1.3: Relation between form and meaning

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For most words, the relation between the form (i.e., phonetic shape) of the word and its meaning is arbitrary. This is not always the case. Onomatopoetic words are words whose forms are intended to be imitations of the sounds which they refer to, e.g. ding-dong for the sound of a bell, or buzz for the sound of a housefly. But even in these cases, the phonetic shape of the word (if it is truly a part of the vocabulary of the language) is partly conventional. The sound a dog makes is represented by the English word bow-wow, the Balinese word kong-kong, the Armenian word haf-haf, and the Korean words mung-mung or wang-wang. ² This cross-linguistic variation is presumably not motivated by differences in the way dogs actually bark in different parts of the world. On the other hand, as these examples indicate, there is a strong tendency for the corresponding words in most languages to use labial, velar, or labio-velar consonants and low back vowels.3 Clearly this is no accident, and reflects the non-arbitrary nature of the formmeaning relation in such words. The situation with “normal” words is quite different, e.g. the word for ‘dog’: Armenian shun, Balinese cicing, Korean gae, Tagalog aso, etc. No common phonological pattern is to be found here.

The relation between the form of a sentence (or other multi-word expression) and its meaning is generally not arbitrary, but compositional. This term means that the meaning of the expression is predictable from the meanings of the words it contains and the way they are combined. To give a very simple example, suppose we know that the word yellow can be used to describe a certain class oobjects (those that are yellow in color) and that the word submarine can be used to refer to objects of another sort (those that belong to the class of submarines). This knowledge, together with a knowledge of English syntax, allows us to infer that when the Beatles sang about living in a yellow submarine they were referring to an object that belonged to both classes, i.e., something that was both yellow and a submarine.

This principle of compositionality is of fundamental importance to almost every topic in semantics, and we will return to it often. But once again, there are exceptions to the general rule. The most common class of exceptions are idioms, such as kick the bucket for ‘die’ or X’s goose is cooked for ‘X is in serious trouble’. Idiomatic phrases are by definition non-compositional: the meaning of the phrase is not predictable from the meanings of the individual words. The meaning of the whole phrase must be learned as a unit.

The relation between utterance meaning and the form of the utterance is neither arbitrary nor, strictly speaking, compositional. Utterance meanings are derivable (or “calculable”) from the sentence meaning and the context of the utterance by various pragmatic principles that we will discuss in later chapters. However, it is not always fully predictable; sometimes more than one interpretation may be possible for a given utterance in a particular situation.

²www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...erentlanguages (accessed 2018-01-22)

³Labial consonants such as /b, m/; velar consonants such as /g, ng/; or labio-velar consonants such as /w/. Low back vowels include /a, o/.