lexical semantics

Lexical semantics is concerned with the semantic properties of words. Semantic properties are pieces of information that help define a word. For example, what do all the words in the list below have in common?

• puppy, kitten, foal, kid, gosling, sprout

All of the words listed above have the semantic property of "young" in common. But that was an easy one; for something more challenging, try to figure out what the nouns in the list below have in common:

• table, stone, tractor, cup, house, cat

All these words are nouns with the semantic property of "can be enumerated." They are called count nouns, because a person can count one table, two stones, three tractors, and so forth. To contrast, nouns like milk, water, and mud have a semantic property of "cannot be enumerated." They are called mass nouns, because we cannot count the number of milk in a cow, the number of water in a glass, or the number of mud in a puddle. You can measure those liquids, but you can't count them.

Like the nouns listed above, every English content word is imbued with semantic properties. This allows us to communicate a lot of information in relatively few words. For example, consider the following sentence:

• Dr. Nash, my dog ate my homework!

By considering the sentence's semantic properties—even if we have never met Dr. Nash, seen a dog, or done homework—we can safely deduce the following from the above sentence:

• Dr. Nash is a highly educated authority figure (semantic property of "Dr.")
• you live with a pet (semantic property of "my" when used before dog)
• your pet uses a mouth to ingest things (semantic property of "ate")
• your pet performed an action (another semantic property of "ate")
• you are a student (semantic property of "homework")

Semantics properties, the previously-agreed-upon meanings of words, thus help us to communicate more quickly and with less effort.

When we describe the relationship between the semantic meaning of words, we use words that end in -nym. These closely related and similar sounding terms are often confusing to students. Below is a reference guide to help you keep them straight.

general semantics

S.I. Hayakawa, author of Language in Thought and Action

In 1938, Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950) founded general semantics, a school of thought that has had enormous influence on linguistics. Korzybski was an engineer and mathematician who observed that human interaction—both interpersonal and international—is negatively affected by our languages' imprecision and distortion of reality. Korzybski theorized that languages' shortcomings could be remedied if people thought more critically and scientifically about the language they use.

Fortunately for us, Korzybski's difficult treatises were translated into simple English, and expanded upon, by S.I. Hayakawa (1906-1992).

Hayakawa's most influential and widely-read book is Language in Thought and Action, a perennial linguistics bestseller since 1941.

Semantics is primarily concerned with meaning and reference, what Hayakawa calls the relationship between the map and the territory.

At the word level, semantics assesses denotation and connotation of the terms used, e.g. individual or collective affective connotations, words with built-in judgments, snarl- and purr-words, and euphemism. Synonyms and homonyms are semantic concerns, because they may trigger ambiguity and/or misunderstanding, or be used as an attention-catching device in headlines and advertising.

At the speaking level, where language operates in real-life situations, semantics distinguishes between report, inference, judgment, and other functions of language. Semantics also catagorizes directive, aesthetic, phatic, and presymbolic language. The perception of the reality represented may be warped through verbal devices like slanting, language-induced stereotyping, or two-valued orientation (not just two different or opposite opinions: rather, a manifestation of a thought-system that leaves no alternative to a binary view of reality), while multi-valued orientation is one of the steps towards open-mindedness.

When we communicate, our speech or writing may be more or less context dependent. The meaning may be public, group related, or personal, while reference may affect how our communication is interpreted. Irony, allusion, insinuation, and metaphor may convey a tentative truth, an evocative quality, or emotional content. Indirect speech acts may illuminate the difference between sentence meaning and the spoken or written meaning. Meanings intended one way by the speaker may be understood differently by the addressee or recipient.

Hayakawa combines all of the above semantic tendencies into the idea of intensional orientation, wherein the thought and action of people is conditioned by the (accurate or misleading) image projected by words. Problems may develop when people ignore contexts, or confuse low-level abstraction with high-level abstraction, or mistake maps for territories.

definitions

::—Individual affective connotation: a word or a phrase triggers an emotive response, which remains individual because it is based on a single person's experience or sensitivity.

I dislike the word funeral. I've had to attend too many funerals.
—Mark Twain: Letters From the Earth

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::—Collective affective connotation occurs when a group of people experience a shared emotive response to a word or phrase.

Black is commonly associated with negatives—the black market, the black sheep—anything which is supposed to be bad. Whatever we do, we will be called black in the inferior sense by some. In a world like that, it's hard not to believe there's something inferior about being black.
—J. Briley: Cry Freedom

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::—Words with built-in judgments are words which, in a language community, immediately call forth an emotive response or value judgment.

We need to stop pussy-footing around and imprison any homeless, drug addicts, or crazies found in the parks along Bear Creek so we can make the greenway safe again for decent citizens.
—The Medford Mail Tribune: letter to the editor

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::—Snarl-words are words used for their unpleasant connotations rather than for their actual reference.

Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rutters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering, palsied, pulseless lot that make up England today.
—D.H. Lawrence, voicing his anger when Sons and Lovers was rejected by a publisher

Purr-words, on the other hand, are chosen for the pleasant, positive judgments or evaluations they convey rather than for the things they refer to in objective terms.

She really was a wonderful woman.
—D.H. Lawrence: The Lovely Lady

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::—Euphemisms are paraphrases or lexical choices made in order to avoid the unpleasant or taboo connotations of words referring to certain culture-conditioned categories of meaning.

Before the war a spade used to be called a spade—often brutally so. I remember an institution named Hospital for Incurable Diseases. How gentle, how tactful, I thought, and tried to imagine the feelings of the patient driven through the gates. But by today a dustman has become a refuse collector, a policeman a law enforcement officer, the pilot of a plane a captain, a man who sells second-hand socks from a market stall a business executive and a dog a home-protection officer.
—G. Mikes: How to Be Decadent

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::—Synonyms may have the same extensional referent, but are not always freely interchangeable because they have different connotations.

We are often told that the traditional belief is that God "dwells" ("lives," for some odd reason, is avoided) in some non-physical space beyond the physical universe of men and matter.
—D.W.D. Shaw: Who is God?

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::—Homonyms are words which, although written and/or pronounced the same, have different meanings and/or grammatical functions.

Vast bureaucracies of civil servants—no longer servants and no longer civil.
—Winston Churchill

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::—Homonyms may cause ambiguity and misunderstanding, but may also be used in playful language use, e.g. in jokes or as attention-catching devices in headlines and advertising.

Grizzly: The Bear Facts.
—title of PBS Documentary

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::—Reports are presumably objective accounts of reality, free of any personal selection, interpretation or value judgment. They are (in principle) verifiable by empirical observation or some other form of truth assessment.

A rifle-wielding man killed by three Medford police officers was shot approximately nine times, according to a doctor who performed the autopsy on Nicholas Vega’s body.
—The Medford Mail Tribune

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::—Inferences are based on observable data, but are the result of a logical interpretation of those data. While the facts are in principle verifiable, the inference remains a matter of fallible human logical processing.

"You told us with your own mouth that there was only one God. Now you talk about his son. He must have a wife, then." The crowd agreed.
—C. Achebe: Things Fall Apart

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::—Judgments are subjective evaluations, in which the speaker produces utterances which rate or classify items in terms of a scale of values. Judgments sometimes pretend to be reports, but may be diagnosed when the question of their truth value or verifiability is raised.

Witness: That scumbag ripped me off.
Defense attorney: Your honor, I object.
Judge: Objection sustained. Now, try to tell the court exactly what happened.
Witness: He ripped me off, the dirty scum.
Defense attorney: Your honor, I object.
Judge: Sustained. Will the witness try to stick to the facts?
Witness: But I'm telling you the facts, your honor. He did rip me off.
—S.I. Hayakawa: Language in Thought and Action

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::—Directive is the term for uses of language when one person seeks to change another person's course of action with orders, commands, or advice. Directives may be direct or indirect.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbours.
—The 10th Commandment

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::—When language is used in its aesthetic function, priority is given not to its referential, informative function, but to its visual or sonorous features. In some extreme cases, meaning may be sacrificed altogether; more frequently, it is only of secondary importance.

Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Mo!
Catch a tiger by the toe,
If he hollers, let him go.

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::—In phatic use, the focus is not so much on what is said as on the interpersonal, communicative function to keep lines of communication open and reach easy agreement through relatively insignificant small talk or writing.

-Hi John, how are you?
-Not too bad. How are you?
-Fine, thanks.
-And how's your mother?
-She's very well, thanks.

In the following example, the initial phatic nature of the conversation is not acknowledged, and Liza invests the subject (weather) with a representative meaning, i.e. turns small talk into a meteorological report.

Mrs. Higgins: Will it rain, do you think?
Liza: The shallow depression in the west of these islands is likely to move slowly in an easterly direction. There are no indications of any great change in the barometrical situation.
—G.B. Shaw: Pygmalion

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::—Language may be used presymbolically, i.e. in situations where the important thing is not so much what is said but the function it fulfills. In this manner, words may be used without people actually believing, understanding, or meaning what they say. We do this frequently in rituals, but also (more simply) when singing in the shower.

They began in unison, "I pledge allegiance to the flag of..."

"Just a moment," the new teacher said, "what does pledge mean? What does allegiance mean? I think it is quite wrong for you to have to say something with long words in it if you don't understand what you're saying."

Danny said, "Miss Warden—well, she never told us. We just had to learn it and then say it, that's all. It's like a, like a, well, sort of sign, isn't it?"
—J. Clavell: The Children's Story

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::—Slanting is a linguistic device through which a speaker (or writer) deliberately gives a biased, subjective account of a given reality and chooses the features to be described and the terms in which these features are communicated in such a way as to make certain value judgments inescapable.

In our time, respect for the right to life calls us to defend the sick and the dying, persons with disabilities and birth defects, and all who are weak and vulnerable. And this self-evident truth calls us to value and to protect the lives of innocent children waiting to be born.
—excerpt from speech by President Bush at political rally, January 2003

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::—Stereotyping is a form of classifying language use, in which a number of beliefs or judgments are automatically projected onto a group of things or people regardless of the features of the individuals belonging to the group.

AIDS is a disease of non-whites. It originated from a mutated cancer almost exclusive to Jews. If you marry a non-white, you can expect to get AIDS.
—Klu Klux Klan propaganda pamphlet

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::—Two-valued orientation is a widespread, and often misleading, form of simplification in which language is used to represent reality in limited, binary terms regardless of intermediary nuances. The danger resides in the reduction of a complex reality to a simple binary contrast (e.g. yes/no or for/against), which is easily adopted and absorbed and may discourage further discernment. It is not just two different or opposite opinions, but rather a manifestation of a thought-system that leaves no alternative to a binary view of reality.

Over time it's going to be important for nations to know they will be held accountable for inactivity. You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror.
—excerpt from President Bush speech to the United Nations, November 2001

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::—Multi-valued orientation seeks to escape from simplistic, two-value reductionism and to recognize nuances between extremes.

I am proud to call myself a liberal, but I don't vote democrat or republican. I'll vote for any candidate who I believe will be a good steward for our community.
—Ashland Daily Tidings: letter to the editor

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::—Most meanings are public, i.e. are easily agreed on by all participants in a communicative situation; that is, basically, why we manage to communicate with other people. Occasionally, however, someone may fail to acknowledge this public meaning; this may lead to misunderstanding, conflict or some other unpleasant situation. For example:

Costello: Look, you gotta pitcher on this team?
Abbott: Now wouldn't this be a fine team without a pitcher.
Costello: The pitcher's name?
Abbott: Tomorrow.
Costello: You don't wanna tell me today?
—Abbott & Costello: Who's on First?

Public meaning may also be deliberately taken outside its usual range of reference. This may cause surprise and thus attract attention (e.g. in advertising) or contribute to the natural evolution of the meaning of a word.

In recent years the term "charismatic" has come to be used of any figure enjoying popular authority. Since such popular authority can be acquired by the exercise of fairly mundane political skills and by the manipulation of a leader's image, the word charisma has become arbitrary and subjective.
—The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Institutions.

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::—Some words, or some meanings of words, will be restricted to a particular group of people, and be meaningless, impossible to understand, or unacceptable to others.

You see that piece of sh*t from the Morris Office? (expletive is a Hollywood term for manuscript).
—The New Yorker: "A Hollywood Lexicon"

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::—An extreme case of restricted meaning is the situation where an individual decides to invest words with a meaning of his/her own, or starts using a private vocabulary. When the meaning becomes too personal or deviant, this may of course make communication rather difficult.

I don't think I'm ambitious for what one would imagine the word ambitious means. What I am ambitious for is to do what I happen to do. I'm ambitious to do that as well as I can and not to waste time.
—actor Jeremy Irons quoted in Premiere Magazine

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::—Reference (the relationship between the word and the thing signified) may be univocal, i.e. the word may refer to the thing as directly and unambiguously as possible.

A byte is a unit of computer memory made up of a series of eight smaller units called bits. One byte is just enough memory to store a single letter or figure.
—The Oxford Wordpower Dictionary

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::—In irony, the speaker/writer means the contrary of what he/she says/writes, but often says it in such tones that the real meaning becomes quite clear.

That hero of democracy, Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin has shut down newspapers, produced a constitution out of his hip pocket that makes him virtual czar, forbidden candidates in the recent election to criticize his constitution on television, put off for years his own need to run for re-election and so on.
—M. Kinsley: Is Democracy Losing its Romance?

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::—In allusion, the speaker uses terms which are reminiscent of more or less famous earlier utterances, lending one's words a certain additional weight or value. Allusion may also be used playfully, or as an attention-catching device.

Some Like it Cold.
—recent headline in Time

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::—Insinuation is an oblique form of language use in which the speaker communicates only part of the total intended meaning, and leaves it up to the listener to guess, infer or understand the full intention of the message, e.g. saying "I'm thirsty" to beg for a drink.

My brain? It's my second favorite organ.
—Woody Allen: Sleeper

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::—Metaphors are nonliteral, suggestive meanings in which an expression that designates one thing is used implicitly to mean something else.

Each time a human cell divides, it must replicate its DNA, a manuscript some 3,000,000 characters long.
—TIME: "The Human Genome Project"

Some metaphors are so useful or successful that they come to be adopted as stock phrases and start living a life of their own as new lexical items in the language.

Religion is the opium of the people.
—K. Marx

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::—There are two major categories of indirect speech acts in which sentence meaning and utterance meaning come apart: understatement and overstatement.

• understatement

They stood, unwilling to part.
"The wood is so lovely now," she said. "I wanted you to see it."
It was getting dark. He followed her to the wood.
—D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers

• overerstatement

The sky is falling!
—Chicken Little

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::—Meanings intended one way by the speaker may be understood differently by the addressee or recipient: this misunderstanding may find its origin at the sound, word, sentence or utterance level.

"My boyfriend tells everyone that he is going to marry the most beautiful girl in the world," said Helen.
"I am so sorry," said Kate. "Perhaps he will change his mind and marry you after all."
—F. Granger: Old Chestnuts

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::—In intensional orientation, the thought and action of people is conditioned by the (accurate or misleading) image projected by words. Problems may develop when people ignore contexts.

In the 1930s, the federal government, confronted by mass unemployment, created the Works Project Administration (WPA). It became a matter of pious faith on the part of critics of the administration to believe that "WPA workers don't ever really work." The capacity for autointoxication being as great as it is in some people, many of the believers in this faith were able to drive daily past gangs of WPA workers sweating over the construction of roads and bridges and still to declare quite honestly, "I've never seen a WPA worker do any work!"
—S.I. Hayakawa: Language in Thought and Action

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The ladder of abstraction represents the way in which human thought may move from a low level of high specificity towards levels of increasing generality and abstraction, i.e. where more and more individual details are left out. Normally, we move up and down on the ladder, i.e. make general statements which are backed up with specific evidence, or give low-level accounts to reach higher-level conclusions or inferences. But occasionally, people will be stuck at one level of abstraction:

• low-level abstraction:

He said, "Morning!" and I said, "You got a fine city here, Mayor." And then he had coffee with me. And then I went to Waterbury.
—A. Miller: Death of a Salesman

• high-level abstraction:

A religious revival or a great awakening begins when accumulated pressures for change produce such acute personal and social stress that the whole culture must break the crust of custom, crash through the blocks in the mazeways, and find new socially structured avenues along which the members of the society may pursue their course in mutual harmony with one another.
—W.G. McLaughlin: Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform

Problems may arise when levels of abstraction are confused, i.e. when low-level realities (individuals, for instance) are viewed and/or judged in terms of the connotations attached to a high-level unit (for instance, an ethnic group, a nation, a religion) and thus unfairly stereotyped.

I love humanity. It's people I can't stand!
—C. Schultz: Peanuts

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Since words are not univocal maps of reality (the territory), people may be misled by words: they may be induced to believe that the linguistic representation is an accurate account of what they may expect the world to be like. Advertising will occasionally resort to this procedure to project a favorable image of a commercial product; but this may lead to frustration or disappointment when implied or explicit promises are not kept.

What's your mother's zodiacal sign?
- Pisces.
- That means fish. She must be a very good swimmer.

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