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11 Semantics
I once referred to a character in one of my cartoons as a "dork" (a popular
insult when I was growing up), but myeditor called me up and said that "dork"
couldn't be used because it meant "penis." I couldn't believe it. I ran to my
New Dictionary ofAmerican Slang and, sure enough, he was right. Allthose
years of saying or being called a "dork" and I had never really known what it
meant. What a nerd. Gary Larson (1989)
Semantics is the study of the meaning of words, phrases and sentences. In
semantic analysis, there is always an attempt to focus on what the words
conventionally mean, rather than on what a speaker might want the words
to mean on a particular occasion. This technical approach to meaning
emphasizes the objective and the general. It avoids the subjective and the
local. Linguistic semantics deals with the conventional meaning conveyed
by the use of words and sentences of a language.
Conceptual versus associative meaning
When linguists investigate the meaning of words in a language, they are
normally interested in characterizing the conceptual meaning and less con-
cerned with the associative or stylistic meaning of words. Conceptual mean-
ing covers those basic, essential components of meaning which are
conveyed by the literal use of a word. Some of the basic components of a
word like needle in English might include 'thin, sharp, steel, instrument'.
These components would be part of the conceptual meaning of needle.
However, you may have 'associations', or 'connotations', attached to a word
like needle which lead you to think of 'painful' whenever you encounter the
word. This 'association' is not treated as part of the conceptual meaning of
needle. In a similar way, you may associate the expression low-calorie, when
II4
Semantics 115
~' used to describe a product, with 'good for you', but we would not want to
., mclude this association within the basic conceptual meaning of the expres-
sion. Poets and advertisers are, of course, very interested in using terms in
such a way that their associative meanings are evoked, and some linguists do
lfivestigate this aspect of language use. However, in this chapter we shall be
more interested in characterizing what constitutes the conceptual meaning
vi terms.
,
Semantic features
j
So, how would a semantic approach help us to understand something about
Ihe nature of language? One way it might be helpful would be as a means of
accounting for the 'oddness' we experience when we read English sentences
such as the following:
The hamburgerate the man
My cat studiedlinguistics
A table was listening to some music
~otice that the oddness of these sentences does not derive from their syn-
tactic structure. According to some basic syntactic rules for forming English
sentences (such as those presented in Chapter 10), we have well-structured
sentences:
The hamburger ate the man
This sentence is syntactically good, but semantically odd. S
Explanation:
u can find an ANSWER in that.
