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But it is a salutary experience for students who have not pre­viously done this to take a set of common English words - e.g., 'foot', 'game', 'table', 'tree' - and to look them up in half-a-dozen comprehensive and reputable dictionaries. They will find many differences of detail, not only in the definitions that are

1.5 Words: forms dnd meanings 27

offered, but also in the number of meanings that are recognized for each word. They will also find that some dictionaries, but not all, operate with a further level of differentiation, such that, not only is "X₁" distinguished from "X₂", "X₃", etc., but "X_1a" is distinguished from "X_1b,", "X_1c", etc. and so on. At the very least, the experience of comparing a number of different dictionaries in this way should have the effect of making it clear that it is not as easy to say how many meanings a word has as casual reflection might initially suggest. It should also cast doubt upon the view that all dictionaries are equally authorita­tive and upon the alternative view that one particular dictionary (the Oxford English Dictionary, Webster's, etc.) is uniquely author-itative and unchallengeable. Indeed, it might even promote the suspicion that in many cases it is not just difficult in practice, but impossible even in principle, to say how many distinct mean- ings a word has. This suspicion, as we shall see, would be con­firmed by further experience of the theory and practice of lexicography.

, Something should now be said, briefly, about homonyms: different words with the same form (to use the traditional defini­tion). Most dictionaries distinguish homonyms by assigning to them distinctive numbers (or letters) and giving to each of them a separate entry. We shall use numerical subscripts. For ex­ample, 'bank]', one of whose meanings is "financial institution", and 'bank₂', one of whose meanings is "sloping side of a river", are generally regarded as homonyms (see Figure 1.1). The fact that they have been classified by the editor or compilers of a par­ticular dictionary as homonyms — i.e., as separate words (and

'bank₁' 'bank₂'

bank "financial institution" bank "sloping side of river"

(FORM) (MEANING) (FORM) (MEANING)

Figure 1.1

28 Metalinguistic preliminaries

most dictionaries of English do so classify them) - is evident from the very fact that they have been given separate entries (whether or not they are also furnished with a distinctive num­ber or letter). It is taken for granted that those who consult the dictionary will have some intuitive understanding of the tradi­tional notion of homonymy, even if they do not know the tradi­tional term for it: it is taken for granted, for example, that those consulting the dictionary will agree that 'bank₁' is a different word from 'bank₂' and know, intuitively, what it means to say that they are different words. As we shall see in Part 2, however, the traditional notion of homonymy is not as straightforward as it might appear to be at first sight and needs to be clarified. Although our more comprehensive discussion of homonymy may be postponed until then, it may be helpful to answer, in advance of that discussion, a question which will have occurred to some readers in relation to one or two of the examples that I have used in this section. If homonyms are words which have the same form but differ in meaning, why did I say that, for example, "terminal part of a leg" and ''lowest part of a hill or mountain" are two different meanings of the same word, 'foot'? Should we not say as we did for 'bank₁' and 'bank₂' that two dif­ferent words, 'foot₁' and 'foot₂', are involved?

Briefly, there are two reasons why 'bank₁' and 'bank₂' are tra-ditionally regarded as homonyms. First of all, they differ etymo-logically: 'bank₁' was borrowed from Italian (cf. the Modern Italian 'banca') in the fifteenth century; 'bank₂' can be traced back through Middle English, and beyond, to a Scandinavian word (related ultimately to the German source of the Italian 'banca', but differing from it in its historical development). Sec­ond, they arc judged to be semantically unrelated: there is assumed to be no connexion - more precisely, no synchronically discernible connexion - between the meanings of 'bank₁' and the meanings of 'bank₂'. The two (or more) meanings of 'foot', on the other hand, are etymologically and semantically related; and the order in which they are numbered and listed in a dic­tionary will generally reflect the editor's view of how closely one meaning is related to the other (or others), either historically or synchronically.

1.5 Words: forms and meanings 29

We shall be looking more closely later at the notion of related-ness of meaning, independently of the question of how (or indeed whether) the notion of homonymy has a role to play in modern linguistic semantics. For the moment, it is sufficient to note that, due allowance having been made for what is traditionally regarded as homonymy, we can usually identify one meaning of a word as being more central (or, alternatively, as being contex-tually more salient) than the others. This is the meaning that I expect the reader to have in mind whenever I refer to the mean­ing of a word (without further qualification) by means of the notational device of double quotation-marks introduced above. When necessary, one meaning can be distinguished from.another with subscripts or by enclosing in double quotation-marks a paraphrase or (partial) definition that is sufficient for the purpose in hand. As we have seen, homonyms may be distin­guished from one another in the same way: for example, we may distinguish 'sole₁' from 'sole₂' (on the assumption that this is indeed a case of homonymy: readers' intuitions may well dif­fer) by saying that the former means (roughly) "bottom of foot or shoe" and the latter "kind of fish". It must be realized, how­ever, that symbolic notation of itself is no more than a tool, which, like other tools, needs to be used with care and the appro­priate skill. This point is worth making here in relation to the comparatively simple — almost trivial - task of regimenting the use of italics and quotation-marks for different kinds of meta­linguistic reference. It is far more important when it comes to the use of some of the more specialized notation that will be introduced in the following chapters.

As I said earlier, homonymy is not as readily determinable in many cases as may have been implied in this section with refer­ence to the examples 'bank₁' and 'bank₂', or 'sole₁' and 'sole₂'. It will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2. So too will the differences among the various senses in which the term 'word' is used both technically and in everyday discourse. Until then, the word 'word' will be employed loosely and, as we shall see presently, ambiguously (as it often is in everyday usage). Meanwhile, readers are advised to bear constantly in mind the importance of not confusing natural-language expressions, such

 

30 Metalinguistic preliminaries

as words, phrases or sentences, with their form (or any one of their forms). Careful attention to the notational conventions introduced above should help them to do this.

In conclusion, readers' attention is also drawn to the fact: (i) that (as was mentioned at the beginning of this section without discussion) that there may be a mismatch between the spoken and the written form (or forms) of words; and (ii) that there are different ways in which forms may be identical with one another or not. The use of the term 'form' (and even more so of its deriv­ative 'formal') in linguistics is at times both confused and confus­ing (see Lyons, 1968: 135-7). For present purposes it is sufficient for me to explain briefly, with reference to (i) and (ii), how the various senses of the term 'form' are related to one another and, can be distinguished if and when it is necessary to do so.

We started from the more or less everyday, non-technical, metalinguistic distinction between form and meaning, saying that words (and other expressions) have, not only form, but a form. We then saw that, in some instances and in some languages, words (and other expressions) may have more than one form, which, typically though not necessarily, differ from one another in grammatical function. Let us temporarily disregard the fact that words may have more than one grammatically (or inflec-tionally) distinct form: this is tantamount to assuming that we are (temporarily) concerned solely with isolating, or analytic, languages, such as Classical Chinese or! Vietnamese.

Trading on the possibility of using the word 'form' both as a count noun and as a mass noun (as I have done in the preceding paragraph and throughout this section), we can now say that two forms are identical (in one sense of 'identical') if they have the same form. For example, two spoken forms will be phoneti­cally identical if they have the same pronunciation; and two written forms (in a language written with an alphabetic script) will be orthographically identical if they have the same spelling. (Orthographic identity needs to be formulated somewhat differ­ently for languages with a non-alphabetic script, but this does not affect the application to such languages of the notion of orthographic identity.) A further distinction can be drawn, as far as the spoken language is concerned, between phonetic and

1.5 Words: forms and meanings 31

phonological identity. Students who are familiar with this dis­tinction will see the implications of drawing it in particular instances; those who are not need not be troubled by it here. It isnormally phonological identity that is at issue in linguistic semantics. But, for simplicity of exposition, I will not draw the distinction between phonetic and phonological identity at this point: I will talk simply about forms being phonetically identical or not (in this or that accent or dialect).

The fact that two (or more) written forms may be phoneti­cally identical is readily illustrated from English (in many, if not all, dialects): cf. soul and sole, great and grate, or red and read (in one of its two different pronunciations). The fact that two or more phonetically different forms may be orthographi- cally identical is also readily illustrated from English: cf. read (in have read vs will read), blessed (in The bishop blessed the congre­gation vs Blessed are the peacemakers). The kind of identity that has just been discussed and exemplified may be called material identity. As I have explained it here, it is dependent on the physical medium in which the form is realized. Extensions and refinements of the notion of material identity are possible, but the somewhat simplified account that I have given of it here will suffice for the deliberately restricted purposes of the present book.

Let us now bring into the discussion the fact that in many nat­ural languages, including English, referred to technically as non-isolating, or (morphologically) synthetic languages, words may have two or more grammatically distinct forms: cf. man (singular, non-possessive), man's (singular, possessive), men (plural, non-possessive) and men's (plural, possessive). Typi­cally, as with the four forms of 'man', the grammatically dis­tinct - more specifically, the inflectionally distinct - forms of a word (or other expression) are materially different (non-identical). But material identity is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition of the grammatical (and, more specifically, the inflectional) identity of forms. For example, the form come serves as one of the present-tense forms of 'come' (they come) and also as what is traditionally called its past-participle form (they have come). Is come the same form in both cases? The answer is: in

32 Metalinguistic preliminaries

one sense, yes; and, in another sense, no. The come of they come is the same as the come of they have come in the sense that it is materially identical with it (in both the spoken and the written language). But the come of they come and the come of they have come are different inflectional forms of the verb 'come'. Conversely, given that some speakers of what is otherwise the same variety of Standard English say fand write) have learned and that others say (and write) hare learnt (and that yet others alternate between the two), the two materially different forms learned and learnt can be regarded as grammatically identical (or equivalent). To make the point more precisely: (in this variety of Standard English) the same grammatical - or, more specifically in this case, the same inflectional form — of the word 'learn' is realized by two materially different (phonetic and orthographic) forms.

What has just been said, in conclusion, about different kinds of identity will be helpful later. It should also reinforce the point made earlier about the importance of establishing a set of techni­cal terms and notational conventions, whether by regimentation or extension, for the purpose of precise metalinguistic reference. Generally speaking, the sense in which I am using the term 'form' at various places in this book will be clear in context. Whenever this is not so, I will invoke the distinction that has been drawn here between forms considered from the point of view of their material composition and forms considered from the point of view of their grammatical function.

 

1.6 s e x t e n c e s a n d u t t e r a n c e s; t e x t,

conversation and discourse

 

We have been assuming (and shall continue to assume) that all natural languages have words, which have both form and mean­ing (1.5). Let us now make explicit two further working assump­tions: (i) that all natural languages also have, sentences, which similarly have form and meaning; and (ii) that the meaning of a sentence is determined, at least partly, by the meanings of the words of which it is composed. Neither of these assumptions is controversial. Each of them, however, will need to be looked at carefully later. None of the general points which are made in

1.6 Sentences and utterances; text, conversation and discourse 33

the first few chapters will be seriously affected by any refine­ments or qualifications that are brought in subsequently.

The meaning of a sentence is determined not only by the meaning of the words of which it is composed, but also by its grammatical structure. This is clear from the fact that two sen­tences can be composed of exactly the same words (each word being interpreted in the same way) and yet differ in meaning. For example, the following two sentences, (22) and (23), contain the same words (in the same form) but differ grammatically. One is a declarative sentence and the other is the corresponding interrogative sentence, and the grammatical difference between them is matched with a corresponding difference of meaning:

(22) 'It was raining yesterday'
and

(23) 'Was it raining yesterday?'.

So too, do (24) and (25). In this case, however, the two sentences are both declarative, and they are not related to one another as corresponding members of two matched and grammatically definable classes of sentences:

(24) 'John admires Mary'
and

(25) 'Mary admires John'.

It will be noted that I am using single quotation-marks for sen­tences (even when they are numbered and displayed), as well as for words and other expressions with form and meaning. This is in accord with the notational convention introduced in the pre­ceding section, which will be adhered to throughout this book. Whether sentences are expressions in the same sense that words and phrases are expressions is a question that we need not be concerned with in Parts 1 and 2 of this book.

For simplicity of exposition, I am making the distinction between word-meaning (or, to be more precise, lexical meaning) and sentence-meaning one of the main organizing principles of this book, dealing with the former in Part 2 and

 

 

34 Metalinguistic preliminaries'

the latter in Part 3. It must be emphasized however that this method of organizing the material carries with it no implication whatsoever about the logical or methodological priority of lexi­cal meaning over sentence-meaning. There is no point in addres­sing the question of the priority of the one over the other until we have built up rather more of the theoretical and terminologi­cal framework. And when we have done so, we shall see that, like many such apparently straightforward questions, it does not admit of a simple, straightforward, answer.

The distinction between sentence-meaning and utterance-meaning provides us with a further organizing principle. This distinction cannot be taken for granted in the way that the one between word-meaning and sentence-meaning can. Not only is it less familiar to non-specialists. It is also the subject of a good deal of controversy among specialists. Most of the details may be left for Part 4. But a few general points must be made here.

In everyday English, the word 'utterance' is generally used to refer to spoken language (as also are the words 'discourse' and 'conversation'). The word 'text', in contrast, is generally used to refer to written language. Throughout this book, both 'utter­ance' and 'text' will be used neutrally with respect to the differ­ence between spoken and written language.

It would have been possible to extend our metalanguage, at this point, by introducing a whole set of specialized medium-neutral terms. A certain number of such terms will be intro­duced in later chapters. Meanwhile, however, we shall use such ordinary-language terms as 'speaker' and 'hearer', as well as 'utterance', 'text' and 'discourse' in a medium-neutral sense.

But language must not be confused with speech. Indeed, one of the most striking properties of natural languages is their rela­tive,independence of the medium in which they are realized. Language is still language, whether it is realized as the product of speech or of writing and, if it is the product of writing, regard­less of whether it is written in the normal alphabet or in braille, morse-code, etc. The degree of correspondence between written and spoken language varies somewhat, for historical and cul­tural reasons, from one language to another. But in English, and in other languages that are associated with an alphabetic

1.6 Sentences and utterances; text, conversation and discourse 35

writing-system, most, if not all, sentences of the spoken language can be put into correspondence with written sentences. The fact that this is not a one-to-one correspondence will occupy us later. Nothing further needs to be said, at this point, about text, dis- course and conversation. Indeed, I shall have nothing to say about them until we get to Chapter 9. In the meantime we can think of utterances as minimal (spoken or written) texts and of discourses and conversations as sequences of (one or more) utter- anees.

But, as we have seen, the terms 'utterance', 'discourse' and 'conversation' (unlike 'text') have both a process-sense and a product-sense: in their process-sense, they denote a particular kind of behaviour, or activity; in their product-sense, they denote, not the activity itself, but the physical product or prod­ucts of that activity (1.4). Obviously, the two senses are related; but the nature of the relation is not self-evident, and it will be dis­cussed in Part 4.

Meanwhile, we will establish the terminological convention that, whenever the term 'utterance' is used in this book without further qualification and in contexts in which the process-sense is excluded for syntactic reasons, it is to be interpreted as de­noting the product or products of what in Chomskyan terminol­ogy may be referred to as performance. Utterances, in this sense of the term, are what some philosophers of language have called inscriptions: i.e., sequences of symbols inscribed in some physi­cal medium. For example, a spoken utterance is normally inscribed (in this technical sense of 'inscribed') in the medium; of sound; a written utterance is inscribed in some other suitable medium which makes it visually identifiable. In so far as lan­guages are used, typically if not necessarily, for communication, • utterances may be regarded as signals which are transmitted from speaker to hearer - more generally, from a sender to a receiver- along some appropriate channel. Utterances (i.e., utterance-inscriptions or utterance-signals) will be distinguished notationally from sentences (as the forms of a word are distin­guished from the word itself) by using italics for the former and single quotation-marks for the latter. This implies that utter­ances are forms; and this is the view of utterances (in the sense

36 Metalinguistic preliminaries

of inscriptions) that is taken throughout this book. As we shall see in Part 4, a case can also be made for the view that they may in many instances be regarded as the context-dependent forms of particular sentences. But at this stage we do not need to take one view rather than another on the controversial issue of the relation between utterances and sentences.

Natural-language utterances, it must be emphasized, are not just sequences, or strings, of word-forms. As we have already seen, superimposed upon the verbal component of any spoken utterances (the string of words of which it is composed), there is always and necessarily a non-verbal component, which lin­guists further subdivide into a prosodic subcomponent and paralinguistic subcomponent (1.3). Just where the line should be drawn between these two subcomponents need not concern us here. Let us merely note that the prosodic contour of an utter­ance includes its intonation, and perhaps also its stress-pattern; and that paralinguistic features include such things as tone of voice, loudness, rhythm, tempo, etc These non-verbal features of an utterance are jusi as relevant to the determination of the meaning of the utterance as are the meanings of the words it con­tains and its grammatical meaning, both of which are encoded in the verbal component:

It is only the verbal component of a spoken utterance that is independent of the medium in which it is realized and is medium-transferable, in that it can, in principle, be held con­stant under the conversion of speech to writing. As we have noted already, some writing systems do include more or less conventionalized principles for the punctuation of written utterances. But these never match significant differences of intonation in the spoken language. Even when the normal conventions of punctuation are supplemented with such typo­graphical devices as the use of capitals, italics, bold print, accent-marks, etc., there may be some part of the prosodic contour of an utterance that is left unrepresented.

This is an important point. Almost every written utterance cited in this and other books on language can be put into correspondence with significantly different spoken utterances. The written utterance Mary won't come, forexample, can be

1.6 Sentences and utterances; text, conversation and discourse 37

pronounced, or read aloud, in several different ways, indicative of boredom, surprise, certainty, etc. I will try to choose; my ex-amples so that, with sufficient explanation at the time, it does not matter, for the particular issue that is under discussion, which of several significantly different spoken utterances is chosen by the reader.

I am taking for granted, for the time being, the reader's ability to identify the sentences of any language in which he or she is competent: i.e., to distinguish them from other combinations of words that are not sentences. I will now make the further assumption that some non-sentences are not sentences because they are grammatically incorrect and others because they are grammatically incomplete, or elliptical; and that, once again, those who are competent in the language, whether they are native speakers or not, can identify these two subclasses of non- sentences. As we shall see later, many everyday utterances are grammatically incomplete, but, in context, both acceptable and interpretable. On the other hand, there are sentences which, though fully grammatical, for one reasop or another can­not normally be uttered: the difference between grammaticality and acceptability (including semantic acceptability) is critically important in linguistic semantics and will be dealt with in Part 2(5.2).

Throughout Parts 2 and 3 of this book we shall be restricting our attention to utterances whose relation to sentences is rela- lively straightforward. We shall leave for Part 4 the task of speci- fying in some detail what exactly is meant by the expression 'to utter a sentence' and explaining how it can be extended to cover grammatically correct, but incomplete, utterances, which constitute a particular subclass of non-sentences. As I have already said, most everyday utterances may well fall into this subclass of non-sentences.

The difference between sentence-meaning and utterance-meaning will be dealt with in Part 4. At this stage it will be suffi­cient to make two general points. First, sentence-meaning is (to a high degree) context-independent, whereas utterance-meaning is not: that is to say, the meaning of an utterance is (to a greater or less degree) determined by the context in which it is

 

 

38 Metalinguistic preliminaries

uttered. Second, there is an intrinsic connexion between the meaning of a sentence and the characteristic use, not of the particular sentence as such, but of the whole class of sentences to which the sentence belongs by virtue of its grammatical struc­ture This connexion may be formulated, for one class of sen­tences, as follows: a declarative sentence is one that belongs, by virtue of its grammatical structure, to the class of sentences whose members are used, characteristically, to make state­ments, as in

 

(26) 'Exercise is good for you'
or

(27) 'I prefer mine with ice'.

 

Similarly for another class of sentences, which is distinguished from declaratives in English and in many languages: an inter­rogative sentence is one that belongs, by virtue of its grammati­cal structure, to the class of sentences whose members are used characteristically to ask questions, as in

 

(28) 'What time is lunch?';

 

and so on. When I said earlier of the sentences (22) 'It was rain­ing yesterday' and (23) 'Was it raining yesterday?' that their meaning was determined, in part, by their grammatical struc­ture, I was tacitly appealing to the reader's knowledge of the characteristic use of declarative and interrogative sentences. It is of course the recognition of this as their characteristic use which accounts for the traditional terms 'declarative' and 'inter­rogative'. Much traditional grammatical terminology similarly reveals assumptions, whether correct or incorrect, about the characteristic use of particular grammatical categories and con­structions.

It should be noted that the notion of characteristic use (which is also intrinsically connected with the notion of literal meaning) has been associated here with classes of sentences, rather than with each and every member of a particular class. This is impor­tant, even though some sentences are never, or very rarely, used in normal circumstances with the function that characterizes

1.6Sentences and utterances; text, conversation and discourse 39

the grammatically defined class to which they belong; and, as we shall see later, all sentences can be used occasionally in the per­formance of what have come to be called indirect speech acts (declarative sentences being used to ask questions, inter­rogative sentences to issue requests, etc.). However, it is obviously impossible that most declarative sentences should nor­mally be used to ask questions, most interrogative sentences to make statements, apd so on. For declarative and interrogative sentences are, by definition, sentences with the characteristic use that is here ascribed to them. If a language does not have a grammatically distinct class of sentences with one or other of these characteristic uses, then it does not have either declarative or interrogative sentences, as the case may be.