. They are words that are necessary to understanding the meaning of a sentence. Syntax is the way in which words are combined into sentences and the grammatical rules used. The different combination of words may have different meanings. This introduces the concept of ambiguity. Sentence construction has a direct influence on sentence meaning and is elaborated under semantics. Phonology is the study of phonemes. The way, in which sentences have their meaning conveyed partly in how they are spoken, this is the phonetics. The tone may be used by the recipient to distinguish between a declarative sentence, a question, a threat or a request. Phonetics influence speech perception. Non- linguistics factors that distinguish sentence meaning are semantics and pragmatism. Semantics is the study of how the words relate to the world and the conceptual understanding and inference of the recipient. Pragmatism is the study of how the meaning of a sentence is influenced by context3. Semantics and Pragmatics One of the factors affecting the meaning of a sentence is form, which is studied under linguistic semantics. Linguistic semantics account for what is linguistically encoded. It is the study of linguistic expressions. This means how meaning is delivered through language and other signs. Linguistic semantics bases itself on the history of the use of words to communicate. There are three types of semantics and they each affect the deciphered meaning of a statement. These are historical, formal and general. Most of the studies conducted on semantics in the past were by philosophers. The accompanying facial expressions, tone and body language in spoken word and certain punctuation in written word affect the meaning of a sentence. These are some of the main examples of semantics in linguistics. Others include denotations and connotations. Denotation is the most specific and literal meaning of a word. Connotation is the implied additional meaning of a word. Semantics show that the understanding of the meaning of sentences goes far beyond the ability to read and understand the words in a sentence. The reader must have the capacity of semantics to understand the sentence and not merely from the meaning of the words in the sentence. The form or observed arrangements of the words in a sentence convey its meaning. For instance, ‘horses ride cowboys’ and ‘cowboys ride horses’ do not mean the same thing due to arrangement of the words in each of the sentences. Semantics suggests that meaningful units combine systematically in a sentence so as to convey the appropriate meaning. Understanding these combinations is the most integral theme in contemporary semantics. The relationship between form and meaning is very complex. These studies also suggest that to assign meaning to a sentence one must know what they are. This suggests conceptual understanding. People are able to relate different words with specific meanings. Once they see or hear them in a sentence, a meaning is automatically conveyed according to the concept intuited. This is studied under a branch of linguistics referred to as syntax. Syntactic meaning provides rules that show that sentences are derived from smaller parts, that is, words. Therefore, the meaning of a sentence not only depends on the words in the sentence but also the syntactic composition. For example, ‘That can hurt you’ is a sentence which is ambiguous. It could have two meanings with the word can either seen as an auxiliary verb or as a noun. The syntactic structure allows for a literal interpretation of the meaning of the sentence. Semantics studies how words and sentences are connected with the things in the outside world of language. It shows the contextual inference gained by a reader or listener4. Communication takes place in different situations and environments. To completely understand meaning this needs to be taken into consideration. This is referred to as context. The further study of the relationship between context and meaning is referred to as Pragmatics. The best way to find the specific meaning of a word is to look into its context. These include linguistic and situational context. Situational context refers to the environmental factors that affect the meaning of a sentence, whereas linguistic context refers to all the language factors, such as, use of verbs and pronouns that influence meaning. In linguistic context, words or lexical units interact as a whole and meaning is derived from this. Most words have more than one meaning and meaning is influenced by the way in which these words have been used. Linguistic context does not take into context the assumptions made by the listener or the intent of the speaker. In the sentence, ‘It is chilly in here’ could portray a mere statement of fact or the request to turn up the heat by the speaker. This is a good example of situational context. This refers to the different meanings that can be conveyed by the same sentence in different circumstances. Situational context may be dependent on the speaker’s body language and the cultural, social, political, moral and economic environment of the speaker and recipient. Situational context also takes into account the conventions, moral and values, ideology and religious beliefs involved in the chain of communication. Deixis is the reference to a noun with reliance on situational context. This may be an object, person or an event. First and second person pronouns, such as, my, mine, you, yours, your, our, ours and we fall into this category as their reference and meaning is entirely dependent on context. Demonstrative articles like that, those, these are deictic as well. Expressions of time and place also fall into this category. This means in order to understand the meaning of these statements of time, place and person as used in a sentence, the recipient needs to also understand what specific context, where or when, the utterance was made. Someone says, “I am over here!” to understand the sentence one must know who “I” is and exactly where “here” is. Deixis marks the territories of semantics and pragmatics5. The layman understanding of pragmatics is the study of what we can do with words. The use of different speech acts, the rhetorical structure, management of reference and conversational implicative determine the meaning of sentences. Speech acts are the deliberate functions of the use of language to communicate certain acts. They are divided into direct and indirect. Direct speech acts may be described as the three basic syntactic structures of sentences. These are assertions, questions, orders and requests. The syntactic composition of sentences distinguishes between these three. It can further be explained in relation to sentence types. An assertion is the act of stating that something is true, it falls under a declarative sentence type. For example, Nancy passed her bar exam. A question falls under the interrogative sentence type. A question seeks to elicit and obtain information from the recipient. For example, ‘Did Nancy pass her bar exam?’ A request or order is a statement that causes the recipients to act in a certain way and falls under imperative sentence types. For example, ‘Nancy, pass your exam!’ The use of the theory of pragmatics allows most English speakers to distinguish the meaning of different sentences which goes beyond the words present in the sentence. The research work of H.P. Grice described conversational implicative as an important aspect for deriving sentence meaning. The speaker’s meaning arises from the literal meaning of the sentence form and four other aspects of a conversation. These are the maxim of quality, quantity, relevance and manner. He sought to show that in a conversation there is a distinct difference between what is said and what is meant. The maxim of quantity states that the speaker must be as informative as possible and as is required, neither providing more or less. The maxim of relevance states that a speaker must remain on topic. The maxim of manner states that the speaker must be brief, specific, avoid ambiguity and orderly. The fourth, the maxim of quality states that the speaker must not lie or make any personal opinions or unsupported claims. He showed that people follow the guidelines of conversation to infer the meaning of statements correctly. In conveying a particular message, pragmatics takes into consideration what the recipients know and conveying the message in an understandable and orderly way. This is referred to as the management of reference. These are the aspects used to indicate whether a piece of information is new or old. It manages the amount of detail the speaker will use to communicate the statement. The use of pragmatics illustrates the different meanings of sentences with the same semantic content. The pragmatics indicate to the recipient what in the sentence is new or old information, what is implied and the expectations that are to be met in the answer to certain questions. Presuppositions are the implicit suppositions required to make a sentence meaningful. Suppositions are assumptions. The sentences that contain presuppositions are very dependent on contextual inference to mean something to the recipient. These sentences are not allowed in courts. This is because accepting the statement means accepting the assumption in it. For instance, have you stopped smoking? Makes the assumption that the person was already smoking and the presupposition has been acknowledged. Hence, these factors illustrate the importance of context in determining sentence meaning6. Another important factor in understanding the meaning of a sentence, the recipient and the speaker must have knowledge of the language. Competence is the knowing a language but not necessarily speaking it. Performance is both to know and speak a language. The recipient may not speak a language but he or she is still able to understand the speaker’s meaning. This introduces the theory of performative sentence, which states that the speaker is the subject of the sentence and by uttering the sentence is accomplishing an additional task. The additional action may be resigning, daring or nominating. Performative verbs include hereby, bet, promise, testify, swear, bequeath, pronounce and dismiss. These create an understanding of sentence meaning. The theories of sentence meaning must take into account the relationship between the meaning of a sentence and the meaning of the words in the sentence, both the lexical and the grammatical words. Historically, those in charge of studying this relationship have focused on the connection between the semantic requirements of the content verb and the event or state denoted by the content verb as used in the sentence. This connection is referred to as the projection principle, which holds that the basic scene denoted by a sentence is derived from the main verb in the sentence. For instance, in the sentence “We gave the house to her” denotes a scene of transfer. There is an agent, a theme and a goal. The semantic frame associated with main verb ‘give’ is the origin for the interpretation of the scene of transfer and the likely presence of three participants. Another principle to be considered in sentence meaning is the override principle. This denotes that if the lexical and structural meanings conflict, the semantic specification of the lexical component will conform to the grammatical structure with which that lexical item is combined. For example, the sentence ‘Give me some pillow’ shows the use of some to denote mass entity. Although, the noun pillow is denotes a single entity and therefore the meaning of the sentence is warped. The override is necessary. Cases of explicit and implicit conversion are used in relation to the grammatical markers7. Conclusion The main function of human language is communication. Communication is effective when both the word in the text and the sentence itself are understood. Understanding the meaning of words is dependent on the lexicon of the speaker’s and the knowledge base of the recipient, referred to as competence. This shows that the statement ‘the meaning of a sentence is determined by the words it contains’ is adequate. The study of sentence meaning begins with the words in the sentence itself. It is a complex process that goes further to survey the syntax, which is the arrangement of the words in the sentence. Syntax creates ambiguity which is eliminated by the application of pragmatics and semantics. Linguistic semantics has the main aim of accounting for what is linguistically encoded for in a sentence. While, pragmatic theory elaborates how a much more detailed and accurate meaning can be derived from the application of context. This may be used to argue the adequacy of the second part of the statement saying sentence meaning is also dependent on the arrangement of the words in the sentence8. Sentence meaning is analyzed in two ways. This is through the consideration of the sentences uttered which have the same propositional content but differ linguistically. This means that the difference in meaning is at the sentence level. The other approach is analysis of the linguistic differences between sentences, which involves the lexical, syntactical, intonational meaning and the contextual inference. This is used to argue an important fact termed compositionality. Compositionality is the notion that the linguistic meaning of a sentence is made up of the sum of the meanings of the parts within the sentence. The study of sentence meaning also encounters the concepts of speech acts and the different sentence types. These include declarative, interrogative and request syntax. Once all these factors are considered during speech processing so as to understand the true meaning of a sentence. The meaning of a complex linguistic expression is determined by the meaning of its parts and how these parts are combined. We understand the meaning of a sentence both by the word meaning in it and the phrase meaning of sentence as a whole. The algorithm used for combining individual word meanings produces the phrase meaning which ultimately produces the sentence meaning. References Aitchison Jean, Linguistics Semantics and Pragmatics, 4th Edition, NTC Publication Group, 1992. Archibald A. Hill, Linguistics, Voice of America, 1999. David Crystal, Introduction to Linguistics, Penguin, 1995. Edmonson Munroe, The Study of Linguistics, University of Texas Press, 2001. McQuown, Norman A., Linguistics Studies, University of Texas Press, 2003. Salus, Peter H., and Windes R., Linguistics at a Glance, Bobbs-Merill Publishers, 2005. Saussure, Ferdinand de., Course in general linguistics, Philosophical Library, 2001. Widdowson H.G, Linguistics, Oxford University Press, 1996. Read More