The dynamic turn in semantics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of language, encompassing three main sub-fields:

Evolutionary, historical and sociolinguistics .

I.Evolutionary linguistics attempts to account for the origins of language. Evolutionary linguistics is the scientific study of the origins and development of language. Evolutionary linguists consider linguistics as a subfield of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. Studying languages as the products of nature, it is interested in the biological origin and development of language. The main challenge in this research is the lack of empirical data: spoken language leaves no traces. This led to an abandonment of the field for more than a century. Since the late 1980s, the field has been revived in the wake of progress made in the related fields of psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, evolutionary anthropology and cognitive science.

II. Historical linguistics explores language change. Historical linguistics (also called diachronic linguistics) is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:

to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages;
to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families (comparative linguistics);
to develop general theories about how and why language changes;
to describe the history of speech communities;
to study the history of words, i.e. etymology.

Modern historical linguistics dates from the late 18th century and grew out of the earlier discipline of philology, the study of ancient texts and documents, which goes back to antiquity.

At first historical linguistics was comparative linguistics and mainly concerned with establishing language families and the reconstruction of prehistoric languages, using the comparative method and internal reconstruction. The focus was on the well-known Indo-European languages, many of which had long written histories.

The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects — 449 according to the 2020 SIL estimate, about half (219) belonging to the Indo-Aryan sub-branch — including most of the major languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau (Southwest Asia), much of Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent (South Asia).

The languages of the Indo-European group are spoken by approximately three billion native speakers, the largest number of the recognised families of languages. (The Sino-Tibetan family of tongues has the second-largest number of speakers). Of the top 20 contemporary languages in terms of native speakers according to SIL Ethnologue, 12 are Indo-European: Spanish, English, Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, German, Marathi, French, Italian, Punjabi and Urdu, accounting for over 1.6 billion native speakers.

Membership of these languages in the Indo-European language family and branches, groups and subgroups thereof, is determined by a genetic relationship, defined by shared innovations which are presumed to have taken place in a common ancestor. For example, what makes Germanic languages "Germanic" is that large parts of the structures of all the languages so designated can be stated just once for all of them. In other words, they can be treated as an innovation that took place in Proto-Germanic, the source of all the Germanic languages.

But since then, significant comparative linguistic work has been done on the Uralic languages, Austronesian and Native American languages (Uralic languages constitute a language family of 39 languages spoken by approximately 20 million people). The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian. Countries that are home to a significant number of speakers of Uralic languages include Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Romania, Russia, Serbia and Slovakia.

Initially, all modern linguistics was historical in orientation - even the study of modern dialects involved looking at their origins. But Saussure drew a distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics, which is fundamental to the present day organization of the discipline. Primacy is accorded to synchronic linguistics, and diachronic linguistics is defined as the study of successive synchronic stages. Saussure's clear demarcation, however, is now seen to be idealised. Also, the work of sociolinguists on linguistic variation has shown synchronic states are not uniform: the speech habits of older and younger speakers differ in ways which point to language change. Synchronic variation is linguistic change in progress.

The biological origin of language is in principle a concern of historical linguistics, but most linguists regard it as too remote to be reliably established by standard techniques of historical linguistics such as the comparative method. Less standard techniques, such as mass lexical comparison, are used by some linguists to overcome the limitations of the comparative method, but most linguists regard them as unreliable.

The findings of historical linguistics are often used as a basis for hypotheses about the groupings and movements of peoples, particularly in the prehistoric period. In practice, however, it is often unclear how to integrate the linguistic evidence with the archaeological or genetic evidence. For example, there are a large number of theories concerning the homeland and early movements of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, each with their own interpretation of the archaeological record.

The branches of historical linguistics:

1. Comparative linguistics (originally comparative philology) is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages in order to establish their historical relatedness. Languages may be related by convergence through borrowing or by genetic descent.

Genetic relatedness implies a common origin or proto-language, and comparative linguistics aims to construct language families, to reconstruct proto-languages and specify the changes that have resulted in the documented languages. In order to maintain a clear distinction between attested and reconstructed forms, comparative linguists prefix an asterisk to any form that is not found in surviving texts.

2. Etymology is the study of the history of words — when they entered a language, from what source, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. In languages with a long detailed history, etymology makes use of philology, the study of how words change from culture to culture over time. However, etymologists also apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct information about languages that are too old for any direct information (such as writing) to be known. By analyzing related languages with a technique known as the comparative method, linguists can make inferences, about their shared parent language and its vocabulary. In this way, word roots have been found which can be traced all the way back to the origin of, for instance, the Indo-European language family.

Linguistic typology is a subfield of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity of the world's languages.

It includes three sub-disciplines:

1. qualitative typology, which deals with the issue of comparing languages and within-language variance;

2. quantitative typology, which deals with the distribution of structural patterns in the world’s languages;

3. theoretical typology, which explains these distributions.

Similarities between languages can have a number of different origins. In the simplest case, universal properties may be due to universal aspects of human experience. For example, all humans experience water, and all human languages have a word for water. Other similarities may be due to common descent: the Latin language spoken by the Ancient Romans developed into Spanish in Spain and Italian in Italy; similarities between Spanish and Italian are thus in many cases due to both being descended from Latin. In other cases, contact between languages — particularly where many speakers are bilingual — can lead to much borrowing of structures, as well as words. Similarity may also, of course, be due to coincidence. English much and Spanish mucho are not descended from the same form or borrowed from one language to the other; nor is the similarity due to innate linguistic knowledge. These words are the examples of false cognates.

False cognates are pairs of words in the same or different languages that are similar in form and meaning but have different roots. That is, they appear to be or are sometimes considered cognates when in fact they are not.

As an example of false cognates, the word for "dog" in the Australian Aboriginal language Mbabaram happens to be dog, although there is no common ancestor or other connection between that language and English (the Mbabaram word evolved regularly from a protolinguistic form *gudaga). Similarly, in the Japanese language the word 'to occur' happens to be okoru.

The basic kinship terms mama and papa comprise a special case of false cognates (cf. Chinese bàba, Persian baba, and French papa (all "dad"); or Navajo má, Chinese māma, Swahili mama, Quechua mama, and English "mama"). The striking cross-linguistical similarities between these terms are thought to result from the nature of language acquisition.

According to Jakobson, these words are the first word-like sounds made by babbling babies; and parents tend to associate the first sound babies make with themselves. Thus, there is no need to ascribe the similarities to common ancestry. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that these terms are built up from speech sounds that are easiest to produce (bilabial stops like m and b and the basic vowel a).

However, variants do occur; for example, in Fijian, the word for "mother" is nana, and in proto-Old Japanese, the word for "mother" was *papa. Furthermore, the modern Japanese word for "father," chichi, is from older titi. In fact, in Japanese the child's initial mamma is interpreted to mean "food". Similarly, in some Indian languages, such as Marathi, a child's articulation of "mum-mum" is interpreted to mean "food".

Some historical linguists presume that all languages go back to a single common ancestor. Therefore, a pair of words whose earlier forms are distinct, yet similar, as far back as they've been traced, could in theory have come from a common root in an even earlier language, making them real cognates. The further back in time language reconstruction efforts go, however, the less confidence there can be in the outcome. Attempts at such reconstructions typically rely on just such pairings of superficially similar words, but the connections proposed by these theories tend to be conjectural, failing to document significant patterns of linguistic change. Under the disputed Nostratic theory (macrofamily of languages) and similar theories, some of these examples would indeed be distantly related cognates, but the evidence for reclassifying them as such is insufficient. The Nostratic hypothesis is however based on the comparative method, unlike some other superfamily hypotheses.

Examples:

Arabic sharif and English sheriff

English boy and Japanese bōya (young male child)

English bullshit and Mandarin búshì (不是; is not, not true)

English cheek and Russian shcheka (щека; cheek)

English chop and Uzbek chop

English day, daily and Spanish día (day) (or Latin dies (day) or English diary)

English delete and Russian udalit' (удалить; to delete, remove)

English hut and Russian hata (хата)

English much and Spanish mucho

English river and Spanish rio

English strange and Russian stranno(странно)

German haben (to have) and Latin habere (to have)

Japanese arigatō and Portuguese obrigado (thank you)

Japanese babā (disrespectful term meaning "old hag") and Russian baba (grandmother)

3. Dialectology is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, the varieties of a language that are characteristic of particular groups, based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features (as opposed to variations based on social factors, which are studied in sociolinguistics, or variations based on time, which are studied in historical linguistics). Dialectology treats such topics as divergence of two local dialects from a common ancestor and synchronic variation. Dialectologists are ultimately concerned with grammatical features which correspond to regional areas. Thus they are usually dealing with populations living in their areas for generations without moving, but also with immigrant groups bringing their languages to new settlements.

4. Phonology is a sub-field of historical linguistics which studies the sound system of a specific language or set of languages change over time. Whereas phonetics is about the physical production and perception of the sounds of speech, phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages.

An important part of phonology is studying which sounds are distinctive units within a language. For example, the "p" in "pin" is aspirated while the same phoneme in "spin" is not. In some other languages, for example Thai and Quechua, this same difference of aspiration or non-aspiration does differentiate phonemes. In addition to the minimal meaningful sounds (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, such as the /p/ in English, and topics such as syllable structure, stress, accent, and intonation.

The principles of phonological theory have also been applied to the analysis of sign languages, even though the phonological units do not consist of sounds.

A sign language (also signed language) is a language which, instead of acoustically conveyed sound patterns, uses visually transmitted sign patterns (manual communication, body language and lip patterns) to convey meaning—simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to express fluidly a speaker's thoughts. On the whole, deaf sign languages are independent of oral languages and follow their own paths of development. For example, British Sign Language and American Sign Language are quite different and mutually unintelligible, even though the hearing people of Britain and America share the same oral language.

5. Morphology - the study of the formal means of expression in a language; in the context of historical linguistics, how the formal means of expression change over time; for instance, languages with complex inflectional systems tend to be subject to a simplification process.

Morphology is the field of linguistics that studies the internal structure of words as a formal means of expression. Words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology. While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. The rules understood by the speaker reflect specific patterns (or regularities) in the way words are formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word-formation within and across languages, and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages, in the context of historical linguistics, how the means of expression change over time.

In historical linguistics, grammaticalisationis a process of linguistic change by which a content word (lexical morpheme) changes into a function word or further into a grammatical affix. Involved in the process are various semantic changes (especially bleaching) and phonological changes typical of high-frequency words. In English, the word "go" became a change-of-state marker (e.g. "He went home" vs. "He went mad") and a future tense marker ("I am going to the store" vs. "I am going to eat", contracted to " eat

6. Syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural languages. The term syntax is used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as in "the syntax of Modern Irish". Modern research in syntax attempts to describe languages in terms of such rules. Many professionals in this discipline attempt to find general rules that apply to all natural languages in the context of historical linguistics, how characteristics of sentence structure in related languages changed over time.

III. Sociolinguistics looks at the relation between linguistic variation and social structures.Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used. Sociolinguistics overlaps to a considerable degree with pragmatics.

It also studies how lects differ between groups separated by certain social variables, e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc., and how creation and adherence to these rules is used to categorize individuals in social class. As the usage of a language varies from place to place (dialect), language usage varies among social classes, and it is these sociolects that sociolinguistics studies. (The term "lect" is a back-formation from specific terms such as dialect and idiolect. A lect is a form of a language, or a language itself, that is considered to be a variety or development of another language or form of it, in sociolinguistics).

William Labov, an American linguist (born December 4, 1927) is regarded as the founder of the study of sociolinguistics. He is especially noted for introducing the quantitative study of language variation and change, making the sociology of language into a scientific discipline.He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics.

He is employed as a professor in the linguistics department of the University of Pennsylvania, and pursues research in sociolinguistics, language change, and dialectology. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, his studies of the linguistic features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) were also influential: he argued that AAVE should not be stigmatized as substandard but respected as a variety of English with its own grammatical rules. He has also pursued research in referential indeterminacy (referential indeterminacy is a situation in which different people vary in naming objects. For example, William Labov studied this effect using illustrations of different drinking vessels to see what people would label as "cups" and what people would label as "mugs"), and he is noted for his seminal studies of the way ordinary people structure narrative stories of their own lives.

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Speech and writing

Most contemporary linguists work under the assumption that spoken (or signed) language is more fundamental than written language. This is because:

• Speech appears to be a human "universal", whereas there have been many cultures and speech communities that lack written communication;

• Speech evolved before human beings discovered writing;

• People learn to speak and process spoken languages more easily and much earlier than writing;

• Written language will be based on a standard language, whereas Linguistics focuses on languages as a whole, not just the accepted cultural norm.

Linguists nonetheless agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable. For research that relies on corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, written language is often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data. Large corpora of spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find, and are typically transcribed and written. Additionally, linguists have turned to text-based discourse occurring in various formats of computer-mediated communication as a viable site for linguistic inquiry.

The study of writing systems themselves is in any case considered a branch of linguistics.

Semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning in communication.

Communication is a process by which we assign and convey meaning in an attempt to create shared understanding. Communication can be seen as processes of information transmission governed by three levels of semiotic rules:

syntactic (formal properties of signs and symbols),
pragmatic (concerned with the relations between signs/expressions and their users)
semantic (study of relationships between signs and symbols and what they represent).

The word semantics derives from Greek σημαντικός (semantikos), "significant", from σημαίνω (semaino), "to signify, to indicate" and that from σήμα (sema), "sign, mark, token". In linguistics it is the study of interpretation of signs as used by agents or communities within particular circumstances and contexts. It has related meanings in several other fields. In linguistics the fields most closely associated with meaning are semantics and pragmatics. While semantics deals most directly with what words or phrases mean, pragmatics deals with how the environment changes the meanings of words.

Semanticists differ on what constitutes meaning in an expression. For example, in the sentence, "John loves a bagel", the word bagel may refer to the object itself, which is its literal meaning or denotation, but it may also refer to many other figurative associations, such as how it meets John's hunger, etc., which may be its connotation. Traditionally, the formal semantic view restricts semantics to its literal meaning, and relegates all figurative associations to pragmatics, but this distinction is difficult to defend. The degree to which a theorist subscribes to the literal-figurative distinction decreases as one moves from the formal semantic, semiotic, pragmatic, to the cognitive semantic traditions.

The word semantic in its modern sense is considered to have first appeared in French as sémantique in Michel Bréal's 1897 book, Essai de sémantique'. In International Scientific Vocabulary semantics is also called semasiology.

Semasiology (from Greek: σημαίνω (sēmaino) — indicate, signify) is a discipline within linguistics concerned with the question "what does the word X mean?" It studies the meaning of words regardless of their phonetic expression. The meaning of the term is somewhat obscure, because according to some authors’ semasiology merged with semantics in modern times, while at the same time the term is still in use when defining onomasiology (the opposite approach to semasiology). While onomasiology, as a part of lexicology, departs from a concept (i.e. an idea, an object, a quality, an activity etc.) and asks for the name of the word, semasiology departs from a word and asks what it means, or what concepts the word refers to. Thus, an onomasiological question is, e.g., "what are the names for long, narrow pieces of potato that have been deep-fried?" (answers: french fries in the US, chips in the UK), while a semasiological question is, e.g., "what is the meaning of the term chips?" (answers: 'long, narrow pieces of potato that have been deep-fried' in the UK, 'slim slices of potatoes deep fried or baked until crisp' in the US).

In linguistics, semantics is the subfield that is devoted to the study of meaning, as inherent at the levels of words, phrases, sentences, and even larger units of discourse (referred to texts.

The basic area of semantics’ study is the meaning of signs, and the study of relations between different linguistic units: homonymy, synonymy, antonymy, polysemy, metonymy, etc. A key concern is how meaning attaches to larger chunks of text, possibly as a result of the composition from smaller units of meaning. Traditionally, semantics has included the study of connotative sense and denotative reference, truth conditions, argument structure, thematic roles, discourse analysis, and the linkage of all of these to syntax.

Formal semanticists are concerned with the modeling of meaning in terms of the semantics of logic. Thus the sentence John loves a bagel above can be broken down into its constituents (signs), of which the unit loves may serve as both syntactic and semantic head.

In linguistics, the head is the word that determines the syntactic type of the phrase of which it is a member, or analogously the stem that determines the semantic category of a compound of which it is a component. The other elements modify the head.

For example, in the big red dog, the word dog is the head, as it determines that the phrase is a noun phrase. The adjectives big and red modify this head noun. That is, the phrase big red dog is a noun like dog, not an adjective like big or red. Likewise, in the compound noun birdsong, the stem song is the head, as it determines the basic meaning of the compound, while the stem bird modifies this meaning. That is, a birdsong is a kind of song, not a kind of bird. If bird were the head, the order would be different: a songbird is a kind of bird. Thus in English, compound nouns are head final: the head comes at the end.

Montague grammar

Richard Merett Montague is an American mathematician and philosopher. Montague pioneered a logical approach to natural language semantics which became known as Montague grammar. This approach to language has been especially influential among certain computational linguists—more than among more traditional philosophers of language. Richard Montague proposed a system for defining semantic entries in the lexicon in terms of lambda calculus.

In mathematical logic and computer science, lambda calculus, also written as λ -calculus, is a formal system designed to investigate function definition, function application and recursion. It was introduced by Alonzo Church and Stephen Cole Kleene in the 1930s as part of an investigation into the foundations of mathematics, but has emerged as a useful tool in the investigation of problems in computability or recursion theory, and forms the basis of a paradigm of computer programming called functional programming .

The lambda calculus is an idealized, minimalistic programming language. It is capable of expressing any algorithm, and it is this fact that makes the model of functional programming an important one.

Functional programs are stateless and deal exclusively with functions that accept and return data (including other functions), but they produce no side effects in 'state' and thus make no alterations to incoming data. Modern functional languages, building on the lambda calculus, include Erlang, Haskell, Lisp, ML, and Scheme, as well as more recent programming languages like Nemerle, and Scala.

Thus, the syntactic parse of the sentence John loves a bagel would now indicate loves as the head, and its entry in the lexicon would point to the arguments as the agent, John, and the object, bagel, with a special role for the article "a" (which Montague called a quantifier). This resulted in the sentence being associated with the logical predicate loves (John, bagel), thus linking semantics to categorial grammar models of syntax.

The dynamic turn in semantics

In the Chomskian tradition in linguistics there was no mechanism for the learning of semantic relations, and the nativist view considered all semantic notions as inborn. This traditional view was also unable to address many issues such as metaphor or associative meanings, and semantic change, where meanings within a linguistic community change over time, and qualia or subjective experience. Another issue not addressed by the nativist model was how perceptual cues are combined in thought, e.g. in mental rotation.

"Qualia" from the Latin for "what sort" or "what kind," is a term used in philosophy to describe the subjective quality of conscious experience. Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, or the redness of an evening sky. Daniel Dennett (a prominent American philosopher), writes that qualia are "an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us."

One of the simpler, broader definitions is "The 'what it is like' character of mental states. The way it feels to have mental states such as pain, seeing red, smelling a rose, etc.'"

The traditional view of semantics, as an innate finite meaning inherent in a lexical unit that can be composed to generate meanings for larger chunks of discourse, is now being fiercely debated in the emerging domain of cognitive linguistics and also in the non-Fodorian camp in Philosophy of Language. The challenge is motivated by factors external to language, i.e. language is not a set of labels stuck on things, but "a toolbox, the importance of whose elements lie in the way they function rather than their attachments to things."

A concrete example of the latter phenomenon is semantic underspecification - meanings are not complete without some elements of context. To take an example of a single word, "red", its meaning in a phrase such as red book is similar to many other usages, and can be viewed as compositional. However, the colours implied in phrases such as "red wine" (very dark), and "red hair" (coppery), or "red soil", or "red skin" are very different. Indeed, these colours by themselves would not be called "red" by native speakers. These instances are contrastive, so "red wine" is so called only in comparison with the other kind of wine (which also is not "white" for the same reasons).

This view goes back to de Saussure: “Each of a set of synonyms like redouter ('to dread'), craindre ('to fear'), avoir peur ('to be afraid') has its particular value only because they stand in contrast with one another. No word has a value that can be identified independently of what else is in its vicinity”.

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