Essay 

Semantics

by

Stefan Prahl

SS 2000

Contents:

The Nature of Categorisation and its relevance to word meaning 1

The grammatical constraint, syntactic structure, and the compositionality of meaning representation 7

Lexicalisation, the TRH, and the question of a "universal" syntactic representation 11

List of works used: 16

Ray Jackendoff′s semantic theory presented in "Semantics and Cognition" proposes that semantics is more than a field of linguistic studies; it studies the very nature of thought and experience as well. In this essay, I will look at certain aspects of this theory and compare them to more traditional approaches to semantics. It will become apparent that Jackendoff′s theory, in the end of the day, is not only concerned with semantics but with the whole area of cognition as well.

The Nature of Categorisation and its relevance to word meaning

In this part of the essay, I will first describe more traditional approaches of semantic theories to categorisation and try to illustrate their inadequacies. Then I will go on to explain a theory provided by Ray Jackendoff which ought to address those problems adequately. Categorisation, about which Jackendoff says that

"…an essential aspect of cognition is the ability to categorise; to judge that a particular thing is or is not an instance of a particular category" 
(Jackendoff, 1983: 69),

has to be an integral part of every semantic theory, as categorisation not only comprises encoding / decoding of linguistic information, but ultimately the core of meaning analysis, the way we store and process information.

A very popular and often - used approach to categorisation was the theory of necessary / sufficient conditions. Jackendoff explains the theory as

"The meaning of a word can be exhaustively decomposed into a finite set of conditions that are collectively necessary and sufficient to determine the reference of the word." 
(Jackendoff, 1983: 112)

Therefore, if the number of characteristics is too low, thus if necessary conditions are not met, or if the quality of the characteristics is not adequate to make it a member of one distinct category, thus sufficient conditions are not met, the #entity# will not be identifiable. I will try to augment the explanation using examples:

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