When I was commissioned by Cambridge University Press to write an introduction to semantics, I was elated; I knew I was in for a great ride. This is the case even if I was perfectly aware of an unavoidable fact: it's impossible to write an introduction to semantics that will satisfy everybody. Many great scholars will feel you are ignoring them (or more probably, just plain wrong about your choices). While it's evident that different traditions have very smart people in their camps who cannot be completely wrong, there's really no way around it: in a book like this, you have to choose sides. And then face the music.

So, as expected, some level of disagreement can be found in almost any topic in semantics we choose: whether the tools of logic are useful or not; whether meaning is something embodied or symbolic, whether metaphor is useful or useless, whether semantics and pragmatics are to be distinguished or not, whether language influences thought significantly or not, and a very long etcetera. That's why I said that writing a book on semantics (especially an introduction, where there's not much space to give all possibilities their due), is probably a surefire way of creating enemies. Well, that's life.

I am in complete agreement with the saying that ‘education is not the filling of a vessel, but the lighting of a fire’. This is the approach I've tried to take here: even more important than the facts themselves is the feeling of excitement and enthusiasm that emanates from all the work that is being carried out in the field right now. As I see it, the story of semantics is not a mere recollection of facts from the past, but something that is being written in these very moments. I firmly believe these are topics that are central to our understanding of language, our minds and ourselves, and in this sense, they should be interesting for just about anyone (especially for anyone interested in how language and our minds work).

A great deal of effort in this book has gone into two goals: first, aiming for an explanation of topics accessible to anyone, while trying to avoid oversimplification at the same time. This is really tricky, because most issues in semantics are notoriously complicated and each single point can be modified, qualified and nuanced ad nauseam.

In this chapter …

Some Preliminaries

Meaning controls memory and perception. Meaning is the goal of communication. Meaning underlies social activities and culture. To a great degree, what distinguishes human cultures are the meanings they give to natural phenomena, artifacts, and human relations (Glenberg and Robertson, 2000).

The importance of semantics for the study of language cannot be overstated. Understanding how we construct meanings from the words and expressions we hear can be said to be the core of linguistic studies, since it amounts to understanding how language performs its main task, which is to convey meaning. Semantics is thus essential for all aspects of language study: how language is acquired (be it a first language or a second one) and how it is structured; how language changes over time and how it varies in different social contexts; how languages should be taught and how we (or machines) translate it; how language-related conditions such as aphasias work, etc. You could say that semantics lies at the very heart of the study of language. The practical applications of knowing in an accurate and detailed way how people associate their thoughts to linguistic objects, and how hearers use those objects to recover the intended meaning in a communicative exchange, are obviously enormous. Semantic search in the web has been called ‘the holy grail of computer-assisted research’ (McCloskey, 2013); natural-language computer query systems such as Apple's Siri or IBM's Watson would be delighted to have a complete story of how meaning really works.

In this chapter …

The Structure of the Lexicon: a Network of Words

Words are not isolated things. We know this from many sources. When people are given one word and they are asked to respond with any word that comes to mind (an exercise known as a ‘word association test’), the responses are not random at all: in fact, depending on the type of word, they can show a surprising degree of overlap. For example, in response to the word canary, a majority of people will answer bird (other options normally supplied are yellow or sing); when given the word furniture, the most frequent answer is table or chair; adjectives like hot or wide typically evoke their opposing pairs, cold and narrow, respectively.

In this chapter …

Why Worry about Methods?

One of the issues that are seldom discussed in courses on semantics is the methodology used by the different scholars to arrive at their analyses. Probably, the reason behind this fact is that, until now, most of the methods have been introspective, that is, based on the intuitions of the analyst (what is sometimes known as ‘arm-chair linguistics’, as in Figure 2.1). Introspection seems to be the most obvious method to study something that goes on within our own minds (which is thus very personal) and is not externally visible in any obvious way. Clearly, it is not apparent how we can study meaning directly: even looking directly at our brain with a scanner would not show us ‘meanings’ there, but only brain activity, neural connections and so forth. Unfortunately, introspective methods are faced with many problems: the subjectivity of the analyst and also the lack of mechanisms for verifiability, to name just two of the main ones. Thus, their claim to usefulness as a method of increasing our knowledge about any topic has to be treated with the utmost caution.

In this chapter …

Then, we will examine some of the problems faced by semantic roles, such as the difficulty of agreeing on their number and their exact coverage, and the two possibilities for their definition: the more abstract, syntactically based approach to semantic roles and the more specific, semantic-based one. The final part of the chapter will explore this second option: the possibility of having very specific semantic roles, which capture information at the level of specific events. We will review empirical evidence showing that thematic event-based knowledge is activated incrementally in the understanding of sentences and we will see how all this could come together by examining the function of a concrete example, the commercial transaction frame. The chapter closes with a discussion of the challenges and the future directions of this field of semantics.

In this chapter …

The Meaning of Words

When talking about how meaning is expressed with language, our gut feeling is that linguistic meaning resides mainly in words. Words are the key to a great part of the information we store in our heads. According to some estimates (e.g., Aitchison, 2012: 7) an educated adult speaker of English knows between 50,000 and 80,000 words (the numbers vary according to the individual, the method of measuring, etc.). However, in spite of the great number of words we store, we can use a word in no time at all. Native speakers can recognize a word 200 milliseconds after its onset, well before it has been completely pronounced. It is no wonder that psychologists are trying to elucidate in what ways words are organized in our minds (e.g., Aitchison, 2012; Altmann, 1997).

The highly efficient organization of the thousands of words we store is no doubt a very interesting issue (which we will examine in Chapter 5), but for semantics there are questions that come before that: how do words mean? How do we use words to convey meaning?

In this chapter …

Language and Thought: the Formal vs. Embodied Split

In Chapter 1, we drew up a list of basic questions about meaning. Two of the most basic ones were concerned with the nature of meaning itself, on the one hand, and its relationship with thought, on the other. How do we think? Do we think directly in language? Do we think in images, or perhaps is there another mode of thought? What actually goes on in people's minds (or brains) when they understand some linguistic object? How should the ‘meaning’ that is created in the mind of the hearer be conceived of?

Unsurprisingly, there are different opinions on these matters. There is a classic (and on-going) debate in cognitive science concerning the format in which information is represented, stored and manipulated in our brains. We can distinguish two opposing views, which can be described as the formal semantics view (also known as the symbolic or amodal view) and the embodied semantics view (also known as the cognitive view).

In this chapter …

Acquisition of Word Meaning

How do children acquire the meaning of words? This was one of the first questions about meaning that we included in our first chapter. This topic is important for many reasons: for example, a close examination of how children learn linguistic signs may help us achieve a more adequate idea of the true nature of language and meaning. One of the aspects that have attracted more attention is which cognitive capacities children must possess in order to acquire language. A second, closely related question is whether these capacities stem from innate, language-related mechanisms that children bring to the task, or whether meaning can be acquired using mechanisms which are used in other areas of cognition, different from language.