Everything is Semantics

Readers of What It All Means will certainly agree, even those with no linguistic background. It’s one of the best popular science books on linguistics I’ve ever read: a page-turner brimming with fascinating pieces of information, including Schlenker’s own theories. The book shows how important the study of meaning is, how far we’ve come in our understanding of it, and what mysteries still remain. Schlenker's own theory is “Super Semantics” and applies linguistic semantics to entirely new areas, such as the alarm calls of monkeys, hand gestures in conversation and the meaning of music. I doubt I’ve written as much about the work of other linguists in recent years as I have about Schlenker's: it’s both sound and exciting and this book proves he knows how to get his ideas across with relish.

Great steps

In the opening sections of his book, Schlenker explains where semantics stands today. It starts with an idea of meaning that is firmly rooted in over a hundred years of philosophical literature, i.e. the meaning of a sentence is equal to its truth value (true or false). For instance, the meaning of the sentence ‘it's raining outside’ consists of the set of circumstances that would make this sentence true. That’s still pretty abstract and vague, but it was formalised in 1970 by the brilliant mathematician and linguist Richard Montague (1930-1971).

In Montague's time, several very precise artificial languages had been developed to express mathematical and logical truths: formal languages. Those languages had been created to remedy the vagueness and ambiguities of natural language, but Montague had a brilliant idea: natural language (his work focused on English, but there’s no reason to believe he thought it was any different from other languages) was also a formal language. This meant you could develop a precise method by which you could translate any English sentence into a logical formula. Montague died in mysterious circumstances a year after his first attempt, but his students and many other scholars have continued his work. It’s far from finished, but great steps have been made.

Literally unsaid

One of the peculiarities of Schlenker’s presentation in this book is that sign languages are shown to often confirm the validity of Montague’s approach, even though they weren’t at all considered at first. One example is the way pronouns are analysed. Take the sentence ‘John tells Richard he has no more money.’ This sentence has two meanings, since John can state that he himself (i.e. John) has no more money or, conversely, that Richard is broke. It means that, in some sense, he is ambiguous and you can represent this logically approximately as ‘John_x tells Richard_y that x has no more money', in which x refers to John (also with subscript x) or as ‘John_x tells Richard_y that y has no more money’, in which y refers to the subscript added to Richard. This may sound abstract and arbitrary, but Schlenker shows that it corresponds exactly to how it’s done in certain sign languages, where signing the name John would involve pointing to a certain place in front of you, whereas signing the name Richard would require you to point towards another place. In like manner you would also point to either of those places in the subordinated clause. This act of pointing is the equivalent of a pronoun in sign language.

An important development of the last few decades is that although semantics and pragmatics are separate from each other, their interplay can create complicated patterns of meaning, which, in turn, can be represented in a mathematical formalism. Roughly, semantics is the study of the ‘literal’ meaning that the words in a sentence contribute; pragmatics studies what is literally unsaid, but normally understood by the listener. 

Stop smoking

A well-known example are so-called presuppositions, as in the question ‘Have you stopped  beating your husband?’ The person asked to answer this question will find themselves in an awkward position: even if they say no, they still seem to agree with the most sensitive part of the statement, namely the suggestion that they used to beat their husband.

‘I’ve stopped x’ means two things: I used to do x, but now I don’t. Yet those two aspects have a different status. Indeed, the meaning of now I don’t is said to be ‘at issue’: if you ask a question about stopping, you are asking whether something is no longer the case now, and if you make a negative statement (‘I didn't stop smoking’) you are only denying the now I don’t aspect, not the assumption that you used to smoke. The meaning ‘I used to do x’ is only ‘implied’, or rather it is presented as a fixed and known fact to all interlocutors, even in a question (‘have you stopped smoking?’) or a denial (‘I haven't stopped smoking’). Such implied meanings are called presuppositions.

Animations

It's precisely that implicitness that can make presuppositions so insidious. ‘Do you support the government’s criminal policies?’ Here the assertion that the government’s policies are criminal is a presupposition that persists, even under denial (‘I do not support the government’s criminal policies’). At the same time, it’s an expedient that also plays an important role in friendly conversation, simply because we don’t want to have to make everything explicit all the time. For example, the previous sentence contains the presupposition that it’s a good idea not to do more work than is strictly necessary.

For a long time, Schlenker argues, presuppositions were regarded as something that belonged specifically to the domain of language, as possibly a property of words themselves: to stop means (1) to have done something before and (2) not to do that thing now and in the future. That definition of to stop exists somewhere in our mind, and so, in the process, we have somehow learned that (2) is “at issue” and that (1) is a presupposition.

But Schlenker’s research punches large holes in that assumption by showing, for example, that animated videos which no one has ever seen before produce presuppositions which are recognised by most people. As in the following clip: