Walter H. Hirtle - Making Sense out of Meaning: An Essay in Lexical Semantics

This essay will be one more attempt to situate meaning, that protean component of words, within an overall view of language, to bringit within the scope of a linguistic theory permitting us to understandhow we manage to communicate by means of such a changeableelement. The traditional view of meaning as the mental counterpartof linguistic signs has been called into question by work in the fieldof neuroscience and even in the field of linguistics. If it is a mentalentity, then meaning is strictly subjective and so, in the eyes of manyscholars, cannot be treated scientifically. It remains that the traditional view of meaning is based on language as a phenomenon, onwhat we, as ordinary speakers, experience of language. Since it isour experience of any reality that provides the basis, the initial data,for reflecting on it in a scientific way, this view of meaning as a mental reality will be adopted here as the starting point to explore whatit can tell us of the nature of language itself.

As a number of linguists have pointed out, meaning occupies acentral place in language because it is what every speaker intendsto express and what every listener tries to understand. As a consequence, there is no shortage of books that deal with various aspectsof semantics and provide reference material for courses on the subject, and so one may well question the need for yet another study insemantics, particularly one limited to lexical meaning. Being amental reality, meaning is the most difficult part of language toanalyze, and no study can claim to have elucidated it completely.This includes the present study, which, however, will propose answers to two important difficulties encountered by a mentalistapproach.

First, having no existence outside the mind, meaning requiresa physical, perceivable sign to make it accessible to someone else.Those of a positivist bent have pointed out that meaning, beingpurely subjective, cannot be observed objectively and so, unlike itssign or any other physical object, does not lend itself to being measured by other observers. They therefore conclude that meaningdoes not give rise to data that can be treated scientifically, a conclusion that has led to linguists focusing on syntax or some other aspectof language and marginalizing meaning or even excluding it as anobject of scientific (rational) enquiry. This question will be re-examined here and an argument put forward to show that meaning cangive rise to observations calling for a rational explanation.

Second, even granted that meaning is the central reality of language, linguists are confronted with a difficulty when describing theobserved meaning of any word: the apparently insurmountable problem of polysemy. How can the same sign express different senses andyet be the same word in the eyes of the speaker? In his importantstudy of this problem, On Monosemy, Ruhl argues that a word has asingle meaning and attributes its apparent diversity of meaning tothe context, a view adopted here in part. However, while making useof his valuable data base, the present study will explore a dimensionof meaning Ruhl did not envisage certain widespread variationsfound with verbs, others with nouns and will examine the relationbetween a words basic lexical meaning and the different senses itcan bring to the sentence. This will lead to the proposal that it is awords underlying lexical monosemy which enables it to express thepolysemy observed in discourse.

Examining a word in this way, before it takes its place in a context,entails adopting a speaker-centred approach, as opposed to the listener-centred approach adopted by so many studies. Focusing onthe speaker involves examining how an idea is construed, alongwith the necessary grammatical components, to provide the meaning of a word ready for use. Taking into account the speakers rolein the act of language does call into question the validity of certainwidely accepted notions concerning conversion and a mental lexicon. On the other hand, through this speaker-oriented approach,we can discern the relationship between a words monosemy and itspolysemy and explain, without appealing to hypothetical rules or tosituation and context, how a speaker can use a word to express different senses and how a listener, making use of context and situation, can understand it rightly. Thus there is no opposition betweenthe two types of approach; to the contrary, the speaker-orientedapproach developed here provides a complement to listener-oriented approaches developed in other studies, a necessary complement if one wants to take into account the whole of the phenomenon,the act of language from beginning to end. References to otherapproaches have been brought in only incidentally, as an aid toclarify my approach, which must be understood before a full-fledgedcomparison with others can be undertaken.

This is an exploratory study, a first attempt to situate meaningwithin an overall view of the act of language, permitting us to understand how we manage to communicate by means of such a changeable element. Various scholars and poets have written on meaning,often with valuable insights suggesting its crucial role for mankind,and many linguists have approached meaning in an attempt toaccount for the vagaries of this mental IMPORT of the word (what itbrings into the sentence), some abandoning the attempt as futile.So far, however, no comprehensive view has emerged providing anunderstanding of meaning as an essential component of the general phenomenon of speaking, itself an essential of the human phenomenon. Any contribution the present essay may make to thisongoing attempt to understand the nature of language will be dueto an effort at the outset to approach the question of meaning fromthat more general point of view in order to discern its place in thelanguage act and its role in the formation and expression of humanthought.