Video Script
With respect to arbitrariness and compositionality, there are a lot of the pieces that you're going to see below in what Catherine Anderson wrote that are exceptional, but I think they need a little bit of setup now. When we talk about semantics, one of the things that is kind of important to remember, is the fact that this is really like philosophy in some ways that we're going to talk about really abstract concepts. Meaning is harder to imagine sometimes than the structure of a phrase or how we put a lexicon together with different morphemes. To start off, let me start talking about a few things that are going to be closer to what you may hear in a philosophy class; there's a reason for that and I’ll get to it.
With respect to semantics, we always have to start off in the same place, and that is talking about an ontology. In linguistic terms, an ontology is pretty close to what you hear in a philosophy class: it is a box with all the possible meanings. Each language assigns a lexicon or a phrase to that meaning; that's what we call lexical meaning or lexical semantics. Let's unpack that a little bit, because that might be a little hard to understand. I like thinking of an ontology as a box, a box for each given language and, in many cases, you can say a specific dialect. You can say that that box come has an entire litany all of the possible phrases and lexicons and the meaning associated with it, so they are connected in some way. What happens is that as fluent speakers of a given language, whether it is our native language or one that we have learned, we pull from the items out of that box and we import it into our entailment, our mental lexicon. That mental lexicon that we talked about in morphology comes in here, because that is how we have built our language, we have pulled items from the ontology we have entailed certain other pieces to that and have built up our mental dictionary or mental lexicon. This really encapsulates a lot of what we do in semantics, because everything that we talked about with respect to semantics, and even pragmatics, which we'll get to later, has to do with understanding what are the items in that box, what are the lexicon and phrases, as well as the meaning in that ontology.
We have talked about this gentleman before in chapter one, as well as when we got to morphology: Ferdinand de Saussure. As you can see, he lived from the middle of the 19th century into the early part of the 20th century. We already talked about his Principle of the Arbitrary, but let's come back to that to refresh our minds a bit. It really is the cornerstone of semantics; you have a hard time understanding anything in semantics without understanding the arbitrariness of language. I talked about him briefly earlier; he was Swiss mathematician, logician, and philosopher that used these tools to look at language. He is a fascinating individual; at a different point in time, I might get into it.
For now, his Principle of the Arbitrary is what we need to focus on. I talked about earlier that you have, for example, sofa, couch, davenport; three different terms, and for most of us we use at least two of those to describe the same piece of furniture. Or, we talk about a groundhog or woodchuck and it's the same animal. Even how air, food and water, the three things that human beings need to live, that none of those terms are the same in any two languages. We use different lexicon in every single language to describe the same three things that we all need. That is proof of arbitrariness, that any given language arbitrarily assigned a lexicon or a phrase to a specific meaning. That's exactly what the Principal the Arbitrary is: connecting the reference to the meaning or the sense. Those were Saussure's terms and when he did this; he had a different aspect for us to think about. He described accurately that when we talk about the morning star and when we talk about the evening star. It's the same heavenly body. What does that mean? You may have heard those terms before, the morning star and the evening star and; if not, the morning star is the last heavenly body, the last thing we see in the sky before the sun comes up and makes it so bright that we can't see any stars. The evening star is the first thing we see once the sun goes down is the first heavenly body that we see. It isn't actually a star—it's the planet Venus—but even still, we use this these two terms to refer to the exact same thing. As Saussure described, that is arbitrary; we arbitrarily name it a different thing, depending on the time of day. That this happens in English or maybe used to happen (there aren’t too many people who say morning star and evening star), but arbitrariness does happen in every language.
Really what we're saying is that a reference or a lexicon or phrase that we use is really a set of truth values, meaning that, if it is correctly attaching or entailing to a certain meaning that it's a true reference: it's true for me, it's true for you. If it's not, then it's a false reference. Let me give you an example. If I hold up this device and call it my phone or my telephone or my mobile phone or my cell phone, all of those are true references, meaning that in any dialect of English this thing would be considered a ‘phone’. It could be any or all of those lexicons. But if I hold this thing up and I call it a pencil, that's going to be a false reference, because in no dialect of English does this apparatus get connected to or entailed to a ‘pencil’; it just doesn't happen. Let me give you another example. If I say, that is a true reference, because this thing that in English we call ‘sky’, it's the thing that is above us when we go outside right; get rid of the clouds and what you see is the sky. That thing up there that thing has a color to it, or at least that we perceive and that color is associated that hue is associated to the term blue, so that's a true reference. If I say the sky is green, for most all of you, that would be a false reference, because in no way does that color get correlated to the term ‘green’. I will say, though, if you are from an area or have spent time in an area that is prone to tornadoes, then you know what that phrase means. If you have the unfortunate instance of being in an area when a tornado is about to drop, the clouds look green; the light bounces off the clouds in such a way that it looks green, and so you say the clouds are green or the sky is green. In that specific reference, it would be true, but for most everybody else, it would be false.
If we talk about Saussure here and the Principle of the Arbitrary, then we have to include Gottlob Frege, who also came from Switzerland. He's also a mathematician, logician, and philosopher of language and he worked alongside Ferdinand de Saussure. He came he came up with the Principle of Compositionality and it is equally important when we talk about semantics; you can't talk about semantics without either the Principle of the Arbitrary or Principle of Compositionality. This principle is actually pretty straightforward and I probably don't need to explain it very much. It is that the meaning of the whole is determined by the meaning of the parts and the way they combine. The components help to form and shape the meaning of the overall. That pretty much makes sense, but I’ll give you a couple of examples. If we think about this morphologically, then certainly if we have a term unbelievable. All we need to do is look at the individual morphemes that are associated with that lexicon, note the meaning of the different morphemes, and we can put together the meaning of the full lexicon. In the term unbelievable, we have a root belief, we have a prefix un-, which means ‘not’ and it's a negator, and we have a suffix, a derivational suffix, that means ‘able to’, -able. ‘Not’ ‘believe’ ‘able’; ‘to not able to believe’—that's what unbelievable means.
It even helps us to understand the history of how certain terms or certain phrases get changed over time. For example, if I say holiday, you have a certain image in mind for most English speakers, that means just a day off. It may include a vacation; certain dialects of English equate a holiday to vacation. However, if I told you that, historically, that it was a sacred day or a holy day, that may not be the meaning of it now, but you can see the history of that, and you can understand how it could come to mean that. These are examples of the Principle of Compositionality: the parts and the way they combined inform the meaning of the whole.
We can also talk about when there is a lack of compositionality. We already have in the previous chapter, when I talked about grammaticality and I talked about the statement that Noam Chomsky came up with: colorless green ideas sleep furiously. We talked about how it is a grammatical sentence structurally; it follows the phrase structure rules of English. Why it doesn't make sense is because it lacks compositionality; the meaning of the individual pieces, that they don't work together. In semantics we call that anomaly; an anomaly is when there is a lack of compositionality. Most of the time, anomaly produces a lack of understanding; you don't understand what somebody is trying to communicate.
However, there are times that anomaly can be massaged a little bit; it can be understood, given a context. One example is, metaphors. If I say there is a fork in the road, what I’m saying has nothing to do with an eating utensil in the middle of the roadway. In that sense, there is anomaly, because there's a lack of compositionality. As an English speaker, you understand what I’m trying to say; I’m describing a situation in which a single road forks or splits into two or more subsequent roads. Because you are an English speaker, you understand what that metaphor is trying to say. That is an example of a bit of elasticity with this Principle of Compositionality, that we can play with this a little bit. This also includes idioms, and it includes something called collocations. A collocation is a combo: X and Y. They are understood as a unit, and they have a little bit of a metaphor quality to it. For example, if I was describing somebody in their late 40s through early 60s, and they are a dark haired individual but there's quite a bit of gray sprinkled throughout their hair. A term we might use in English is salt and pepper, that that person has salt and pepper hair. If I just said, salt hair or pepper hair, you wouldn't understand what I was trying to say. If I say, salt and pepper, together, that is understandable, as a chunk of meaning. It stretches that Principle of Compositionality just a little bit, but it's understood because of the context, because that phrase is part of the ontology of English. I'll give you another example. I used to have a neighbor who did not tell stories very well, and one of the things they used to do was not give very much in the way of detail. If you talked to them after a trip, they would say they went here and there, and did this and that. Here and there, this and that, those are two collocations. They are general phrases to explain that there was probably nothing important going on: they didn't go to anywhere that they felt was interesting, or they didn't want to tell us where they went. Either way, they used two different collocations to describe his vacation.
All of these expansions of the Principle of Compositionality and the Principle of the Arbitrary inform everything with respect to semantics. From this point going forward, both of those principles will have a role in every aspect of semantics and pragmatics.
