Modes of meaning

The study of meaning is a permanent interest of scholar­ship. It has been pursued in all the languages of the major civilizations and in ancient times, especially in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, including the Latin of the Medieval Scholastics — Duns Scotus, Thomas of Erfurt. In English the obvious phrase “the meaning of meaning” is well known as the title of a work on the definition of knowl­edge, a matter which is not under examination in the present essay. There are many other ways, of applying the word “meaning”in English, including the usages of logicians, psychologists, sociologists, mathematicians, and lexicographers. The use of the word “meaning” issubject to the general rule that each word when used in a new context is a new word. The disciplines and techniques are those of general linguistics which are designed for empirical analy­sis and do not necessarily have a point of departure in other disciplines such as biology, psychology, literary criticism, or in a school of metaphysics. The constructs or schemata of linguistics enable us to handle isolates that may be called language events. These systematic constructs are neither immanent nor transcendent, but just language turned back on itself. The present essay is an attempt to sketch the framework of a language of description in English about English for those who use English, to illustrate what I understand by linguistic analysis, and espe­cially to show the dangers of an over-facile superficial use of the word “stylistics”, without an adequate logical syntax or even without considering the essential prerequisites of linguistics. The disciplines and techniques of linguistics are directed to assist us in making statements of meaning. Indeed, the main concern of descriptive linguistics is to make statements of meaning. [...]

Even in a dictionary, the lexical meaning of any given word is achieved by multiple statements of meaning at different levels. First, at the orthographic level the group of letters, peer, is distinguished from the group pier, and both of these from pear, apir, and pare. Next, by means of some kind of phonetic notation, the pronunciation is stated, and new identities arise. At least two grammatical designations are possible for peer — noun, substantive, or verb — and by making such statements at the grammatical level a further component of meaning is made explicit. Formal and etymological meaning may be added, together with social indications of usage such as colloquial, slang, nautical, vulgar, poetical.

To make statements of meaning in terms of linguistics, we may accept the language event as a whole and then deal with it at various levels, sometimes in a descending order, beginning with social context and proceeding through syntax and vocabulary to phonology and even phonetics, and at other times in the opposite order, which will be adopted here since the main purpose is the exposition of linguistics as a discipline and technique for the statement of meanings without reference to such dualisms and dicho­tomies as word and idea, overt expressions and covert concepts, language and thought, subject and object. In doing this I must not be taken to exclude the concept of mind, or to imply an embracing of materialism to avoid a foolish bogey of mentalism.

At the phonetic level no case has yet been made out for systematic sound symbolism or onomatopoeia in gener­al human terms. I have myself made experiments with speakers of many languages belonging to all the principal races and have found, with Koehler, evidence of some cor­relation of sounds with shapes (sense of feeling them or of drawing them). The experiment consisted in drawing two shapes in line, one of a round bellying shape, ‘clumpy’, and the other a sharp angular zigzag of points prickling in all directions. Two words were then offered in sound and in roughly phonetic spelling as their names, viz kikeriki and oombooloo. The only cases when kikeriki was chosen as a suitable name for the clumpy figure occurred when someone wished to enliven the proceeding and provide amusement, which he invariably did. [...]

The following sentences show that part of the meaning of the word ass in modern colloquial English can be by collocation:

(i) An ass like Bagson might easily do that.

(ii) He is an ass.

(iii) You silly ass!

(iv) Don’t be an ass!

One of the meanings of ass is its habitual collocation with an immediately preceding you silly, and with other phrases of address or of personal reference. Even if you said An ass has been frightfully mauled at the Zoo, a possible retort would be, What on earth was he doing?

There are only limited possibilities of collocation with preceding adjectives, among which the commonest are silly, obstinate, stupid, awful, occasionally egregious. Young is much more frequently found than old. The plural form is not very common.

It must be pointed out that meaning by collocation is not at all the same thing as contextual meaning, which is the functional relation of the sentence to the processes of a context of situation in the context of culture.

In the language of Lear’s limericks, man is generally preceded by old, never by young. Person is collocated with old and young. There are only four old ladies — of Prague, of France, of Winchelsea, and the one ‘whose folly’ rhymes with ‘holly’. There is only one girl, ‘a young girl of Majorca, whose aunt was a very fast walker’. One of the ‘meanings’ of man in this language is to be immediately preceded by old in collocation of the type: There was an old Man of..., Who (or Whose)..., in which names like Kamschatka or Jamaica or the East frequent­ly complete the ‘of’ phrase. The collocability of lady is most frequently with young, but person with either old or young. In this amusing language there is no boy or young man or woman, neither are there any plurals for man, person, or lady.

This kind of study of the distribution of common words may be classified into general or usual collocations and more restricted technical or personal collocations. The com­monest sentences in which the words horse, cow, pig, swine, dog are used with adjectives in nominal phrases, and also with verbs in the simple present, indicate characteristic distributions in collocability which may be regarded as a level of meaning in describing the English of any particular social group or indeed of one person. The word time can be used in collocations with or without articles, deter­minatives, or pronouns. And it can be collocated with saved, spent, wasted, frittered away, with presses, flies, and with a variety of particles, even with no. Just as phonetic, phonological, and grammatical forms well established and habitual in any close social group provide a basis for the mutual expectancies of words and sentences at those levels, and also the sharing of these common features, so also the study of the usual collocations of a particular literary form or genre or of a particular author makes possible a clearly defined and precisely stated contribution to what I have termed the spectrum of descriptive linguistics, which handles and states meaning by dispersing it in a range of techniques working at a series of levels.

The statement of meaning by collocation and various collocabilities does not involve the definition of word-meaning by means of further sentences in shifted terms. Meaning by collocation is an abstraction at the syntagmatic level and is not directly concerned with the conceptual or idea approach to the meaning of words. One of the meanings of night is its collocability with dark, and of dark, of course, collocation with night. This kind of mutuality may be paralleled in most languages and has resulted in similar­ities of poetic diction in literatures sharing common classical sources. [...]