- Many of the ideas presented in this article had their early formulation while I was working on a research project in comparative semantics, supported by a grant (OE 2–14012) from the Office of Education under the National Defense Education Act. I have profited from lengthy discussions with my co-grantee on that project, Paul Friedrich, and with Ward Goodenough, Kenneth L. Pike, Alton L. Becker, and above all, with Floyd Lounsbury. Several of these men, as well as John L. Fischer and Herbert H. Paper, read an earlier draft of this article and offered numerous sensible suggestions.
- Cf. Ward Goodenough's treatment of meaning in his “Componential Analysis and the Study of Meaning,” Language, XXXII (1956), 195–216. “The problem of determining what a linguistic form signifies is very well illustrated by kinship terms. In essence, it is this: what do I have to know about A and B in order to say that A is B's cousin? Clearly, people have criteria in mind by which they make the judgment that A is or is not B's cousin. What the expression his cousin signifies is the particular set of criteria by which this judgment is made” (p. 195).
- John L. Fischer, “SocialInfluences on the Choice of a Linguistic Variant,” Word, XIV (1958), 47–56.
- Charles Morris, “Foundations of a Theory of Signs,” International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol. I, No. 2 (Chicago, 1939).
- Zellig S. Harris, Methods in Structural Linguistics (New York, 1951), p. 347. Harris, however, dismisses meaning from relevance for his descriptive objectives, almost as soon as it appears. “It may be presumed that any two morphemes A and B having different meanings also differ somewhere in distribution: there are some [presumably linguistic] environments, in which one occurs and the other does not” (p. 7, n. 4; see also p. 365, n. 6). Thus, Harris claims to be able to accomplish with distribution what others might expect to do with meaning (a conclusion which, as will appear below, I feel to be unjustified). Note, though, that Harris does not equate meaning with linguistic distribution, as some others appear to have done.
- Charles F. Hockett, A Course in Modern Linguistics (New York, 1958), p. 138.
- J. F. Firth, “The Technique of Semantics” Transactions of the Philological Society (London 1935), pp. 36–72.
- Leonard Bloomfield, Language (New York, 1933), p. 74.
- See, for instance, Willard V. O. Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), p. 9.
- Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), pp. 148–149.
- Of course, phonetic-realization rules also relate linguistic phenomena to something external to language—noises. It should be obvious that the phonological rules to which I refer here are slightly higher-level rules which, like syntactical rules, can be written without including nonlinguistic data.
- In an earlier article I argued that the use of classifiers can only be described semantically. Robbins Burling “How to Choose a Burmese Numeral Classifier,” in Context and Meaning in Cultural Anthropology, ed. Melford Spiro (New York, 1965), pp. 243–264. I now feel that my argument was overstated and that both grammatical and semantic formulations are legitimate and to some degree revealing, though they are certainly very different from one another. The Burmese classifiers are more fully described in that article.
- I have given a fuller description of Burmese kinship terms in an earlier article: “Burmese Kinship Terminology,” in Formal Semantic Analysis, ed. E. A. Hammel, American Anthropologist, LXVII, No. 5, Part 2 (1965), 106–117.
- This example appeared in that delightful section of Scientific American “Mathematical Games,” by Martin Gardiner, in May, 1962.
- There is nothing novel in my observation that words can be learned both in linguistic and in nonlinguistic contexts. Hockett, for instance, says: “For the child, at first, there is actually only one [method by which the semantic system can be observed]: the meanings which utterances and morphemes come to have for him are the result of recurrent regularities of correspondence between acts of speech of various grammatical structures and the behavioral antecedents and consequences in which the child himself participates. Later, and for the analyst, there is another method: he can be told—in a language or part of a language he already knows—what a newly observed form means” (p. 141).
- W. F. Twaddell, in “Meanings, Habits and Rules,” Language Learning, II (1949), 4–11, made much the same point when he distinguished the habitual or compulsory or rule-governed element of language from the “element of choice in language which we call meaning” (p. 4).
- Cf. Kenneth L. Pike, “On the Grammar of Intonation” in Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, ed. Eberhard Zwirner and Wolfgang Bethge (Basle, 1965), pp. 105–119.
- Clifford Geertz, The Religion of Java (Glencoe, 111., 1960), pp. 248–260.
- William Labov, “Phonological Correlates of Social Stratification,” in The Ethnography of Communication, ed. John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes, American Anthropologist, LXVI, No. 6, Part 2 (1964), 164–176.
- John J. Gumperz, “Dialect Differences and Social Stratification in a North Indian Village.” American Anthropologist, LX (1958). 668–692.
- Choose new content alerts to be informed about new research of interest to you
- Easy remote access to your institution's subscriptions on any device, from any location
- Save your searches and schedule alerts to send you new results
- Export your search results into a .csv file to support your research