Eberhard-Karls Universität Tübingen
Seminar für Englische Philologie
HS: Lexical Semantics
SS 2006

Explaining the Meaning of Words: A Descriptive Study on Strategies

von

Andreas Glombitza

Table of Content

1. INTRODUCTION 3

2. PRELIMINARIES: THEORY AND TERMINOLOGY 4

3. RETRIEVING DATA FOR A COLLECTION OF STRATEGIES 9

4. ISOLATING STRATEGIES, ESTABLISHING RELATIONS 10

4.1 Strategies involving 10

a) giving a synonym 10
b) giving a hyperonym  11
c) naming the part of spe 12
d) syntagmatic or grammatical proximity  13

4.2 Strategies of Reference 13

a) giving an example  13
b) appealing to imaginati 14
c) miming  15
d) telling an anecdote  15

5. CONCLUSION  16

6. APPENDIX  17

A. Transcripts 17
B. Dictionary Entries  23
C. Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll  24

7. WORKS CITED 25

8. REFERENCES 26

1. Introduction

Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words.
Just as all men have not the same writing so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental
experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our
experiences are the images. (Aristotle, De Int. I., 16a)

Words, things and mental experiences – these three, their nature and the relationships that hold between them, form the scope of lexical semantics. Aristotle, in this programmatic statement “On Interpretation”, explicitly distinguishes between spoken and written word. He assigns a clear priority to the former: rooted in a culture of still predominantly oral transmisson, the difference between writing and speech is more palpable for him than we are inclined to feel it today. We are quite used, if we think of a word, to imagine its written form – as if this is its origin and essence. In need for the meaning of a word, we usually go and look for its entry in a dictionary. “Words” and “books” seem inextricably linked to each other, also suggested by the etymology of terms such as “lexicon” (literally, “a collection of words”). Terminology in L2-learning seems to metaphorically extend this connection by suggesting that the lexical inventory of language is stored in memory like in some kind of dictionary or mental lexicon. Rieder, in her research-paper on incidental vocabulary acquisition, quite naturally talks about the role of written discourse in L2-learning: her approach is about finding the “principles and guidelines [that] characterize the process of (re)constructing the meaning of unknown words within the text comprehension process […].” (Rieder 2002: 53) Her object of study is the L2-learner, confronted with a written text containing unknown words. One of her objectives is to find out about the interplay of top-down (text-level) and bottom-up (wordlevel) processes in the effort of constructing on the one hand a mental representation of the text and meaning-hypotheses for the unknown words on the other (cp. Rieder 2002: 54). In our study group, we have sketched out an approach that rests on similar assumptions and works on related objectives, but with two important differences. First, it works “the other way round”: instead of watching a recipient infer an unknown lexical item with the help of co-text (drawing on knowledge resources which allow him to create contextual coherence), we chose to have speakers of different competence levels explain a lexical item – in other words, build a coherent text whose purpose is to optimally (in their opinion) guide an inference process in a potential recipient ignorant of the word. The second difference is that our (potential) recipients are hearers rather than readers, that our texts are tied to persons rather than to letters. The decision to use oral material rests on the belief that producing a written text is different from speaking in one very relevant respect: it is much easier to follow the actual process of thinking in our subjects, “Die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken”ⁱ, as Kleist put it, if we make them speak rather than read or write. The material we observed and analyzed by means of a theoretical apparatus taken from lexical semantics and pragmatics, yields a variety of strategies for word-explanation. The purpose of this is to present our approach, describe its implementation, name and categorize the most salient strategies.

2. Preliminaries: Theory and Terminology

Our approach is all about getting people to talk about words: this talk is it that we want to analyze. In order to make coherent sense of quite a variety of such attempts, we feel the need to establish a portion of technical languageⁱⁱ and think about the theoretical models underlying it. We will make use of a number of concepts from the field of linguistic semantics. We will concur with the idea that there are distinct types of meaning; we will distinguish between intensional lexical relations (between lexical items), extensional and referential relations; we will take up some of the implications of componential analysis and keep a close look at Snell-Hornby’s model of verb-descriptivity derived from it. Where possible, we will try to keep this consistent with a broader pragmatic and cognitive perspective on communication and understanding.

Lyons distinguishes a number of aspects of meaning: one set of distinctions he makes is “between lexical meaning and sentence meaning […]” (Lyons 1981: 139, emph. by auth.), grammatical meaning and utterance-meaning. “The meaning of a sentence depends upon the meaning of its constituent lexemes […]; and the meaning of some, if not all, lexemes depends upon the meaning of the sentences in which they occur.” (Lyons 1981: 140) There is also “grammatical meaning as a further component of sentence meaning.” (Lyons 1981: 140) More comprehensive (arguably outside the traditional scope of semantics and rather an object of pragmatics) is the notion of utterance-meaning: “The meaning of an utterance includes, but is not exhausted by, the meaning of the sentence that is uttered.” (Lyons 1981: 140) Utterance-meaning includes the contributions of situative context. The distinction between sentence- and utterance-meaning must remain blurry, however,

[…] because the notion of sentence-meaning is arguably dependent, […] upon the notion
of utterance-meaning, so that one cannot give a full account of sentence-meaning without
relating sentences, in principle, to their possible contexts of utterance. (Lyons 1981: 140)

For this reason, “[…] semantics in the narrow sense is not logically prior to pragmatics. The
two are interdependent” (Lyons 1981: 168) In the realm of lexical meaning, which concerns
us most immediately, Lyons discerns “two […] components [of meaning]: sense and
denotation.” (Lyons 1981: 151)

It is obvious that some lexemes, if not all, are related both to other lexemes in the same
language […] and to entities, properties, situations, relations, etc., in the outside world.
[…] A lexeme which is related to other lexemes is related to them in sense; […] a lexeme
which is related to the outside world is related by means of denotation. (Lyons 1981:
152)

The notion of reference is, much like denotation, “[…] a relation which holds between expressions and entities, properties or situations in the outside world.” (Lyons 1981: 168) The two are, however, not identical: “ […] there is an important difference between denotation and reference: the latter, unlike the former, is bound to the context of utterance.” (Lyons 1981: 168) Reference, in this view, is a pragmatic notion rather than just a semantic one: a lexical item in use refers to an entity “in the outside world” (to Aristotle’s “things”). A lexical item in the language system denotes something in the mind (it “symbolizes directly” Aristotles says, “mental experiences”). This “something in the mind”, then, bears some indirect relationship to things in “the outside world” (it is an “image” of it, Aristotle thought): this is it that we expect to discover in word-explanation – verbalized denotations. There have been attempts to describe these denotations by virtue of the systematic relations that hold between lexical items. Intensional or sense-relations between lexemes are subsumed under the headings of “substitutional” and “syntagmatic”: substitutional relations are either those of synonymy, hyponymy or antonymy. “[…] Syntagmatic relations hold between […] ‘eat’ and ‘food’; between ‘kick’ and ‘foot’; and so on.” (Lyons 1981: 155) Taken together, substitutional and syntagmatic relations between lexemes form so-called “semantic fields”. Componential analysis (at least chronologicallyⁱⁱⁱ) emerged from semantic field theory.

[...]

i „[...] l’idee vient en parlant. [...] Ein solches Reden ist wahrhaft lautes Denken. Die Reihen der Vorstellungen und ihre Bezeichnungen gehen nebeneinander fort [...]. Die Sprache ist alsdann keine Fessel, etwa wie ein Hemmschuh an dem Rade des Geistes, sondern ihm wie ein zweites mit ihm parallel fortlaufendes, Rad an seiner Achse.“ (von Kleist: 1805)

ii we are aware that this technical language is a meta-communicative scientific construct; its purpose is to pin down “meaning” as effectively as possible. It should certainly not be seen as the “proper” or “standard” way to deal with word meaning in actual communication – it is just the scientific way, and thus one quite narrowly tied to the written word;

iii Lyons (1977) claims that “[componential analysis] neither presupposes field-theory nor is it supposed by it.” (Lyons 1977: 326) Snell-Hornby, however, uses the term “semantic field” along with am method of componential analysis;