The Меaning of a Word

It is taken as axiomatic in this book that every aspect of the meaning of a word is reflected in a characteristic pattern of semantic normality (and abnormality) in grammatically appropriate contexts. That which is not mirrored in this way is not, for us, a question of meaning; and, conversely, every difference in the semantic normality profile between two items betokens a difference of meaning. The full set of normality relations which a lexical item contracts with all conceivable contexts will be referred to as its contextual relations. We shall say, then, that the meaning of a word is fully reflected in its contextual relations; in fact, we can go further, and say that, for present purposes, the meaning of a word is constituted by its contextual relations.

In its basic form, this conception of the meaning of a word is of limited usefulness: much important information concerning word-meaning remains, as it were, latent. The picture can be made more revealing and informative in various ways. For instance, we can picture the meaning of a word as a pattern of affinities and disaffinities with all the other words in the language with which it is capable of contrasting semantic relations in grammatical contexts. Affinities are of two kinds, syntagmatic and paradigmatic. A syntagmatic affinity is established by a capacity for normal association in an utterance: there is a syntagmatic affinity, for instance, between dog and barked, since The dog barked is normal (a syntagmatic affinity always presupposes a particular grammatical relationship). A syntagmatic disaffinity is revealed by a syntagmatic abnormality that does not infringe grammatical constraints, as in The lions are chirruping. Paradigmatically, a semantic affinity between two grammatically identical words is the greater the more congruent their patterns of syntagmatic normality. So, for instance, dog and cat share far more normal and abnormal contexts than, say, dog and lamp-post.

Arthur fed the dog / cat /? lamp-post.

The dog / cat /? lamp-post ran away.

The? dog /? cat / lamp-post got bent in the crash.

We painted the? dog /? cat / lamp-post red.

An extremely useful model of the meaning of a word, which can be extracted from the contextual relations, is one in which it is viewed as being made up, at least in part, of the meanings of other words. A particular word-meaning which participates in this way in the meaning of another word will be termed a semantic trait of the second word. To render this picture more informative, it is necessary to distinguish degrees and modes of participation. We shall do this initially by defining a number of statuses (degrees of necessity) of semantic traits: criterial, expected, possible, unexpected and excluded.

Criterial and excluded traits can be diagnosed by means of entailment relations between sentences: for instance, “animal” is a criterial trait of dog because It’s a dog entails It’s an animal, fish is an excluded trait of dog because It’s a dog entails It’s not a fish.

For the diagnosis of expected, possible and unexpected traits, the but-test is extremely useful. This utilizes the normality or abnormality of sentences of the form P, but Q. Consider the status of can bark as a trait of dog. First of all, It’s a dog does not entail It can bark (since a dog may have a congenital malformation of the larynx, or some such); hence, can bark is not a criterial trait. However, the following two sentences show it to be an expected trait:

1) It’s a dog, but it can bark. (odd)

2) It’s a dog, but it can’t bark. (normal)

The sort of oddness exhibited by 1 may be termed expressive paradox, since the expressive meaning carried by but is inappropriately deployed. The pattern of oddness is reversed in 3 and 4, showing that can sing is an unexpected trait of dog.

3) It’s a dog, but it can sing. (normal sentence, unusual dog)

4) It’s a dog, but it can’t sing. (expressive paradox)

(It is of course necessary to ascertain that, can sing is not an excluded trait of dog, the fact that It’s a dog does not entail It can’t sing confirms this.) A possible trait is signalled when both test sentences exhibit expressive paradox, and P and Qis normal:

5) It’s a dog, but it’s brown. (Why shouldn’t it be?)

6) It’s a dog, but it isn’t brown. (Why should it be?)

7) It’s a dog, and it’s brown. (normal)

At first sight, the picture of word-meaning given by patterns of affinity and disaffinity is, at least in some respects, different from the picture given by semantic traits. For instance, cat and dog havea fairly high degree of paradigmatic affinity, as they are equi-normal in a wide range of contexts:

I stroked the cat / dog.

We have a cat / dog at home.

The cat / dog died.

The children love the cat / dog.

But cat is an excluded trait of dog, since It’s a dog entails It’s not a cat. The two pictures are not, however, incompatible; they merely highlight different aspects of meaning. The affinity between dog and cat reveals itself in the number of equi-status or near-equi-status traits they have in common; and the differences between dog and cat appear more sharply when the affinity patterns are articulated in greater detail by means of diagnostic frames.

Although we have distinguished five discrete statuses, it must be borne in mind that the reality being described is a continuum — any discreteness is an artefact of the definitions. This is true even within the statuses that we have chosen to define by means of entailment. Probably most speakers of English would accept both of the following entailments:

It’s a triangle entails It has three angles.

Lesley is Arthur’s mother entails Lesley is female _.

Although we shall continue to regard three-angled as a criterial trait of triangle and female as a criterial trait of mother, it must be conceded that there is a palpable difference in the degree of necessity of these two traits. A four-angled triangle is totally inconceivable — but a male mother? It is beyond imagination, in these days of biological engineering, to conceive of a time when embryos will be emplanted in a man’s body, and develop, and be born — perhaps by a caesarian section? Surely not totally? No systematic use will be made here of a more criterial / less criterial distinction. However, there is a distinction that can be made within ‘expected’ status which is of some significance in lexical semantics. Consider the relation between ‘adapted for flight’ as a semantic trait of bird, and ‘possessesfour legs’ as a trait of dog. They are alike in that neither is criterial, both are expected:

It’s a bird doesn’t entail It is adapted for flight. (There are birds such as the ostrich and kiwi which are not adapted for flight.)

It’s a dog doesn’t entail It has four legs. (A dog may have a birth abnormality, or may lose a leg in an accident.)

It’s a bird, but it’s adapted for flight. (odd)

It’s a bird, but it’s not adapted for flight. (normal)

It’s a dog, but it has four legs. (odd)

It’s a dog, but it doesn’t have four legs. (normal)

There is, however, a difference in the status of these two traits. There is a sense in which a dog ought to have four legs — if it does not, it is imperfect, ill-formed, not fully functional. There is no recognised sub-category of dogs for which the possession of a number of legs other than four is the norm (as there is a sub­category of cats for which the absence of a tall is the norm). Species of birds which are not adapted for flight, on the other hand, are not ill-formed — they are merely atypical. Semantic traits whose absence is regarded as a defect will be called canonical traits. Canonical traits can be distinguished from non-canonical expected traits in a number of ways:

? The typical dog has four legs.

? Dogs typically have four legs.

The typical bird is adapted for flight.

Birds are typically adapted for flight.

? A dog that does not hare four legs is not necessarily defective.

A bird that cannot fly is not necessarily defective.

? What kinds of dog have only three legs?

What kinds of bird are not adapted for flight?

Canonical traits are not only to be found in words denoting living things. We could say, for instance, of le table ronde that it lacked a canonical trait of noun phrases in French, namely, concord in respect of gender. Likewise, a command enjoining some action which was logically impossible, or which had already been carried out, or a lie that through ignorance on the part of the perpetrator turned out to be objectively true, can both be considered defective through the lack of a canonical trait.

The adoption of the contextual approach to word-meaning outlined in this chapter has certain inescapable consequences that some might consider to be disadvantages. One is that any attempt to draw a line between the meaning of a word and ‘encyclopaedic’ facts concerning the extra-linguistic references of the word would be quite arbitrary; another is that there is no motivation for isolating 'pragmatic meaning' as a separate domain of lexical meaning. Perhaps most importantly, it would seem that we have no grounds for believing that the meaning of a word, when viewed in this fashion, is finitely describable — without severe circumscription it is an unpromising candidate for formalisation, or representation in terms of logical or quasi-mathematical formulae. However, our conception of word-meaning has the advantage of being intuitively plausible: its scope coincides well with the pre-theoretical notion of word-meaning that anyone with a practical interest in meaning — a lexicographer, translator, or language teacher, or even a novelist or poet – is likely to have. Unwieldy it may be in certain respects, but it is surely better for a model of meaning destined to serve a descriptive as apposed to a theoretical study to err on the side of generosity of scope, rather than on the side of austerity.

While the contextual method is well-suited to the exploration of the infinite subtlety and particularity of word-meanings, it is nonetheless more infinite particularly the aim of this book to seek out and highlight anything which lends itself to generalisation, even of a limited sort, any tendency towards structure, system and recurrence, in the domain of word-meaning. [...]