Lexical meaning
- Key People:
- Noam Chomsky
- Rudolf Carnap
- Gottlob Frege
- Lorenzo Valla
- Max Müller
The other component of sentence meaning is word meaning, the individual meanings of the words in a sentence, as lexical items. The concept of word meaning is a familiar one. Dictionaries list words and in one way or another state their meanings. It is regarded as a sensible question to ask of any word in a language, “What does it mean?” This question, like many others about language, is easier to ask than to answer.
It is through lexical resources that languages maintain the flexibility their open-ended commitments demand. Every language has a vocabulary of many thousands of words, though not all are in active use, and some are known only to relatively few speakers. Perhaps the commonest delusion in considering vocabularies is the assumption that the words of different languages, or at least their nouns, verbs, and adjectives, label the same inventory of things, processes, and qualities in the world but unfortunately label them with different labels from language to language. If this were so, translation would be easier than it is; but the fact that translation, though often difficult, is possible indicates that people are talking about similar worlds of experience in their various languages.
Languages in part create the world in which humans live. Of course, many words do name existing bits and pieces of earth and heaven: stone, tree, dog, woman, star, cloud, and so on. Others, however, do not so much pick out what is there as classify it and organize one’s relations with it and with each other with regard to it. A range of living creatures are mammals or are vertebrates, because people classify them in these ways, among others, by applying selected criteria and so determining the denotation of the words mammal and vertebrate. Plants are vegetables or weeds according as groups of people classify them, and different plants are included and excluded by such classifications in different languages and different cultures.
Time and its associated vocabulary (year, month, day, hour, minute, yesterday, tomorrow, and so on) do not refer to discrete sections of reality but enable people to impose some sort of order, in agreement with others, on the processes of change observed in the world. Personal pronouns pick out the persons speaking, spoken to, and spoken about; but some languages make different distinctions in their pronouns from those made in English. For example, in Malay, kita, which means “we,” including the person addressed, is distinct from kami, a form for “we” that includes the speaker and a third person or persons but excludes the person addressed. In Japanese and in several other languages, a variety of words denoting the first and second persons indicate additionally the observed or intended social relationship of those involved.
Other word meanings are even more language- and culture-bound and, in consequence, harder to translate. Right and wrong, theft, inheritance, property, debt, sin, and crime are just a few of the words regulating one’s conduct and relations with one’s fellows in a particular culture. Translation becomes progressively harder as one moves to languages of more remote cultures, and it has been said that it requires “a unification of cultural context.” Insofar as a person’s understanding of the universe and of the relations between that person and other people is closely linked with the language used, it must be assumed, and the evidence confirms this assumption, that children progressively acquire such understanding along with their language.
The great majority of word shapes bear no direct relation to their lexical meanings. If they did, languages would be more alike. What are called onomatopoeic words have some similarity in shape through different languages: French coucou, English cuckoo, and German Kuckuck directly mimic the call of the bird. English dingdong and German bim-bam share several sound features in common that partially resemble the clanging of bells. More abstractly, some direct “sound symbolism” has been seen between certain sound types and visual or tactile shapes. Most people agree that the made-up word oomboolu would better designate a round, bulbous object than a spiky one. In addition, the appropriateness of the vowel sound represented by ee in English wee and i in French petit and Italian piccolo for expressing things of small size has been traced in several languages.
All this, however, is a very small part of the vocabulary of any language. For by far the largest number of words in a spoken language, there is no direct association between sound and meaning. English horse, German Pferd, French cheval, Latin equus, and Greek hippos are all unrelated to the animal so named, except that these words are so used in the languages concerned. This is what is meant by the term arbitrary in the second definition of language quoted at the beginning of this article. Vocabulary has to be largely arbitrary, because the greater part of the world and of human experience is not directly associated with any kind of noise, or even with specific gestures or hand shapes.
The relations between sentence structure and structural meanings are also largely arbitrary and tacitly conventional. The use of loudness and stress for emphasis in spoken languages as well as certain linguistic indications of anger and excitement are akin to nonlinguistic expressions of emotion and are somewhat similar across language divisions. But actual intonations and features such as word order, word inflection, and grammatical particles, used in maintaining distinctions in structural meaning, differ markedly in different languages.
Semantic flexibility
Not only are word meanings somewhat different in different languages; they are not fixed for all time in any one language. Semantic changes take place all along (see below Linguistic change), and at any moment the semantic area covered by a word is indeterminately bordered and differs from context to context. This is a further aspect and condition of the inherent and necessary flexibility of language.
General and specific designations
People can be as precise or as imprecise as they need or wish to be. In general, words are fairly imprecise, yet for particular purposes their meanings can be tightened up, usually by bringing in more words or phrases to divide up a given field in more detail. Good contrasts generally with bad, but one can, for example, grade students as first-class, excellent, very good, good, fair, poor, and failed (or bad). In this case, good now covers a restricted and relatively low place in a field of associated terms.
Colour words get their meanings from their mutual contrasts. The field of visually discriminable hues is very large and goes far beyond the resources of any vocabulary as it is normally used. Children learn the central or basic colour words of their language fairly early and at the same time; such terms as red and green are normally learned before subdivisions such as crimson and scarlet or chartreuse. It is well known that languages make their primary divisions of the spectrum of colours in different places; Japanese aoi covers many of the hues referred to in English by green and blue, while blue covers much of the range of the two Russian words goluboy and siny. While the actual colour vocabularies of languages differ, however, research by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay in the 1960s sought to show that “there exist universally for humans eleven basic perceptual color categories” that serve as reference points for the colour words of a language, whatever number may be regularly employed at any time. The claim remains controversial.
Ordinarily, considerable areas of indeterminate designation in colour vocabulary and in other fields are tolerated; between red and purple and between purple and blue, there are hues that one would hesitate to assign firmly to one or the other and on which there would be considerable personal disagreement. When greater precision than normal is required—as, for example, in listing paint or textile colours—all kinds of additional terms can be brought into service to supplement the usual vocabulary: off-white, light cream, lemon, blush pink, and so on.
The vocabulary of kinship terms varies from language to language, reflecting cultural differences. English distinguishes the nearer kinsfolk by sex: mother, father; sister, brother; aunt, uncle; and others. Other languages, such as Malay, make a lexical distinction of age the primary one, with separate words for elder brother or sister and younger brother or sister. Still other languages—for example, some American Indian ones—use different words for the sister of a man and for the sister of a woman. But beyond this any language can be as precise as the situation demands in kin designation. When it is necessary, English speakers can specify elder sister and female cousin, and within the overall category it is possible to distinguish first and second cousins and cousins once removed, distinctions that it is ordinarily pedantic to make.
The best example of infinite precision available from a strictly limited lexical stock is in the field of arithmetic. Between any two whole numbers a further fractional or decimal number may always be inserted, and this may go on indefinitely: between 10 and 11, 10 1/2 (10.5), 10 1/4 (10.25), 10 1/8 (10.125), and so on. Thus, mathematicians and physical scientists are able to achieve any desired degree of quantitative precision appropriate to their purposes, and hence the importance of quantitative statements in the sciences; any thermometric scale contains far more distinctions of temperature than are reasonably available in the vocabulary of a language (hot, warm, cool, tepid, cold, and so on). For this reason mathematics has been described as the “ideal use of language.” This characterization, however, applies to relatively few areas of expression, and for many purposes in everyday life the very imprecision of natural languages is the source of their strength and adaptability.
Neologisms
Every living language can readily be adapted to meet changes occurring in the life and culture of its speakers, and the main weight of such changes falls on vocabulary. Grammatical and phonological structures are relatively stable and change noticeably over centuries rather than decades (see below Linguistic change), but vocabularies can change very quickly both in word stock and in word meanings. Among the drivers of this sort of change, technology is among the most significant.
Every language can alter its vocabulary very easily, which means that every user can without effort adopt new words, accept or invent new meanings for existing words, and, of course, cease to use some words or cease to use them in certain meanings. Dictionaries identify some words and some meanings as “obsolete” or “obsolescent” to indicate this process. No two speakers share precisely the same vocabulary of words readily used and readily understood, though they may speak the same dialect. They will, however, naturally have the great majority of words in their vocabularies in common.
Languages have various resources for effecting changes in vocabulary. Meanings of existing words may change. With the virtual disappearance of falconry as a sport in England, lure has lost its original meaning of a bunch of feathers on a string by which hawks were recalled to their handler and is used now mainly in its metaphorical sense of enticement. Words such as computer and jet acquired new ranges of meaning in the mid-20th century.
All languages have the means of creating new words to bear new meanings. These can be new creations; chortle, which entered into general use in the 20th century, was a jocular creation of the English writer and mathematician Lewis Carroll (creator of Alice in Wonderland), and gas was formed in the 17th century by the Belgian chemist and physician Jan Baptista van Helmont as a technical term in chemistry, loosely modeled on the Greek chaos (“formless void”). Mostly, though, languages follow definite patterns in their innovations. Words can be made up without limit from existing words or from parts of words; the sources of railroad and aircraft are obvious. The controversy over the relations between church and state in the 19th and early 20th centuries gave rise to a chain of new words as the debate proceeded: disestablishmentarian, antidisestablishmentarian, antidisestablishmentarianism. Usually, the bits and pieces of words used in this way are those found in other such combinations, but this is not always so. The term permafrost (terrain that is perennially frozen) contains a bit of permanent probably not hitherto found in any other word.
A particular source of technical neologisms in European languages has been the words and word elements of Latin and Greek. This is part of the cultural history of western Europe, in so many ways the continuation of Greco-Roman civilization. Microbiology and dolichocephalic are words well formed according to the rules of Greek as they would be taken over into English, but no records survive of mikrobiologia and dolichokephalikos ever having been used in Ancient Greek. The same is true of Latinate creations such as reinvestment and longiverbosity. The long tradition of looking to Latin and, since the Renaissance, to Greek also as the languages of European civilization keeps alive the continuing formation of learned and scientific vocabulary in English and other European languages from these sources (late 20th-century coinages using the Greek prefix cyber- provide an example). The dependence on the classical languages in Europe is matched by a similar use of Sanskrit words for certain parts of learned vocabulary in some modern Indian languages (Sanskrit being the classical language of India). Such phenomena are examples of loanwords, one of the readiest sources for vocabulary extension.
Loanwords are words taken into a language from another language (the term borrowing is used for the process). Most obviously, this occurs when new things come into individuals’ experiences as the result of contacts with users of other languages. This is part of the history of every language, except for one used by an impossibly isolated community. Tea from Chinese, coffee from Arabic, and tomato, potato, and tobacco from American Indian languages are familiar examples of loanwords designating new products that have been added to the vocabulary of English. In more abstract areas, several modern languages of India and Pakistan contain many words that relate to government, industry, and current technology taken in from English. This is the result of British rule in these countries up to independence and the worldwide use of English as a language of international science since then.
In general, loanwords are rapidly and completely assimilated to the prevailing grammatical and phonological patterns of the borrowing language. The German word Kindergarten, literally “children’s garden,” was borrowed into English in the middle of the 19th century to designate an informal school for young children. It is now regularly pronounced as an English word, and the plural is kindergartens (not Kindergärten, as in German). Occasionally, however, some loanwords retain marks of their foreign origin; examples include Latin plurals such as cacti and narcissi (as contrasted with native patterns such as cactuses and narcissuses).
Languages differ in their acceptance of loanwords. An alternative way of extending vocabulary to cope with new products is to create a descriptive compound from within one’s own language. English aircraft and aeroplane are, respectively, examples of a native compound and a Greek loan creation for the same thing. English potato is a loan; French pomme de terre (literally, “apple of the earth”) is a descriptive compound. Chinese is particularly resistant to loans; aircraft, railway, and telephone are translated by newly formed compounds meaning literally fly machine, fire vehicle, and lightning (electricity) language. Some countries try to resist loans, believing that they reduce a language’s identity or “purity,” and introduce laws aimed at stopping the influx and form committees to provide native translations. Language change, however, is never restrained by such efforts; even in countries that have followed a legal road (such as France), loanwords continue to flow into everyday speech. It can be argued that loans add to a language’s richness and flexibility: English itself has received loans from more than 350 languages.
Language and conceptualization
The ability to communicate and the ability to conceptualize are very closely linked, and the typical child learns both these skills together at the same time. This is not to say that thinking is no more than subvocal speech, as some behaviourists have proposed; most people can think pictorially and in simple diagrams, some to a greater degree than others, and one has the experience of responding rationally to external stimuli without intervening verbalization. But, as 18th-century thinkers saw, human rationality developed and still goes hand in hand with the use of language, and a good deal of the flexibility of languages has been exploited in humans’ progressive understanding and conceptualizing of the world they live in and of their relations with others. Different cultures and different periods have seen this process differently developed. The anthropological linguist Edward Sapir put it well: “The ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.”
Much of this lies in the irrecoverable prehistory of languages. The idea that there are still some primitive, almost “fossil,” languages, embodying a very low level of conceptualization, is a vain one. All that can be said is that languages are different and that, in part, the world is seen differently through the eyes of speakers or users of different languages. But, in some cases, part of the lexical adaptation of a language to developing thought patterns can be followed through.
Ancient Greece saw a wholly unique growth and flowering of civilization in the 1st millennium bce, which has put virtually the entire civilized world in its debt ever since. In Greek, along with the emergence of certain abstract concepts and ways of thinking, one can follow some of the changes of word meanings and the coining of new words that accompanied this. As an example, the word dikē originally meant “way” or “manner,” and thereafter it acquired the meaning of the “right way of doing something,” “the right way of behaving,” and finally “abstract right.” Its derivative dikaiosynē, traditionally translated “justice,” became the subject of philosophical debate and analysis by the Greek philosophers and covered almost the whole range of moral obligation involved in the relations of one person with others in society. Similar debate and refinement of key terms in the various branches of thought covered by Greek philosophy can be followed through; indeed, the term philosophy is directly taken from Greek philosophia, a compound formed not later than the 5th century bce from philo- (compare philein, “to love”) and sophia (“wisdom”) to refer to abstract speculation and debate of a fundamental nature about the world and humans’ place in it.
An examination of the lexical structure of languages throws some light on the relations between various aspects of human conceptualization. Spatial relations and their expression seem to lie very deep in the content of vocabulary. Words referring to time are drawn metaphorically from spatial words with great frequency: a long/short time, the near future, far ahead/separated in time. Although time is a continuum, people readily divide it up into bits and record it rather as they do materials extended in space: five years, three months, six seconds. This last use of vocabulary may be a particular trait of European languages and some others. An American Indian language is reported not to do this nearly so readily; it uses cardinal numbers only for discrete, countable objects. A separate class of words aligns the vocabulary of sequential time with that of intensity, so repetition of the same activity again and again (to a European) is rather the intensification of a single activity. Certain differences in cultural attitudes and world outlook are said to accompany this kind of linguistic difference.
Spatial terms are also freely used in the expression of other, more abstract relationships: higher temperature, higher quality, lower expectations, summit of a career, far removed from any sensible course of action, a distant relationship, close friends, over and above what had been said. It has been theorized that the linguistic forms most closely associated semantically with the expression of relations—case inflections in languages exhibiting this category—are originally and basically spatial in meaning. This “localist” theory, as it has been called, has been debated since the beginning of the 19th century and probably cannot be accepted as it stands, but the fact that it can be proposed and argued shows the dominant position that spatial relations hold in the conceptualization and verbalization of relations in other realms of thought.
It has been maintained that the human brain has a preference for binary oppositions, or polarities. If this is so, it will help explain the numerous pairs of related antonyms that are found: good, bad; hot, cold; high, low; right, wrong; dark, light; and so on. For finer discriminations, these terms can be put into more narrowly specified fields containing more than two terms taken together, but their most general use is in binary contrasts. Here, however, one term seems to represent the fundamental semantic category in question. In asking about size, one asks How big is it?; about weight, How heavy is it?; and about evaluation, How good is it? It is possible to ask how small, how light, or how bad something is, but such questions presuppose that the thing in mind has already been graded on the small side, on the light side, or on the bad side.
