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Spoken utterances, in particular, will contain, in addition to the words of which they are composed, a particular intonation-contour and stress-pattern: these are referred to technically as prosodic features. They are an integral part of the utterances in which they occur, and they must not be thought of as being in any sense secondary or optional. Prosodic features, in all nat­ural languages, are to a considerable degree (though not wholly) iconic. Spoken utterances may also be accompanied by what are called paralinguistic features - popularly, but inaccu­rately, called body-language (gestures, posture, eye movements, facial expressions, etc.). As the term 'paralinguistic' suggests, these are not regarded by linguists as being an integral part of the utterances with which they are associated. In this respect, they differ from prosodic features. But paralinguistic features too are meaningful, and, like prosodic features, they serve to modulate and to punctuate the utterances which they accom­pany. They tend to be even more highly iconic, or otherwise non-arbitrary, than prosodic features. In 'both cases, however, their non-arbitrariness is blended with an equally high degree of conventionality: that is to say, the prosodic features of spoken languages and the paralinguistic gestures that are associated with spoken utterances in particular languages (or dialects) in particular cultures (or subcultures) vary from language to language and have to be learned as part of the normal process of language-acquisition.

Written language does not have anything which directly corresponds to the prosodic or paralinguistic features of spoken language. However, punctuation marks (the full stop, or period, the comma, the question-mark, etc.) and capitals, italics, underlining, etc. are roughly equivalent in function. Hence my use of the term 'punctuation' as a technical term of linguistic semantics for both spoken and written language.

1.3 Linguistic and non-linguistic semantics 15

Another kind of non-arbitrariness, to which semanticists have given increasing attention in recent years, is indexicality. An index, as the term was originally defined, is a sign which, in some sense, calls attention to - indicates (or is indicative of) what it signifies (in the immediate situation) and which thereby serves as a clue, as it were, to the presence or existence (in the immediate situation) of whatever it is that it signifies. For example, smoke is an index of fire; slurred speech may indi­cate drunkenness; and so on. In these two cases there is a causal connexion between the index and what it indicates. But this is not considered to be essential. In fact, the term 'index', as it was originally defined, covered a variety of things which have little in common other than that of focusing attention on some aspect of the immediate physical situation. One of the consequences is that the term 'indexicality' has been used in several conflicting senses in the more recent literature. I will select just one of those senses and explain it in Chapter 10. Until then, I will make no further use of the terms 'index', 'indexical' or 'indexicality'.

I will however employ the verb 'indicate' (and also Sbe indica­tive of) in the sense in which I have used it of smoke and slurred speech in the preceding paragraph. When one says that smoke means fire or that slurred speech is a sign of drunkenness, one implies, not merely that they call attention to the presence of fire or drunkenness (in the immediate situation), but that fire is the source of the smoke and that it is the person whose speech is slurred who is drunk. If we make this a defining condition of indication, in what I will now adopt as a technical sense of the term, we can say that a good deal of information that is expressed in spoken utterances is indicative of the biological, psychological or social characteristics of their source. For ex­ample, a person's accent will generally be indicative of his or her social or geographical provenance; so too, on occasion, will the selection of one, rather than another, of two otherwise syn­onymous expressions.

How then do linguists deal with the meaning of language-utterances? And how much of it do they classify as linguistic (in the sense of "falling within the scope of linguistics") rather than as paralinguistic (or extralinguistic)? Linguists' ways of dealing

 

16 Metalinguistic preliminaries

with any part of their subject-matter vary, as do those of specialists in other disciplines, in accordance with the prevailing intellectual climate. Indeed, there have been times in the recent past, notably in the United States in the period between 1930 and the end of the 1950s, when linguistic semantics was very largely neglected. One reason for this was that the investigation of meaning was felt to be inherently subjective (in the pejorative-sense of the word) and, at least temporarily, beyond the scope of science.

A more particular reason for the comparative neglect of lin­guistic semantics was the influence of behaviourist psychology upon some, though not all, schools of American linguistics. Largely as a result of Chomsky's criticisms of behaviourism in the late 1950s and the subsequent revolutionary impact of his theory of generative grammar, not only upon linguistics, but also upon other academic disciplines, including philosophy and psychology, the influence of behaviourism is no longer as strong as it was a generation ago. Not only linguists, but also philos­ophers and psychologists, are now prepared to admit as data much that was previously rejected as subjective (in the pejora­tive sense of the word) and unreliable.

This book concentrates upon linguistic semantics, and it does so from what many would classify as a traditional point of view. But it also pays due attention to those developments which have taken place as a consequence of the increased collaboration that there has been, in recent years, between linguists and repre­sentatives of other disciplines, including formal logic and the philosophy of language, and examines the strengths and weak­nesses of some of the most important notions which linguistic semantics currently shares with various kinds of non-linguistic semantics.

1.4 LANGUAGE. SPEECH AND U T T E R A NC E; ' L A NG U E' AND 'PAROLE': 'COMPETENCE' AND 'PERFORMANCE'

The English word 'language', like the word 'meaning', has a wide range of meaning (or meanings). But the first and most important point to be made about the word 'language' is that

Language, speech and utterance 17

(like 'meaning' and several other English nouns) it is catego-rially ambivalent with respect to the semantically relevant property of countability: i.e., it can be used (like 'thing', 'idea', etc.) as a count noun (which means that, when it is used in the singular, it must be combined with an article, definite or indefinite, or some other kind of determiner); it can also be used (like 'water', 'information', etc.) as a mass noun (i.e., non-count noun), which does not require a determiner and which normally denotes not an individual entity of set or entities, but an unbounded mass or aggregate of stuff or substance. Count-ability is not given grammatical recognition - is not grammaticalized (either morphologically or syntactically) - in all natural languages (cf. 10.1). And in those languages in which it is grammaticalized, it is grammaticalized in a variety of ways.

What is of concern to us here is the fact that when the word 'language' is used as a mass noun in the singular (without a determiner) the expression containing it can be, but need not be, semantically equivalent to an expression containing the plural form of 'language' used as a count noun. This, has the effect that some statements containing the word 'language' in the singular are ambiguous. One such example (adapted from the second paragraph of section 1.2 above) is

(15) A metalanguage is a language which is used to describe language.
Another is

(16) Linguistics is the scientific study of language.

Do (15) and (16) mean the same, respectively, as

(17) A metalanguage is a language which is used to describe languages
and

(18) Linguistics is the scientific study of languages?

This question cannot be answered without reference to the con­text in which (15) and (16) occur, and it may not be answerable even in context. What should be clear however, on reflection if not immediately, is that (15) and (16), as they stand and out of context, are ambiguous, according to whether they

 

18 Metalinguistic preliminaries

are interpreted as being semantically equivalent to (17) and (18), respectively, or not.

The reason for this particular ambiguity is that, whenever the word 'language' is used as a mass noun, as in (15) and (16), the expression containing it may be referring, not to a set of lan­guages, each of which is (or can be described as) a system of words and grammatical rules, but to the spoken or written products of (the use of) a particular system or set of systems. What may be referred to as the system-product ambiguity of many expressions containing the English word 'language' cor­relates with the fact, which has just been noted, that the English word 'language' (like many other nouns in English) is syntacti­cally ambivalent: i.e., it belong to two syntactically distinct sub­classes of nouns (count nouns and mass nouns). And it so happens that, when it is used, as a mass noun in the singular, the expression containing it can refer either to the product of (the use of) a language or to the totality (or a sample) of languages.

Expressions containing the words 'English', 'French', 'Ger­man', etc. exhibit a related, but rather different, kind of sys­tem-product ambiguity when they are used as mass nouns in the singular (in certain contexts). For example,

(19) That is English

may be used to refer either to a particular text or utterance as such or, alternatively, to the language-system of which parti­cular texts or utterances are the products. That this is a genuine ambiguity is evident from the fact that in one interpretation of (19), but not the other, the single-word expression 'English' may be replaced with the phrase 'the English, language'. It is obvious that one cannot identify any particular English utter­ance with the English language. It is also obvious that, in cases like this, the syntactic ambivalence upon which the ambiguity turns, is not between count nouns and mass nouns, as such, but between proper (count) nouns and common (mass) nouns.

What I have referred to as, the system-product ambiguity associated with the categorial ambivalence of the word 'language' is obvious enough, once it has been explained. But it has been, and continues to be, the source of a good deal of

Language, speech and utterance 19

theoretical confusion. One way of avoiding at least some of this confusion is to adopt the policy of never using the English word 'language' metalinguistically as a mass noun when the expression containing it could be replaced, without change of meaning, with an expression containing the plural form of 'language' used as a count noun. This policy will be adhered to consistently in all that follows; and students are advised to adopt the same policy themselves.

Another way of avoiding, or reducing, the ambiguity and con­fusion caused by the syntactic (or categorial) ambivalence of the everyday English word 'language' and by its several mean­ings is to coin a'set of more specialized terms to replace it. Such are the now widely used 'langue' and 'parole', which were first employed technically by Saussure (1916), writing in French, and 'competence' and 'performance', which were introduced into linguistics as technical terms by Chomsky (1965).

, In everyday, non-technical, French the noun 'langue' is one of two words which, taken together, nave much the same range of meaning or meanings as the English word 'language'. The other is 'langage'. The two French words differ from one another grammmatically and semantically in several respects. Two such differences are relevant in the present context: (i) 'langue', in contrast with 'langage', is always used as a count noun; (ii) 'langue' denotes what are commonly referred to as natural languages and, unlike 'langage', is not normally used to refer (a) to the artificial (i.e., non-natural) formal languages of logicians, mathematicians, and computer scientists, (b) to such ^;extralinguistic or paralinguistic communication systems as what is popularly called body-language, or (c) to non-human systems of communication. The fact that French (like Italian, Portu­guese, Spanish and other Romance languages) has two semanti­cally non-equivalent words, one of which is much more general than the other, to cover what is covered by the English word 'language' is interesting in itself. It reinforces the point made eadier about the English word 'meaning': the everyday meta­language that is contained in one natural language is not necessarily equivalent semantically, in whole or in part, to the metalanguage contained in other natural languages. But this

 

20 Metalinguistic preliminaries

fact has been mentioned here in connexion with the Saussurean distinction between 'langue' and 'parole'.

Expressions containing the French word 'langage' are subject to the same kind of system-product ambiguity as are expressions containing the English word 'language'. But expressions con­taining the word 'langue' are not. They always refer to what I am calling language-systems (and by virtue of the narrow range of 'langue', in contrast with the English word 'language', to what are commonly called natural languages). This holds true regardless of whether 'langue' is being used technically or non-technically in French.

The word 'parole' has a number of related, or overlapping, meanings in everyday French. In the meaning which concerns us here it covers part of what is covered by the French word 'langage' and the English word 'language' when they are being used as mass nouns. It denotes the product or products of the use of a language-system. Unlike 'langage' and 'language', however, it is restricted to spoken language: i.e., to the product of speech. Consequently, the Saussurean distinction between 'langue' and 'parole' has frequently been misrepresented, in English, as also in several other European languages including German and Russian, as a distinction between language and speech.

The essential distinction, as we have seen, is between a system (comprising a set of grammatical rules and a vocabulary) and the products of (the use of) the system. It will be noted that here, as earlier in this section, I have inserted in parentheses the phrase 'the use of'. This brings us to a second point which must be made, not only about the Saussurean distinction between 'langue' and 'parole', but also about the Chomskyan distinction between 'competence' and 'performance', which has also given rise to a good deal of theoretical confusion.

By 'competence' (more fully, 'linguistic competence' or 'grammatical competence') Chomsky means the language-system which is stored in the brains of individuals who are said to know, or to be competent in, the language in question. Linguistic competence in this sense is always competence in a particular language. It is normally acquired by so-called native speakers in childhood (in normal environmental

Language, speech and utterance 21

conditions) by virtue of the interaction of (i) the specifically human and genetically transmitted language-facility (to which Chomsky applies the term 'universal grammar') and (ii) a suffi­cient number of sufficiently representative sample utterances which can be analysed (with the aid of the child's innate know­ledge of the principles and parameters of universal grammar) as products of the developing language-system. There is much in the detail of Chomsky's theory of language-acquisition and uni­versal grammar which is philosophically and psychologically controversial. But this is irrelevant to our present concerns. It is, or ought to be, by now uncontroversial that what Chomsky calls competence in particular natural languages is stored neurophysiologically in the brains of individual members of particular language-communities. And Chomsky's 'com­petence', thus explicated, may be identified for present purposes with Saussure's 'langue'.

As Chomsky distinguishes 'competence' from 'performance', so Saussure distinguishes 'langue' from 'parole'. But 'perfor­mance' cannot be identified with 'parole' as readily as 'com­petence' can be identified with 'langue'. Strictly speaking, 'performance' applies to the use of the language-system, whereas 'parole' applies to the products of the use of the system. But this terminological distinction is not always maintained. The Chomskyan term 'performance' (like the term 'behaviour') is often employed by linguists to refer indifferently, or equivocally, both to the use of the system and to the products of the use of the system. 'Parole', in contrast, is rarely, if ever, employed to refer to anything other than the products of the use of particular language-systems. What is required, it should now be clear, is not a simple two-term distinction between a system and its products, but a three-term distinction, in which the products ('parole') are distinguished, not only from the system, but also from the process ('performance','behaviour', 'use', etc.). Whether we employ specialized metalinguistic vocabulary for this purpose or not, it is important that what is produced by the process of using a language should be carefully distinguished from the process itself.

Many everyday English nouns derived from verbs are like 'performance', in that they can be used to refer both to a process

22 Metalinguistic preliminaries

and to its product or products. These include the noun 'produc­tion' itself and a host of semantically related nouns, such as 'cre­ation', 'composition' and 'construction'. They also include such ordinary-language (i.e., ordinary-metalanguage) words as 'speech', 'writing' and 'utterance',(and many others). The two senses of these terms must not be confused, as they have been confused - and continue to be confused - in many textbooks of linguistics. This point,, as we shall see, is of special importance when it comes to the definition of 'pragmatics'.

Much that has been said in this section is relevant, not only to the problems which can arise if we do not exercise great care in the use of such everyday words as 'language' and 'speech', but to a range of other issues which will come up later. It is essential that those who are new to the study of semantics should be made aware of what I will refer to here as the system-process—product trichotomy. Students who are already familiar with the principles of modern generative grammar and formal semantics will know that there are further refinements to be made to the system-process-product analysis of language and of the use of language which has been presented here. In particular, there is a more abstract, mathematical, sense of 'pro­cess' and 'product' in terms of which sentences are said to be produced - or generated - by a grammar operating upon an associated vocabulary. This more abstract sense of 'process' (like the more abstract sense of 'sentence' which depends upon it and will be explained in due course) is logically independent of use and context and can be considered as system-internal. But technical questions of this kind do not concern us for the present. We can make a good deal of progress in seman­tics before we need to take account of recent advances in theoretical linguistics and formal logic.

1.5 WORDS: FORMS AND MEANINGS

At this point it will be convenient to introduce the notational convention for distinguishing between form and meaning with which we shall be operating throughout this book. It is readily explained, in the first instance, with respect to the form and

Words: forms and meanings 23

meaning of words. It may then be extended, as we shall see, to phrases, sentences and other expressions.

One of the tacit assumptions with which we have been operat­ing so far and which may now be made explicit is that words (and other expressions, including phrases and sentences) have meaning. They also have form: in fact, in English and any other natural language which is associated with a writing-system, whether alphabetic or non-alphabetic, and is in common use, words have both a spoken form and a conventionally accepted written form. (In certain cases, the same spoken lan­guage is associated with different writing-systems, so that the same spoken word may have several different written forms. Conversely, and more strikingly, phonologically distinct spoken languages may be associated, not only with the same writing-system, but with the same written language, provided that, as is the case with the so-called dialects of Modern Chinese, there is a sufficient degree of grammatical and lexical isomorphism among the different spoken languages: i.e., a sufficient degree of structural identity in grammar and vocabulary.) We shall not generally need to draw a distinction between written and spoken forms, although some of the conventions for doing so, when necessary, are well enough established in linguistics (including the use of symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet within square brackets or obliques for the phonetic or phono­logical representation of forms). But it will certainly be necessary to distinguish the word (considered as a composite unit) from both its form and its meaning. And for this purpose we can employ the ordinary written form of a word to stand, not only for the word itself as a composite unit with both form and meaning, but also for either the form or the meaning considered indepen­dently of one another. This is what is done in the everyday meta­linguistic use of English and other languages. However, in order to make it clear which of these three different metalinguis­tic functions the written form of a word is fulfilling on a particular occasion we need to establish distinctive notational conventions.

Regrettably, the notational conventions most commonly used by linguists fail to distinguish clearly and consistently between

 

24 Metalinguistic preliminaries

words (and other expressions), on the one hand, and their form or their meaning, on the other. In this book, single quotation-marks will be employed for words, and for other composite units with both form and meaning; italics (without quotation-marks) for forms (whether spoken or written); and double quotation-marks for meanings (or senses).

A moment's reflection will show that all we have done so far is to systematize and codify (i.e., to regiment), for our own special purposes, some of the ordinary metalinguistic conventions of written English. When ordinary users of English (or other nat­ural languages) wish to refer to a word, they do so by citing it in either its written or spoken form, as the case may be. For example, they might say

(20) Can you tell me what 'sesquipedalian' means? and one possible response would be (21) I'm sorrv. I can't: look it up in the dictionary,

where 'it', in context, both refers to and can be replaced by the word 'sesquipedalian'. Similarly, conventional dictionaries of English and of other languages that are associated with an alphabetic writing-system identify words by means of their form, listing them according to a purely conventional ordering of the letters of the alphabet, which is taught for this very pur­pose at school.

We have now explicitly adopted a notational convention for distinguishing words (and other expressions) from both their meaning and their form. But in many languages, including Eng­lish, words may also have more than one form. For example, the noun 'man' has the grammatically distinct forms man, man's, men and men's', the verb 'sing| has the grammatically distinct forms sing, sings, singing, sang and sung; and so on. These gramma­tically distinct forms of a word are traditionally described as inflectional: the noun 'man', like the vast majority of count nouns in English, is inflected for the grammatical (more precisely, morphosyntactic) properties of singularity/plurality and possession; the verb 'sing', like the majority of verbs in English, is inflected for the grammatical category of tense

1.5 Words: forms and meanings 25

(present versus past), etc. Some languages are much more highly inflected than others. English in contrast with Russian or Latin, or even French, Italian, Spanish, etc., or German, does not have much inflectional variation in the forms of words; and certain languages (so-called analytic, or isolating, languages), notably Vietnamese and Classical Chinese, have none. It is nevertheless important to draw a distinction between a word and its form, even if it has no distinct inflectional forms.

Among the inflectional forms of a word, in English and other languages, one is conventionally regarded as its citation-form: i.e., as the form which is used to cite, or refer to, the word as a composite whole. And it is usually the citation-form which appears, in alphabetical order, at the head of an entry in conventional dictionaries of English and of other languages that are associated with an alphabetic writing-system.

The conventionally accepted everyday citation-form of a word is not necessarily the form of the word that a linguist might identify as its root or stem. Generally speaking, in English, as it happens, the everyday citation-form of most words -except for verbs - is identical with their stem-form. But this is not so in all languages. Throughout this book, for all languages other than English, we shall use whatever citation-form is most generally accepted in the mainstream lexicographical tradition of the languages being referred to. In English, as far as verbs are concerned, there are two alternative conventions. The more traditional everyday convention, which is less commonly adopted these days by linguists, is to use the so-called infinitive-form, composed of the particle to and the stem-form (or, in the case of irregular verbs, one of the stem-forms): e.g., 'to love', 'to sing', 'to be', etc. The loss traditional convention, which is the one I will follow, is to use the stem-form (or one of the stem-forms), not only for nouns, pronouns, adjectives and adverbs, but also for verbs: e.g., not only 'man', 'she', 'good' and 'well', etc., but also 'love', 'sing', 'be', etc. There are undoubtedly good reasons for choosing the stem-form (or one of the stem-forms) as the citation-form in languages such as English. But, in principle, the fact that one form rather than another is used for

26 Metalinguistic preliminaries

metalinguistic reference to the word of which it is a form is arbi­trary and a matter of convention.

Not only do most English words have more than one form. They may also have more than one meaning; and in this respect English is typical of all natural languages. (Although there are natural languages in which every word has one and only one form, it is almost certainly the case that there are no natural languages, and never have been, in which every word has one and only one meaning.) For example, the noun 'foot' has several meanings. If we wish to distinguish these notationally, we can do so by numbering them and attaching the numbers as subscripts to our symbolic representation of meaning: "foot₁", "foot₂", "foot₃", etc. More generally, given that X is the citation-form.of a word, we refer to that word as 'X' and to its meaning (i.e., to the set of its one or more meanings) as "X"; and if it has more than one meaning, we can distinguish these as "X₁", "X₂", "X₃", etc.

Of course, this use 'of subscripts is simply a convenient nota-tional device, which tells one nothing at all about the meaning or meanings of a word. When it comes to identifying the different meanings other than symbolically in this way, we can do so by means of definition or paraphrase. For example, in the case of the word 'foot', we can say that "foot₁" is "terminal part of a leg", that "foot₂" is "lowest part of a hill or mountain", etc. How one decides whether a particular definition or paraphrase is correct or not is something that will be discussed in Part 2. Here I am concerned simply to explain the metalinguistic nota­tion that I am using. But I should also make explicit the fact that the use that I am making of the notation at this point rests upon the assumption that the meanings of words are both (i) dis­crete and (ii) distinguishable. This assumption is one that is com­monly made by lexicographers (and linguists) and is reflected in the organization of most standard dictionaries.