6

Meaning in linguistic forms

Like other social scientists, linguists are very inventive at creating new terms for the mere purpose of description. This makes their work authoritative and at the same time impenetrable to those who are outside of the field of linguistics. In this chapter, I will introduce some of the units of analysis employed by grammarians in the formal study of the structure of natural languages (phonemes, morphemes). After introducing some basic principles of structuralist linguistics, I will discuss how events and participants’ roles are marked through nominal and verbal morphology. In particular, I will illustrate how the differentiated treatment received by different types of referents across languages is related to contextual features such as animacy, person, and level of involvement. Grammatical structures and choices will be shown to be related to a number of parameters, including the nature of action and the extent to which information is foregrounded or backgrounded. I will then introduce the notion of metalinguistic awareness and show that certain aspects of meaning that cannot be captured by studying speakers’ intuitions can be captured when we examine spontaneous language use, especially conversational discourse. The relation between language and gender will be illustrated through the notion of indexicality, a property of a particular type of signs.

6.1The formal method in linguistic analysis

Most of the linguistic analyses of what I identify here as “linguistic forms” have been based on a formal method of inquiry (Carnap 1942) according to which the properties of linguistic expressions are studied without paying too close attention to the non-linguistic correlates of those expressions. The linguist concentrates on linguistic forms without trying to connect them to events and objects in the world they describe (what philosphers call “designata”). In general, phonologists, morphologists, and syntacticians are more interested in the relationship among different elements of the linguistic system (sounds, parts of words, phrases and sentences) than in the relationship between such elements and the “world out there” that such a system is meant to represent. In the formal method,

162

6.1 The formal method in linguistic analysis

linguistic signs are taken out of their natural context – as part of acts of communication and hence social acts – and examined as part of an abstract formal system. This method is based on a number of assumptions.

One assumption is that linguistic forms are shared by a particular group of speakers. No consideration is usually given however to the cultural and political processes that make such sharing possible or necessary (Bourdieu 1982: 26). For the purposes of their analysis, structuralist and generative linguists alike act as if form-content relationships remain constant across time, space, and speakers – this is part of the synchronic approach to linguistic description – and that social, cultural, or psychological implications or consequences for a linguistic choice are not relevant to such a description. A new version of this approach is the autonomous view of syntax assumed by many contemporary formal linguists, Chomsky and his students in particular.

In engaging in structural analysis, grammarians look at words, sentences, and their components as symbolic elements that can be readily manipulated (that is, modified and combined in various ways with other elements of the system) to establish the rules that govern their understanding and use by speakers. Such techniques presuppose a view of language as predominantly an instrument for informing or describing the world (for a different view, see chapter 7). In other words, although grammarians are concerned with meaning, they usually focus on what logicians and semanticists call referential or denotational meaning (Lyons 1969, 1977), that is, respectively, the property of linguistic expressions to identify particular objects in the world (e.g.use of the expression the red guitar in the utterance John wants the red guitar) or a particular class of objects, properties, events (e.g. the use of guitar in the sentence John just bought a guitar).1

Usually grammarians do not make any claim about other aspects of meaning, variously called social, affective, emotive, indexical, all of which are of primary interest to linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists (see Romaine 1984; Silverstein 1979, 1985b). They also assume that, with the exception of indexical expressions such as I, you, here, now, etc. (see sections 1.4.2 and 6.8.2), denotational meanings are shared, that is, they remain constant across speakers and over time and space. Finally, the formal method of analysis is based on the assumption (introduced by the German logician Gottlieb Frege) that the meaning of a proposition is made up out of the meaning of its constituent words (Dummett 1973: 4).

As we shall see later in this chapter, the inclusion of other types of meaning in

1The distinction between reference and denotation is also known as a distinction between reference (German Bedeutung) and sense (German Sinn) or extension and intension (see also Allwood, Andersson, and Dahl 1977; Chierchia and McConnellGinet 1990; Frege [1892]1952).

163

Meaning in linguistic forms

the study of grammatical units allows linguistic anthropologists and discourse analysts to unveil a new set of linguistic phenomena.

6.2Meaning as relations among signs

One of the major contributions of linguistic analysis in the last century has been the idea that the basis of meaning lies in the kinds of relations that signs – words, conventional gestures, street signs, traffic signals, etc. – have with one another in a particular system. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, considered by many the founder of modern linguistics and the inspiration for the European intellectual movement known as structuralism, believed that certain objects (marks on paper as well as sound waves in the air) acquire meaning, that is, become signs, in two ways: (i) by being temporally or spatially connected to other (similar) elements and (ii) by being understood in opposition to other (similar) elements that could have been used but were not. Saussure called the first type of relations syntagmatic and the second type paradigmatic (psychologists sometimes talk about the same relations in terms of horizontal and vertical relations). Saussure defines syntagmatic relations as relations of contiguity (or in presentia). In a sentence, words acquire meaning by being next to other words. This becomes immediately apparent when we consider words that can have quite different meanings. For example, the word line in examples (1)–(4) conveys different concepts and refers to different objects in the world. The meanings of line is each time recoverable by looking at the other words it co-occurs with.

(1)I can’t draw a straight line without a ruler

(2)People must form a line if they want to be served

(3)I can’t remember a single line of that poem

(4)What is the line of argument you’re following?

In (1) and (2), the meaning of line is defined by the verb that precedes it – draw in

(1) and form in (2). In (3) and (4) the meaning of line is defined by the rest of the nominal phrase to which it belongs – of that poem and of argument respectively. The structuralist notion of syntagmatic relations in this case captures the idea often articulated by philosophers and logicians (Frege, Wittgenstein) that words only make sense within the context of a sentence.2

Paradigmatic relations are oppositional relations (Saussure used the Latin term in absentia). They are defined by what something is not, that is, the range of alternative signs within the same system.

2For example, Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus says: “3.3 Only propositions have sense; only in the nexus of a proposition does a name have meaning” (1961: 14). The English term proposition is here, as elsewhere in the logico-philosophical literature of the period, a translation of the German term Satz (see Willard 1972).

164

6.2 Meaning as relations among signs

In the following sentence, for instance, the word big must be understood in contrast to the other possible words that can be used in its place.

(5)Paul is a big man.

If I am trying to look for Paul in a group of people, I will be able to exclude those who look small or tall but thin. The structuralist idea is that the meaning of what we use is partly given by what we do not use. The choice of big must be seen not only in contrast with its opposite, small, but also with words that are closer and yet distinct, like great. Structuralists would say that to understand what big means we must take into consideration the fact that the system (i.e. the English lexicon) also has the word great. When we use the word big, we are not just doing that, we are also not using the word great. We know that a great man is different from a big man. Hence the importance of what is not said (Tyler 1978).

As Lévi-Strauss understood when he introduced structuralist methods in cultural anthropology, this notion of meaning-by-opposition and possible variations within a class can be applied to any system of classification and especially to those systems that can be characterized by dualism or binary oppositions: male and female, blood relations and affines, nobles and commoners, gods and mortals, citizens and slaves, sea animals and earth animals, dead and live beings, raw and cooked foods (see chapter 2). In each case, the meaning of one member is given by its opposition to the other. It is the fact that there are people who are not nobles (i.e. commoners) that gives nobles their special status. In a structuralist account, any relation of domination is not only imposed from the top (e.g. by force or laws); it is also sustained from the bottom, by those who act as “inferiors.” Such an account purposely ignores the sociohistorical conditions that brought about the present situation and emphasizes the element of choice that is implicit in any system of classification.

More generally, the structuralist view of meaning is potentially relevant to anyone interested in how people interpret their environment, including other people’s actions. If we substitute “words” with “acts,” we can apply the structuralist view of meaning in language to meaning in any human encounter. We can for instance analyze the presentation of a gift, which may or may not be accompanied by language, as an act that must be interpreted both syntagmatically (sequentially) and paradigmatically (in opposition to other possible acts). An offer of food made as soon as the food is brought to the table is interpreted differently from an offer made later, after other people have been served already. Furthermore, the meaning of the act of offering might also depend on the range of foods available. If the table is full of different plates with warm foods and we are offered the contents of a can, we might find the offer not sufficiently generous or even offensive. Such a reaction would be based however on

165