Semantică

2. The Relationship between Language, Thought and Reality

Long before linguistics existed as a discipline, thinkers were speculating about the nature of meaning. For thousands of years, the question ‘what is meaning?’ has been considered central to philosophy. More recently it has come to be important in linguistics, as well.

2.1 Extension and Intension

The impossibility of equating a word's meaning with its referents has led to a distinction between extension and intension or Serin and Bedeutung. The extension of a term corresponds to the set of entities that it picks out in the real world. The term ‘extension’ is often used synonymously with ‘denotation’. Sometimes, denotation is understood not only in its narrower sense which covers the relation between nouns or noun phrases and groups of individuals or objects, but also the relation between words belonging to other word classes and extra-linguistic phenomena they relate to. Thus, verbs denote situations, adjectives denote properties of individuals and objects and adverbs denote properties of situations.(Kortmann, 2005: 197)

The extension of "tiger" is the set of tigers in the real world. Intension corresponds to the inherent sense of a term, to the concept that is associated with it. For instance, the intension of woman involves notions like "female" or "human".

Two terms can have the same extension and yet differ in intension (meaning). For example, the compound terms "creature with a heart" and "creature with a kidney" have the same extension because (we assume that) every creature with a heart possesses a kidney and vice versa. Nevertheless the reverse is impossible: two terms cannot differ in extension and have the same intension.

Putnam (1975: 135) claims that this impossibility reflects the tradition of the ancient and medieval philosophers who assumed that the concept corresponding to a term was just a conjunction of terms, and hence that the concept corresponding to a term must always provide a necessary and sufficient condition for falling into the extension of the term.

The term whose analysis caused all the discussions in medieval philosophy was GOD, thought to be defined through the conjunctions of the terms "Good", "Powerful", "Omniscient".

The philosopher Putnam supports Frege's view/stand against psychologism according to which the psychological state of the speaker determines the intension of a term and hence, its extension. He argues that extension is not determined by psychological state.

Extension is determined socially (is a problem of sociolinguistics) and indexically and in its turn determines intension.

If concepts (intensions) were more important than extensions (then we would expect that when concepts associated with a term no longer applied to the members of its extension) , then that term would be replaced by another to refer to the extension. Knowing the meaning of a word is to acquire a word, i.e. to associate it with the right concept.

2.2 Sign-sense-reference (referent)

Contributions to semantics have come from a diverse group of scholars, ranging from Plato to Aristotle in ancient Greece to Putnam and Frege in the twentieth century.

According to Frege (1970: 57) a sign is any designation representing a (proper) name which has as its reference a definite object (the word object is taken in the widest sense), not a concept or a relation.

The regular connection between a sign, its sense and its reference is of such a kind that to the sign there corresponds a definite sense and to that in turn a definite reference while to a given reference (an object) there does not belong only a single sign. For example, Aristotle (the referent) can be denoted by these signs: the pupil of Plato and the teacher of Alexander the Great.

The same sense has different lexicalizations in different languages or even in the same language (pass away - die - kick the bucket).

To the sense does not always correspond a reference, i.e. in grasping a sense one is not certainly assured of a reference (e.g. sign words such as unicorn, dragon, elf, fairy, World War III, have no referents in the real world even though they are far from being meaningless)

Frege maintains that the reference and sense of a sign must be distinguished from the associated idea (concept) which is subjective: "if the reference of a sign is an object perceivable by the senses, my idea of it is an internal image arising from memories of sense impressions which I have had […] . Such an idea is often saturated with feeling; the clarity of its separate parts varies and oscillates. The same sense is not always connected, even in the same man with the same idea".

Ogden and Richards (1921) argue that the symbol corresponds to the Saussurian "signifiant" (signifier). They use the term reference for the concept that mediates between the symbol/ word/expression and the referent. The triadic concept of meaning was represented by Ogden and Richards in the form of a triangle.

Most linguists agree that a sign (word or expression) expresses its sense, stands for and designates its reference. By means of a sign we express its sense and designate its reference.

Identical linguistic expressions may have different referents in different contexts and at different times (e.g. the Pope, my neighbour, I, you, here, there, now, tomorrow). (Meyer, 2002: 104). These expressions are called expressions with variable reference.

To identify who is being referred to by pronouns like “she”, “I”, “you”, etc., we certainly need to know a lot about the context in which these word were uttered. These words whose denotational capability needs / requires contextual support are called deictic words. (The term deixis comes from Greek and means roughly ‘pointing’).

The sense of a linguistic expression is its content without reference, those features and properties which define it. For example, the sense of “girl” is a bundle of semantic features: /+human/, /-adult/, /+female/.

The referent of a sign may differ from the sense. For instance, the referent of “evening star” is the same as that of morning star, but not the sense. Therefore the designation of a single object can also consist of several words or signs. Other instances of references denoted by several signs are "the pupil of Plato", "the teacher of Alexander the Great" referring to Aristotle or "The Prime Minister of Great Britain" and "the leader of the Conservative Party", both referring (in 1989 at least) to Margaret Thatcher. Although the last two expressions may have the same referent we would not say that they have the same sense. No one would maintain that the phrase " The Prime Minister of Great Britain" could be defined as "the leader of the Conservative Party" or vice versa.

Besides expressions with variable reference, there are expressions with constant reference (e.g. the Eiffel Tower and the Pacific Ocean) and non-referring items, that is, they do not identify entities in the world, such as so, very, maybe, if, not, all.