As you have seen from the table of contents, the chapters of this book are organized into six units. In the first four units we introduce some of the basic tools, concepts, and terminology which are commonly used for analyzing and describing linguistic meaning. In the last two units we use these tools to explore the meanings of several specific classes of words and grammatical markers: modals, tense markers, if, because, etc.
The rest of this first unit is devoted to exploring two of the foundational concepts for understanding how we talk about the world: reference and truth. Chapter 2 deals with reference and the relationship between reference and meaning. Just as a proper name can be used to refer to a specific individual, other kinds of noun phrases can be used to refer to people, things, groups, etc. in the world. The actual reference of a word or phrase depends on the context in which it is used; the meaning of the word determines what things it can be used to refer to in any given context.
Chapter 3 deals with truth, and also with certain kinds of inference. We say that a statement is true if its meaning corresponds to the situation under discussion. Sometimes the meanings of two statements are related in such a way that the truth of one will give us reason to believe that the other is also true. For example, if I know that the statement in (4a) is true, then I can be quite certain that the statement in (4b) is also true, because of the way in which the meanings of the two sentences are related. A different kind of meaning relation gives us reason to believe that if a person says (4c), he must believe that the statement in (4a) is true. These two types of meaning-based inference, which we will call entailment and presupposition respectively, are of fundamental importance to most of the topics discussed in this book.
(4) a. John killed the wasp.
b. The wasp died.
c. John is proud that he killed the wasp.
Chapter 4 introduces some basic logical notation that is widely used in semantics, and discusses certain patterns of inference based on truth values and logical structure
Unit II focuses on word meanings, starting with the observation that a single word can have more than one meaning. One of the standard ways of demonstrating this fact is by observing the ambiguity of sentences like the famous headline in (5). Many of the issues we discuss in Unit II with respect to “content words” (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.), such as ambiguity, vagueness, idiomatic uses, cooccurrence restrictions, etc., will turn out to be relevant in our later discussions of various kinds of “function words” and grammatical morphemes as well.
(5) Headline: Reagan wins on budget, but more lies ahead.
Unit III deals with a pattern of pragmatic inference known as conversational implicature: meaning which is intended by the speaker to be understood by the hearer, but is not part of the literal sentence meaning. Many people consider the identification of this type of inference, by the philosopher Paul Grice in the 1960s, to be the “birth-date” of pragmatics as a distinct field of study. It is another foundational concept that we will refer to in many of the subsequent chapters. Chapter 10 discusses a class of conversational implicatures that has received a great deal of attention, namely indirect speech acts. As illustrated above in example (3b), an indirect speech act involves a sentence whose literal meaning seems to perform one kind of speech act (asking a question: Can you pass me the salt?) used in a way which implicates a different speech act (request: Please pass me the salt). Chapter 11 discusses various types of expressions (e.g. sentence adverbs like frankly, fortunately, etc., honorifics and politeness markers, and certain types of “discourse particles”) whose meanings seem to contribute to the appropriateness of an utterance, rather than to the truth of a proposition. Some such meanings were referred to by Grice as a different kind of implicature.
Unit IV addresses the issue of compositionality: how the meanings of phrases and sentences can be predicted based on the meanings of the words they contain and the way those words are arranged (syntactic structure). It provides a brief introduction to some basic concepts in set theory, and shows how these concepts can be used to express the truth conditions of sentences. One topic of special interest is the interpretation of “quantified” noun phrases such as every person, some animal, or no student, using set theory to state the meanings of such phrases. In Unit V we will use this analysis of quantifiers to provide a way of understanding the meanings of modals (e.g. may, must, should) and if clauses.
Unit VI presents a framework for analyzing the meanings of tense and aspect markers. Tense and aspect both deal with time reference, but in different ways. As we will see, the use and interpretation of these markers often depends heavily on the type of situation being described.
Each of these topics individually has been the subject of countless books and papers, and we cannot hope to give a complete account of any of them. This book is intended as a broad introduction to the field as a whole, a stepping stone which will help prepare you to read more specialized books and papers in areas that interest you.
Further reading
For helpful discussions of the distinction between semantics vs. pragmatics, see Levinson (1983: ch. 1) and Birner (2012/2013: §1.2). Levinson (1983: ch. 1) also provides a helpful discussion of Grice’s distinction between “natural meaning” vs. linguistic meaning.
