Unit 10: Basic Lexis
The purpose of this unit is to introduce some basic concepts to do with word meaning.
When you don't know the meaning of a word, your instinct is probably to look it up in a dictionary. This works well enough for most practical purposes, but we should not treat dictionary definitions with too much reverence. They are only approximations, and can never hope to capture everything about the meaning of a word. Sometimes they are very contentious. For example, some dictionaries define Yorkshire as a "former county" of England, apparently on the grounds that it is not an administrative unit. The citizens of that region are said to be upset by this. Yet the same fate of being defined as a "former county" also befell Middlesex, and it seems that few citizens of that region are upset. The reasons for this difference must be very complex, but we can assume that the meaning of Yorkshire has something about it which former appears to deny, whereas Middlesex is more solidly former.
ACTIVITY 1 What elements of the meaning of the word Yorkshire contribute to rejection of the label former? How does Middlesex differ? |
Whatever core meaning we think a word has, the actual meaning of a word in use is likely to be more complex than, or even quite different from, the core meaning we thought it has. This is particularly true of common words. Indeed, the more common a word is, the more likely it is that it will have more than one meaning.
ACTIVITY 2 Consider these dictionary entries for girl and boy but do not look the words up in any other dictionaries for the time being. boy (___) n. 1. a male child; youth. 2. a man regarded as immature or inexperienced: he's just a boy when it comes to dealing with women. 3. See old boy. 4. the boys. Informal. a group of men, esp. a group of friends. 5. (esp. in former colonial territories) a native servant. 6. short for boyfriend. 7. boys will be boys. youthful indiscretion or exuberance must be expected and tolerated. 8. jobs for the boys. Informal. appointment of one's supporters to posts, without reference to their qualifications or ability. - interj. 9. an exclamation of surprise, pleasure, contempt etc. [C13 (in the sense: male servant; C14: young male): of uncertain origin; perhaps related to Old English Boia, man's name; from Old High German Buobo, man's name] girl (____) n. 1. a female child from birth to young womanhood. 2. a young unmarried woman; lass; maid. 3. Informal. a sweetheart or girlfriend. 4. Informal. a woman of any age. 5. an informal word for daughter. 6. a female employee, esp. a female servant. 7. (usually pl. and preceded by the) Informal. a group of women, esp. acquaintances. [C13: of uncertain origin; perhaps related to Low German Göre boy, girl]
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In using a word we are doing more than simply referring to an entity or concept in the real world. We are also exercising a choice, determined by a range of social and linguistic factors. Boy and lad, girl and lass: each pair seems to be doing much the same thing, i.e. pointing to a young male, or female, human being. Yet the meanings conveyed by each term in these two pairs go well beyond this simple act of reference.
It is conventional to distinguish reference from sense. Reference is the relationship between the word and the object or concept in the world. Sense is the relationship between the word and other words. That is, sense has more to do with our choice of one word rather than another and the way we combine that word with others we have chosen. In this way of looking at meaning, boy means not girl (also not man, not dog etc.), and girl means not boy, not woman etc. Notice that lad also means not boy, not youth, not juvenile, not young male human, not knave, not page etc., i.e. not any of these lexical choices, as opposed to not that object in the world. With Yorkshire, it is clear that people are not necessarily referring simply to an administrative unit (i.e. the unit which is Yorkshire not Lancashire), but to a whole complex of meanings which are 'Yorkshire' not 'Lancashire'.
It is commonly said that words mean what they mean because of how they are used. Reference is only one aspect of this use. Repeated use of a word to refer to an entity will indeed confirm its referential meaning, although there are many words to which it is hard or impossible to give any referential meaning, e.g. the, however. Repeated use of a word in certain social or linguistic contexts will help to confirm its sense. The meaning of a word, therefore, arises out of its use as a referring item and its context of use. 'Context' here is a broad term, which needs dividing into several categories.
This refers to variables such as region, class, age, gender etc. Many words are neutral with regard to social context: that is, they are used by everyone, and mean the same thing no matter who uses them, where or when. Words like telephone, paper-clip, dictionary seem to be of this type. A word such as tummy is clearly different. You would not find it used in medical text-books, for example. If it did appear in one, it would surely be as part of a cited dialogue between, say, a doctor and a child. If a doctor used the word tummy in a discussion with you about your own health, you might find it patronising. An element of meaning would be attached to it by using it outside the social boundaries you expect for that word.
The word tummy is marked as being children's language. This social restriction is connected to another point about it - its relative informality. Because it is children's language, it is also informal. There are many words which are not children's language but are still informal, or even slang. They are inappropriate in certain social interactions. This observation applies to regional dialect as well. A word such as lass might be very common in everyday language in Scotland, but it is still unlikely to be used by a judge sitting in court. The scale of relative informality to relative formality is known as register. Register overlaps with, but needs to be distinguished from, social variables such as region, class, gender and age.
Many words are restricted to certain fields of human activity. This kind of restriction should also be distinguished in principle from social restriction, although once again the two may correlate in some way. Take the word homophone. It is clearly a technical term restricted to the genre of linguistic research. It is therefore likely to used only by people who have a certain level of education. Ultimately education correlates to some degree with social class. However, these are secondary effects. The primary restriction is generic. The same can be said of words such as appellant, architrave, googly, purl, woggle and countless others. In each case, the word is typically restricted to particular users and contexts, although anyone might refer to these things. The restrictions are primarily based on categories of human activity. These may be secondarily correlated with some social facts, for example the fact that most people using the word purl are women.
ACTIVITY 3 The following words are clearly marked or restricted by social or generic context in one way or another. That is, they are much more likely to be used by certain speakers than others, at certain times and in certain places etc. Briefly note down the likely social or generic context of use for each. wee, pikelet, platelet, wee (again), bathroom, delightful, cool, wotcha, gules. |
This refers to a range of restrictions arising from the immediate linguistic environment. Grammatical restrictions are one kind, but of more immediate interest are semantic and other less easily defined restrictions. Some linguistics books attempt to distinguish grammatical from semantic restrictions by means of different deviant sentences, usually invented for the purpose. For example, in the sentence Sincerity admired the girl, it has been suggested that we have a violation of a semantic restriction, because sincerity is a non-human entity which is not semantically capable of being the subject of a verb like admire. From a strictly grammatical point of view, it has also been argued, there is nothing wrong with the sentence; it does not break any grammatical rules. By contract, the sentence The girl admired sincerity the does break a grammatical rule and is thus a violation of a grammatical restriction. This distinction is well-embedded in the linguistic literature, but its usefulness is also a matter of dispute.
Now consider the unidiomatic sentence The snow was absolutely bucketing down. This does not appear to break any grammatical rules. So is the violation a semantic one? There seems to be no real reason why snow should not fall by the bucketful. Is it perhaps only liquids that can bucket down? This seems a little doubtful, since even to say 'the stream was bucketing down' or 'water was bucketing down from the overflow pipe' sound odd. In the end, it seems that only rain 'buckets down', and it can probably only do this directly from the sky. (In passing, notice how unusual the use of buckets down is in the last sentence - have you ever seen this verb used in the present tense like this before?) What we appear to be saying is that it is part of the meaning of bucket down that the subject must be rain. There is quite a jump from saying that the subject of admire must be human to saying that the subject of bucket down must be the actual word rain. Moreover, while we certainly find it difficult to conceive of sincerity admiring anything, we do not find it difficult to conceive of snow in buckets. So to call our snow sentence a semantic violation seems, at the very least, to be introducing a different slant to the term semantic. Recent computer-aided studies of lexis have made several interesting discoveries about the more precise restrictions affecting words.
ACTIVITY 4 What linguistic restrictions apply to the use of each of the following adjectives: drunken, drunk, blithering, rancid, torrential, taciturn, beige, lovely Turn to Comments on Activities |
The distinction between social context, generic context and linguistic context is not absolute. Taciturn is hardly ever used of women. Is this merely a curious linguistic fact, similar to the fact that beige is never used of hair? Or is there an underlying element of meaning in taciturn which relates to the world, or the way we see the world? It is clearly not the case that only men are habitually silent. It may be the case that habitual silence in a woman is perceived as less remarkable, and is thus less in need of vocabulary to refer to it. If true, this is a social fact, a fact about people's attitudes to men and women, which is then subtly reflected in the language.
Similar remarks apply to lovely, except that the semantics of lovely are far more complicated than those of taciturn. Lovely is used of both human and non-human subjects. Let us put the non-human use on one side, and consider how the word applies to the two nouns man and woman. Your instinct might be that lovely is more likely to apply to women. If so, you would be wrong, at least according to the corpus of examples we are using, which has 80 instances of lovely man and only 35 of lovely woman. Lovely has two broad meanings when applied to people: physical appearance, and personality or character. Which is more common? Where men are concerned, it is clearly the personality which is lovely, although appearance examples do also occur. With women, appearance is the more common meaning, but not by a huge margin. Personality meanings do also occur. More intriguingly, when lovely is applied to men, the men are nearly always old, retired or dead. Lovely men are most often talked of in the past. More could be said but space forbids. The important point is that speakers must have some quite refined semantic criteria which allow or discourage the use of lovely + man or woman. These seldom appear in dictionaries and are not necessarily amenable to conscious explanation by speakers.
Notice that a social explanation for the strange distribution of taciturn is not a comment on who uses the word. There is no evidence to hand at present that taciturn is more likely to be used by men than women or vice versa. This is different from a case like purl.
ACTIVITY 5 What restrictions, if any, can you identify for the following words? pot-bellied, arrant, sautéed, vacuum cleaner, almighty Turn to Comments on Activities |
In a later unit we shall consider meaning again. In particular, we shall explore questions such as: Are there words which mean what they mean irrespective of context? What do words such as the and however mean, and how do they mean that? Are there any two words which mean exactly the same thing?
Crystal, D. 1995. The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language. CUP.
Chapters 11 and 12.
Kuiper, K and W.S. Allan 1996. An Introduction to the English Language. Sound, word and sentence. Macmillan.
Chapter 6.
