CHAPTER OUTLINE
In the previous chapters, we focused on the relation between syntax and the way syntactic structures are expressed: how do concrete morpho-phonological forms get inserted into the syntactic representation, and how do these forms get linearised in the order we hear them in? But sentences are not only expressed; they also have a meaning. Semantics is the grammatical component that assigns an interpretation (i.e. a meaning) to a sentence. How does it do that? Crucially, like morphology and phonology, semantics is also based on the output of the syntax: the way words and morphemes with their interpretable features are merged determines the meaning of a sentence. This sounds like a pretty straightforward procedure, but we will see that the relation between syntax and semantics is not always transparent, as was also the case for syntax and morphology. In order to get to the right interpretations of sentences we sometimes need more syntax than syntax seems to give us.
Insight: Compositionality
How does a sentence get the meaning it has? This is a question that has interested philosophers and linguists for centuries. And even though there are many complex issues at stake, at least on two points consensus has arisen. These two points may sound obvious at first sight, but appear to be very powerful in explaining all kinds of semantic effects.
The first point is that the meaning of a sentence is determined by the meaning of the words or morphemes it consists of. If you have the sentence John love-d Mary, the meaning of the entire sentence follows from the meaning of components like John, love, -d and Mary. This sentence cannot all of a sudden mean that some guy hated Bill. No meaningful elements are removed or added when we interpret this sentence. In that sense, sentence meaning is like a linguistic fruit salad. If you mix bananas, strawberries and apples, the salad is not going to taste like oranges. Now, you may wonder, though, what exactly we mean when we say that semantics is interested in the meaning of words and morphemes. Wasn't it the case that words are sometimes formed after the syntax, for instance by morphologically merging the features in Fin with V+v?
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