Semantics I acknowledgements
CHAPTER IITHE BASIC PRINSCIPLES IN SEMANTICS
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| CHAPTER II THE BASIC PRINSCIPLES IN SEMANTICS 2.1 What is Semantics? “Semantics is the study of meanings. The term is derived from Greek semanen (to signify or mean. It concerned with the relation between words or other symbols and objects or concepts to which they refer. As an empirical study of word meaning in existing language, semantics is a branch of linguistics (American Encyclopedia : It is obvious that meaning plays a very important role in any situation of speech acts. Without meaning, all the utterances of a language are useless or without meaning there will be no language, or if a language is not intended to communicate meaning, there will be no interaction of thought as we do in daily life. Meaning is concerned with the relation between words and objects to which they refer, this statement leads us to presuppose that Meaning is the relation between words and objects to which they refer. If we say chair, we are concerned with an object (a seat with aback or arms). - It is impossible to find meaning in phonemes and syllables because they constitute a hierarchy in phonology and functioning as distinctive feature in minimal pairs. So, meaning is concerned with words or morphemes. The latter as a minimal meaningful unit will do in this analysis, as a word is a morpheme, is not always a word, like the prefix im – in impossible. Thus we just focus only to words. SEMANTICS Page We are not satisfied yet with the definition mentioned above, for it just concentrates meaning on words. So why do not we find meaning in sentence in order that we can find meaning outside language or what it refers to (despite the meaning of word which constructs the meaning of sentence as a whole. Realizing the link between language aspect and the aspect outside language is very close, meaning has recently been an intricate but interesting subject and linguists began to embrace it separately from the other aspect to grasp it more detail let us pick opinions of some linguists about what meaning is and therefore we know it essence and domain. “Meaning signifies any and all phrases of sign-process (the status of being a sign, the interpreted, the fact of denoting, the signification) and frequently suggest mental and valuation process as well (CW. Morris, 1946: Morris in his definition included mental and valuation process to which meanings signifies. As a mental and valuation process there is no an occurrence of physical process. This is accordance with or we happen to remember about the mentalist concern to meaning as : the characteristic mental event which occurs in every speaker and hearer in connection with the utterance or hearing of the linguistic form. This can be seen for example, in uttering the wordbook, the speaker has had a mental image of a book and this word evokes a similar image in a hearer’s mind. So, a mental and valuation process consist of nonphysical process, a thought, concept, image, feeling or the like. This mental process is opposed to physical process which was called by Bloomfield as the mechanistic. Semantics is central to the study of communication ; and as communication becomes more and more a crucial factor in social SEMANTICS Page organization, they need to understand it becomes more and more pressing. Semantics is also at the centre of the study of the human mind – thought processes, cognition, conceptualization – all these are intricately bound up with the way in which we classify and convey our experience of the world through language. What Geoffrey Leech stated about semantics is that he emphasized its rule on a broader sense – communication in social organization and our experience of the world which se convey through thought processes and the like. From Leech’s point of view it seems to us that understanding language means understanding meaning, thus meaning would be the starting point in communication. We can see for example in the sentence below how we tend to focus on its meaning first despite its ungrammatical form : I go to Jakarta last week. We can be easily understood and our communication still keep going on through thought process which meaning is bound up which causes the communication flows. Thus semantics is also an empiric study of meaning. Jerrold J. Katz defined semantics as : “Semantics is the study of linguistics meaning. It is concerned with that sentences and other linguistic objects express, not with the arrangement of their syntactic parts or with their pronunciation” (Katz, 1972 : 1). According to Katz , nearly everyone agrees on this and it is also generally agreed that the basic question of semantic is what is meaning? “but he argued what kind of meaning we are concerned with or in general ,as the semanticists we have often seemed argued the term which is also called what is meaning of meaning ? SEMANTICS Page CK OGDEN and RICHARD list twenty two definition of the word meaning. Some of the definition are quoted by Leech (1974:1) as : - an intrinsic property- the other words annexed to a word in the dictionary- the connotation of a word- the place of anything in a system- the practical consequences of a thing in our future experience- that to which the user of a system actually refers- that to which the user of a symbol ought to be referring- that to which the user of the symbol believe himself to be referring- that to which the interpreter of a symbol a) refers b) believes himself to be referring c) believes the user to be referring According to Leech those definitions are the definitions of philosopher, psychologist, philologist, literary critics and other specialists, in other words, it is explained in terms of other scientific disciplines. They cause diverse frames of reference, as each specialist desire to study meaning in his own requirement of each field. Consequently, it will have SEMANTICS Page little in common. The best we can do for finding the answer to what is meaning of meaning is exactly by making questions to the question of breaking down the general question. For an autonomous discipline begins not with answers, but with questions. It is on a par with a phusicist does, before defining terms like heat, atom, electricity or the like, he should investigate their properties. How then the construct questions from question what is meaning of meaning? Katz list questions which are to be a model of semantic theory as given below- what are synonymy and paraphrase? - What are semantic similarity and semantic difference? - What is antonymy What is super ordination? - What are meaningfulness and semantic anomaly? - What is semantic ambiguity? - What is semantic redundancy? - What is semantic truth (analyticity)? - What is contradiction? - What is syntenticity? SEMANTICS Page What is inconsistency? - What is entailment? - What is presupposition? - What is possible answer to a question? - What is self-answer question? All those questions pin down the domain of a semantic theory that offers an answer to what is meaning or these questions show what kinds of phenomena of semantic theory has to explain. Those questions, except the last two will be treated in chapter four in detail concerning with the elements of proposition as to which they are also related to logic. The model of semantic theory of Katz that has been mention above will do to that of Leech’s and it is the reason why this book based on their theories. We have seen so far that semantic cannot be ignored or considered to be the weak point in the language. Of its essence, Mooris bravely stated We come then to conclusion that meaning is practically everything. We always seethe meaning as we look, think in meanings as we think, act in terms of meaning when we act. Apparently we are never directly conscious of anything but meanings (Morris, 1946 :19). |