Semasiology: Semantic structure of English words

Seminar 1.

1. Two approaches to meaning.

2. Types of meaning:

a) grammatical

b) lexical

c) contextual

-1-

1. Following is a well-known passage from Shakespeare in which the relationship word-concept-thing is clearly brought out. Can you explain it?

What’s Montague? It is not hand, nor foot,

Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part

Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet:

So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,

Retain that dear perfection which he owes

Without that title: Romeo, doff thy name;

And for that time, which is not part of thee,

Take all myself.

(W. Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet.)

2. The English novelist E.M. Forster said once:

“How can I tell what I think, till I see what I say?”

How can you explain it in terms of our views on the relationship between language and thought?

3. Discuss the meaning of the word in bold type in connection with the problem “concept-meaning”.

a) A house in the country. A full house (аншлаг). Every word was heard in all the parts of the house. White House. An ancient trading house in the city. A noisy cheerful house. To keep house. To bring down the house(вызвать гром аплодисментов). To leave one’s father’shouse. On the house. (за счет предприятия, бесплатно).

b) Whiteclouds. White hair. A white elephant. The white race. White magic. White meat. As white as snow. White vine. It’s white of you. White lie.

-2-

1. Discuss the following groups of words from the point of view of their meaning (denotational and connotational components).

a) joke, jest, witticism, gag, wisecrack.

b) Fat, stout, plump.

c) Friend, crony, buddy, companion.

d) Stubborn, mulish, obstinate.

e) Abridged, shortened, epitomized.

f) Lament, mourn, deplore, grieve for.

It is very important to distinguish between the lexical meaning of the word in speech and its semantic structure in language. The meaning in speech is contextual. (“Any woman will love any man who bothers her enough” H.Philipps.)

Polysemy does not interfere with the communicative function of the language because in every particular case the situation and context cancel all the unnecessary meanings and make the speech unambiguous.

2.Analyze the following sets of sentences.

a) He bought a chair at the furniture store. He was condemned to the chair. Please address the chair. He will chair the meeting. He was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the university.

b) My father came. Father Murphy came. He was the father of the idea.

c) The horse runs. The man runs. The water runs. The tap runs. His nose runs. He ran his business well.

d) He charged the battery. He charged them to do their duty. The judge charged him with the crime.

In “Through the Looking Glass” Lewis Carroll makes Humpy Dumpy say the following.

“When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less”

Discuss this statement. What are its linguistic implications?

-3-

1.Read the passage given below, make a plan and comment on it.

William Bright

University of Colorado

“ What IS a Name? Reflections on Onomastics

“You are sad,” the Knight said in an anxious tone: “let me sing you a song to comfort you.”

“Is it very long?” Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day. “It’s long,” said the Knight, “but very, very beautiful. Everybody that hears me sing it—either it brings the tears into their eyes, or else—” “Or else what?” said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause.

“Or else it doesn’t, you know. The name of the song is called ‘Haddocks’ Eyes’.”

“Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?” Alice said, trying to feel interested. “No, you don’t understand,” the Knight said, looking a little vexed. “That’s what the name is called. The name really is ‘The Aged Aged Man’.” “Then I ought to have said ‘That’s what the song is called’?” Alice corrected herself. “No, you oughtn’t: that’s quite another thing! The song is called ‘Ways and Means’: but that’s only what it’s called, you know!” “Well, what is the song, then?” said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.

“I was coming to that,” the Knight said. “The song really is ‘A-Sitting on a Gate’:

and the tune’s my own invention.”

—Through the Looking-Glass

Many books and articles have taken as their title the famous line from Shakespeare’s

Romeo and Juliet: “What’s in a name?” I choose to raise a slightly different question:

“What IS a name?”—not to answer the question definitively, of course, but simply to

focus attention on some aspects of the problem. In doing so, I also want to focus attention on the field of onomastics, understood as the study of names. Such study is, in fact, carried out as part of several larger fields, including linguistics, ethnography, folklore, philology, history, geography, philosophy, and literary scholarship. In Europe, especially in Germany, it is a well recognized branch of philology, as witness the three-volume encyclopedic survey of the field recently published there.

By contrast, in the US, onomastics is scarcely recognized as a scholarly field at all. To be sure, there is an organization called the American Name Society, which publishes a small journal called Names, but only a few linguists belong to the society, and most linguists have probably never heard of the organization or the journal. I myself have been interested in onomastics since my student days, and I have published articles in the journal Names; but even so, in 1992, when I edited the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, it never occurred to me to plan for an article on names. Fortunately, the forthcoming second edition of that encyclopedia will repair my omission.

To begin with, the word name is often used to mean a term which can refer to anything, as when we say: “Banana is the name of a fruit,” or “Murder is the name of a crime.” In this sense, the word name is virtually synonymous with the word noun;

indeed, in some languages, the same term can used for both, e.g., French nom. In this

sense, the relationship between a name and that to which it refers has been the topic of an extensive literature written by philosophers specializing in semantics (cf. Zabeeh 1968, Lehrer 1992, Lamarque 1994). These writers have had much to say about the material in the famous quotation from Through the Looking Glass. I must admit to ignorance of this large topic, and so I will go on to more limited aspects of names and naming.

Within the general category of names, people often use the word name for what we can more precisely call proper names. Within this subdivision, it is common to distinguish two principal types. One of these is place names or toponyms; another is

PERSONAL NAMES, for which we have no commonly used term derived from Greek, but which are sometimes called anthroponyms. My discussion is limited to these two types, but it can be noted that other varieties exist, such as ethnonyms—terms referring to nationalities or ethnic groups—and glottonyms, referring to languages. An English example of both these types is Chinese, referring not only to the nationality, but also to the language that corresponds to the toponym China. It is not easy to define the term proper name (Algeo 1973). In English and some other European languages, such words often appear in writing with initial capital letters; but obviously this cannot define the term for spoken language, or for writing systems like Chinese which have no capital letters. Are there grammatical criteria to identify the proper name?

In English, it is often observed that it is unusual for proper names to occur with articles — either indefinite (a, an) or definite (the). A sentence like The George and a

Henry come from England is hard to interpret unless someone explains that it is intended to mean ‘The one person in this group named George, and one of the people

named Henry, come from England.’

Such usage may be made clearer by the use of spoken or written emphasis: He’s not THE George (who was King of England), he’s just A George (one of many people named George). But of course other languages have very different rules for using definite and indefinite articles; and many languages, such as Chinese, do not use articles at all.

It may be that, for a universal concept of the proper name, we must seek semantic

and pragmatic definitions. To put it briefly, we may say that a proper name represents a social convention for brief reference to a specific entity, as opposed to a class of

persons or places. For example, George may refer to ‘my cousin who is legally designated as George Baker; the Bakers refers to a family of people named Baker (as

contrasted with the bakers ‘the people who bake bread’); America may refer to ‘the

nation which is legally and politically designated as the United States of America’.

Much more could be—and has been—said about this (cf. Lehrer 1994), but I only want to establish this simple understanding as a basis for further discussion.

As I’ve said, the types of proper names which are most often discussed are personal names and placenames. I wish to focus here, first, on a proposed characteristic of personal names, namely their universality; and second, on a frequently remarked characteristic of placenames, namely their descriptiveness. As we shall see, there is a relationship between these two topics.

Finally, at the end of this paper, I wish to point out that, in some languages, placenames may function not only as nouns, but also as adverbs. I believe that this may the case in many more languages than have been reported.”

Seminar 2.

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