Approaches to Meaning-Octavio

7/31/2019 Approaches to Meaning-Octavio

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Luis Octavio Canseco García / Escuela de Idiomas / Universidad Regional del Sureste (URSE) / Oaxaca

Meaning is at once the most obvious and most

mysterious feature of human language. More than

3,000 years of speculation by philosophers andlinguists have failed to crack the central conundrum

of meaning. We will begin by surveying some

theories of meaning.

If we ask someone the meaning of the word cat ,

we are very likely to be told that the word refers

to in the world.

This view that the meaning of an expression is

what it refers to, or names, is often called

referential theory or naming theory.

The word

names the in the real world

The object tree is called the

Name objects and events

Name properties of thoseobjects and events

Name actions

Name properties of actions

Of course, there some problems with this view.

It is not always immediately obvious what is

being named.

What do conjunctions but and and refer to?

What do prepossitions like for and to stand for?

What do we say abour imaginary objects or actions?

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/approaches-to-meaning-octavio 7/35Luis Octavio Canseco García / Escuela de Idiomas / Universidad Regional del Sureste (URSE) / Oaxaca

This theory suggests that any particular sound

image is pshychologically associated with a

particular concept.

When the word is spoken,

the concept of is called upon the mind of

the hearer.

Everyone of us who knows the word or expressions

has a concept or idea in his mind associated with it.

proposed by Ogden & Richards in their “The

Meaning of Meaning” . They saw the

relationship between words and things as a

triangle.

( thought)

refers to

(the word)

evokes

stands for

There is not a direct link

between the sound of

the word dog and the

object it refers to. There

is no direct or natural

link between symbol

and referent, that is,

between language and

the world. The link is via

thought , the concept in

our minds.

The SYMBOL refers to the linguistic elements

(word, sentence, etc.), the REFERENT refers tothe object in the world of experience, and

THOUGHT or REFERENCE refers to concept.

e.g. The dog over there looks friendly.

The word “dog” is directly associated with a

certain concept in our mind, i.e. what a “dog”

is like, but it is not directly linked to the

referent (the particular dog) in this particular

This theory avoids many of the problems of

naming. However, to state the meaning is a

concept does not overcome all the problemsthat naming theory has .

We can still ask what are the concepts that

and or but stand for?

"Suppose Jack and Jill are walking down a lane.

Jill is hungry. She sees an apple in a tree.

She makes a noise with her larynx, tongue,and lips. Jack vaults the fence, climbs the tree,

takes the apple, brings it to Jill, and places it in

her hand. Jill eats the apple…”

Practical event preceding

the act of speech

(hunger)

“… we … will naturally distinguish between theact of speech and the other occurrences,

which we shall call practical events."

Practical events following

the act of speech

(reaction)

SPEECH

"Language enables one person to make a

reaction (R ) when another person has the

stimulus (S). “

speechless reaction:: S > ——————————————> R

reaction mediated by speech: S > ——> r s > ——> R

If Jill had been alone, she would have first

received a STIMULUS (S) (hunger) which have

produced a speechless reaction, RESPONSE (R )

that would have made a move to get the apple.

S > ——————————————> R

However, since Jack was with her, the stimulusproduced not the response R , but a linguistic

response, that of saying to Jack, (r). The sound

waves reculting from this in turn created a stimulus

for Jack, a linguistic stimulus (s), which results in

his non-linguistic response R of getting the apple.

S > ——> r ……………….. s > ——> R

However, there are some significant practical

difficulties with this viewpoint.

For example, since the practical stimulus S is not

always obvious, so how do we identify it?

Many times context determines meaning of words

and sentences.

The view that meaning is found in the context

within which a particular expression is uttered

suggests that we can derive meaning from, or

reduce it to, the observable context.

Every utterance occurs in a particular spatio-

temporal situation. Each utterance is limited by

various factors of the situational context. These

factors include:

(i) The setting (formal, informal…)

(ii) The speaker and hearer (relationship,

position…)

(iii) The activities they are engaged in at the time

(iv) The presence or absence of other participants

(relationship, position…)(v) The presence of various external objects and

events

The linguistic context alone is the weaker form of

contextual views. It is principally concerned with

the probability of words or expressions co-

ocurring or collocating with each other. This is

obviously an aspect of meaning.

Truth-conditional is a theory that sees the

meaning of assertions as being the same as, or

reducible to, their truth conditions.

It attempts to define the meaning sense of a

given proposition in terms of the truth conditions

under which it obtains in the real world.

The meaning of conditional statements can be

described by making reference to the truthconditions of the statement in an a priori

unbounded number of "possible worlds."

We know the meaning of both sentences equally well,

and knowing their meaning means knowing their

sense of truth conditions. The sense of a declarativesentence permits you to know under what

“circumstances” that sentence is true.

Those “circumstances” are called truth conditions of the sentence.

The truth conditions of a declarative sentence arethe same as the sense of the sentence.

We compare their truth conditions with “the realworld” or some historical fact, and can thus say

which one is true and which one is false.

Statements about meaning are based on the

formulation that:

S (sentence). P (set of conditions that guarantees

the truth of S)

For this statement to be true:

If this theory is adopted, we limit semantics to

being concerned principally about meaning in

relation to truth and falsehood. Some linguists

have objected that this is too narrow of a view.

• How can we discussed the meaning of interrogatives or

imperatives?

• How can we discussed the truth or falsehood of a question

or a command?

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