Untitled Flashcards Set

Sense

There must be something more to meaning than reference alone. This is also suggested by the fact that speakers know the meanings of many words that have no real-world referents (e.g., hobbits, unicorns, and Harry Potter). Similarly, what real-world entities would function words such as of and by, or modal verbs such as will or may refer to?

These additional elements of meaning are often termed sense. It is the extra something referred to earlier. Unicorns, hobbits, and Harry Potter have sense but no reference (with regard to objects in the real world). Conversely, proper names typically have only reference. A name such as Clem Kadiddlehopper may point out a certain person, its referent, but has little linguistic meaning beyond that. Philosophers of language dating back to ancient Greece have suggested that part of the meaning of a word is the mental image it conjures up. This helps with the problem of unicorns, hobbits, and Harry Potter; we may have a clear image of these entities from books, movies, and so on, and that connection might serve as reference for those expressions. However, many meaningful expressions are not associated with any clear, unique image agreed on by most speakers of the language. For example, what image is evoked by the words very, if, and every? It's difficult to say, yet these expressions are certainly meaningful. What is the image of oxygen as distinct from nitrogen-both are colorless, odorless gases, yet they differ in meaning. What mental image would we have of dog that is general enough to include Yorkshire Terriers and Great Danes and yet excludes foxes and wolves? And the image of no man in no man is an island presents a riddle worthy of a Zen koan. Although the idea that the meaning of a word corresponds to a mental image is intuitive (because many words do provoke imagery), it is clearly inadequate as a general explanation of what people know about word meanings.

Perhaps the best we can do is to note that the reference part of a word's meaning, if it has reference at all, is the association with its referent; and the sense part of a word's meaning contains the information needed to complete the association, and to suggest properties that the referent may have, whether it exists in the real world or in the world of imagination.

Lexical Relations

Does he wear a turban, a fez or a hat?

Does he sleep on a mattress, a bed or a mat, or a Cot,

The Akond of Swat?

Can he write a letter concisely clear,

Without a speck or a smudge or smear or Blot,

The Akond of Swat?

EDWARD LEAR, "The Akond of Swat," in Laughable Lyrics, 1877

Although we do not have a complete theory of word meaning, we know that speakers have considerable knowledge about the meaning relationships among

different words in their mental lexicons, and any theory must account for that knowledge. Words are semantically related to one another in a variety of ways. Words that describe these relations often contain the bound morpheme -nym. The best-known lexical relation is synonymy, illustrated in the poem by Edward Lear, and antonymy, or opposites. Synonyms are words or expressions that have the same meaning in some or all contexts. There are dictionaries of synonyms that contain many hundreds of entries, such as:

apathetic/phlegmatic/passive/sluggish/indifferent pedigree/ancestry/genealogy/descent/lineage

A sign in the San Diego Zoo Wild Animal Park states:

Please do not annoy, torment, pester, plague, molest, worry, badger, harry, harass, heckle, persecute, irk, bullyrag, vex, disquiet, grate, beset, bother, tease, nettle, tantalize, or ruffle the animals.

It has been said that there are no perfect synonyms-that is, no two words ever have exactly the same meaning. Still, the following two sentences have very similar meanings:

He's sitting on the sofa./He's sitting on the couch.

During the French Norman occupation of England that began in 1066 CE, many French words of Latin origin were imported into English. For this reason, English contains many synonymous pairs consisting of a word with an English (or Germanic) root, and another with a Latin root, such as:

English manly

heal

Latin virile

recuperate

send

go down

transmit descend

Words that are opposite in meaning are antonyms. There are several kinds of antonymy. There are complementary pairs:

alive/dead

present/absent awake/asleep

They are complementary in that alive = not dead and dead = not alive, and so on. There are gradable pairs of antonyms:

big/small

hot/cold fast/slow happy/sad

The meaning of adjectives in gradable pairs is related to the objects they modify. The words do not provide an absolute scale. For example, we know that "a small elephant" is much bigger than "a large mouse." Fast is faster when applied to an airplane than to a car.

Another kind of opposition involves pairs such as

give/receive buy/sell

teacher/pupil

They are called relational opposites, and they display symmetry in their meanings. If X gives Y to Z, then Z receives Y from X. If X is Y's teacher, then Y is X's pupil. Pairs of words ending in -er and -ee are usually relational opposites. If Mary is Bill's employer, then Bill is Mary's employee.

Other lexical relations include homonyms, polysemy, and hyponyms. Words like bear and bare are homonyms (also called homophones). Homonyms are words that are pronounced the same but have different meanings. Near non- sense sentences such as Entre nous, the new gnu knew nu is a Greek letter tease us with homonyms. Homonyms easily lead to ambiguity, as the confused goat in the cartoon confirms.

When a word has multiple meanings that are related conceptually or histori- cally, it is said to be polysemous. For example, the word diamond referring to a jewel and also to a baseball field is polysemous. Speakers of English know that the words red, white, and blue are color words. Similarly, lion, tiger, leopard, and lynx are all felines. Hyponymy is the relationship between the more general term such as color and the more specific instances of it, such as red. Thus, red is a hyponym of color, and lion is a hyponym of feline; or equivalently, color has the hyponym red and feline has the hyponym lion.