This semester, I am taking a class on semantics for my linguistics major. For those of you who don’t know, the study of semantics is focused on word and sentence meaning. Of the three aspects of linguistic analysis (phonology, syntax, and semantics), semantics is the most abstract topic. In three days of class, we have already spent about half an hour talking about the meaning of the word whale. That might seem pretty obvious, we’re all smart enough to know what a whale is right? But meaning is difficult. It can be based on definition, or usage, or a super abstract concept referred to as sense. A couple questions: do you need to know that a whale is a mammal to know the meaning of whale? If you know the meaning of the word whale, how does that inform your understanding of the phrases “whale of a time” or “whaling on that bag”? Depending on the answers to these questions, the meaning of whale can differ. For example, my class came to the conclusion that sometimes you need to know that a whale is a mammal, but other times that information is unnecessary. If you are talking to a marine biologist, it would help to know some basic scientific facts. However, many people are able to identify, describe, and talk about whales while believing them to be fish. Context matters. And then we come to the idiomatic expressions. Where did they come from? What aspect of whale is being referred to in “whale of a time”? It helps to know that “whale of a time” is referring to something good and often equivalent to “grand old time”, so we can safely assume that we are referring to a whale’s large size, even though that connection has long left the consciousness of English users. Already I can tell that this class is going to require a lot of complex thinking and willingness to abstract away from and look beyond how we typically use language, and I am very excited.
On a side note for those of you keeping up with my quest to merge linguistics and math: I think semantics may be the way I finally do it. Part of semantics is something called propositions, which are essentially the ‘point’ of a sentence and can be expressed in any number of syntactic compositions. Sometimes we write propositions using all caps (CAESAR INVADED GAUL=It was Gaul that Caesar invaded=It was Caesar that invaded Gaul=What Caesar invaded was Gaul=The one who invaded Gaul was Caesar) (Saeed, 12). However, we can also write them similarly to a mathematical function so that the above sentences are also equivalent to invade(caesar, gaul). When we focus more on propositions toward the end of the semester, we will spend time on this function notation and relate it to formal mathematics—I can’t wait.
Saeed, J. I. (2016). Semantics. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell.
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