Meaning, communication and significance
Informally, it is easy to agree that meaning is the heart of language. Meaning, we might say, is what language is for: to have a language without meaning would be like having lungs without air. Only when sequences of sounds or letters have (or are judged capable of having) a meaning do they qualify as language: infants’ babbling and bird song, for example, use the same medium as human language – sound – but since they do not, and cannot, express meaning (except, perhaps, to the infants or the birds) we do not consider them as examples of language in the full sense of the word. Meaning is also central to the experience of using language, as any one knows who has ever listened to people talking in an unknown language. Not only does such a language fail to express any meaning; it is also often hard to catch hold of individual words: without knowing the meaning of an utterance, it is hard to identify the separate words which constitute it.
Without a capacity to express meaning, then, language loses one of its essential aspects. We practically always speak or write in order to express a meaning of one kind or another. This is most obviously true for pieces of language which convey information: if someone suddenly says (4), then a meaning has been conveyed, and you are in possession of some information – whether true or false – which you may not have previously known.
But not only sentences have meanings. Even the shortest, most everyday words, which we would not normally consider as containing information, like the, not, of, or even ouch!, contribute something specific to the meanings of utterances in which they occur and can thus be legitimately considered as having meanings in their own right. (For some scholars, the study of the meanings of words like these belongs as much to pragmatics and syntax as it does to semantics; we will discuss the difference between semantics and pragmatics in 1.4.4.)
QUESTION Two apparent exceptions to the meaningfulness of language are T-shirts worn in Japan and elsewhere with ‘nonsensical’ English sentences on them, and people speaking in tongues at certain religious meetings. Are there other examples of this kind? Are instances of language use like this really non-meaningful? If so, what are some possible implications for semantics? If not, why not?
Although the study of meaning is extremely ancient, the name semantics was only coined in the late nineteenth century by the French linguist Michel Bréal. Like many other names of branches of linguistics, the word semantics reflects the origins of the Western tradition of linguistic analysis in the writings of Greek thinkers from the fifth century BC onwards. Semantics comes from the ancient Greek word semantikos, an adjective meaning ‘relating to signs’, based on the noun sēmeion ‘sign’. In Ancient Greek, one of the original uses of sēmeion was as a medical term for the symptoms that were the signs of underlying diseases. This derivation high lights the close relation between the study of linguistic signs – words, phrases, sentences and utterances – and the study of signs in general: both artificial, conventional signs like road signs, clock faces, the symbols used in computer programs, or the ‘signals’ communicated by different choices of clothes; and natural signs like symptoms of disease, the level of the sun in the sky (a sign of the time of day) or tracks on the ground (the sign that an animal has passed). The study of signs in general is known as semiotics or semiology (both Greek words also deriving from sēmeion). In the twentieth century, the general study of signs became particularly important and the new discipline of semiotics was created, especially as the result of the work of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced ‘purse’; 1839–1914) and of Bréal’s student, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), often considered as the founder of modern linguistics.
The meanings we can express through language are infinitely more numerous, detailed and precise than those expressible through other semiotic media. Yet the type of meaning found in language can be seen as a subset of two broader categories of meaningfulness: the significance of human behaviour in general, and the meaningfulness of communication specifically. There are many meaningful ways of behaving which do not involve language. These are not limited to those types of behaviour involving structured sets of conventional, accepted symbols like the left right indicator lights on cars, the use of flags at sea to convey various specifi c messages, or the many types of symbol involving body parts (bowing, waving, nodding and shaking the head, the thumbs up/thumbs down signals, the hand signs used in baseball, etc.). Many types of intentional human behaviour can be seen as having a significance, or a meaning, in the (broad) sense of the word, since they both express, and allow observers to draw conclusions about, the nature and intentions of the participants. Someone who has just got up from their seat on the bus is probably intending to get off. Someone who suddenly stops walking down the street to search frantically through their pockets may just have realized that they have forgotten their keys. Unlike the use of language, these types of behaviour do not involve any structured set of symbols or, necessarily, any communicative intention and are therefore non-semiotic. The person getting up from their seat is not wishing to communicate anything to anyone, and is not making use of any structured communicative symbols: they simply want to get off. The use of fully articulated language, which does involve a communicative intention, is thus only the fullest and most explicit way in which we derive information about our environment: as a result, the meaningfulness of language can be seen as a subset of the meaningfulness of human behaviour.
QUESTION We have just given a number of examples of conventional symbols. What are some others?
Even when an intention to communicate does exist, however, the use of language is only one of a number of ways in which the intention can be fulfilled. Take the example of someone at the dinner table suddenly choking on some food. They start to gasp, they go red in the face, their eyes water, and all they can do is make a muffled, indistinct cry. To the other people at the table, this communicates something: they realize that there is something wrong and that help is needed. As a result, they could quickly help the sufferer by giving them a glass of water or a slap on the back. This, then, is an example of some information being made known without the help of language: the person choking has just cried out, perhaps involuntarily, and this is enough to attract the attention of others, to tell them something about the current state of that person, and to stimulate them to bring the required help. Now imagine that the person choking, instead of simply crying out, articulates three quick syllables consisting simply of three choking-sounding vowels, with the middle syllable louder than the others: ‘* - * - *’. In this case, the other people at the table might conclude that the three cries were substitutes for the three syllables of the sentence ‘I’m CHOking!’, and would act on the basis of this (correct) assumption. Here, even though the speaker can only manage to articulate the syllable pattern of the intended phrase, communication successfully takes place. Of course, if they had enough breath left, they could simply cry out ‘I’m choking’, and there would be no ambiguity. These cases show that a fully articulated sentence is not always necessary to communicate an intended meaning: the same meaning can be suggested in a variety of different ways, all of which rely on implicit conventions. The sentence expresses the intended meaning more precisely and unambiguously than the others: both the single cry and its three syllable variant are open to many interpretations, and are therefore much less reliable than the fully explicit sentence. But we can nevertheless remove the language from a communicative situation and retain much of the meaning. Situations are inherently meaningful. Meaning, we might say, is already there in the world: all we have to do is draw attention to it, and language is the most specific and unambiguous way of doing so. The different types of meaningfulness we have been discussing so far could be diagrammed as in Figure 1.1.
