2.3
Semantics
Many experts already
defined what semantics is. For example, Crystal (2008:454), Hurford, et al
(2007: 1) and Goddard (1997:1) define semantics as the study of meaning in
language. Similarly, Kreidler (1998:3) defines semantics as the systematic
study of meaning in language. However, he distinguishes the definition
semantics and linguistic semantics: the study of how languages organize and
express the meaning. According to him, the systematic study of meaning can be
taken in three disciplines like what he stated “three disciplines are concerned
with the systematic study of ‘meaning’ in itself: psychology[1],
philosophy[2]
and linguistics” (Kreidler, 1988:2).
Semantics seems
to have central position linguistic study as Goddard (1997: 1) states that
semantics stands at the very centre of the linguistic. It seeks to understand
the nature of language and human language abilities. Further, according to him
that expressing meaning is all about languages. Besides concerning meaning of
language, semantics also concerns on the relationship between languages and cultures
that is reflected by much of the vocabulary of any language and parts of the
grammar.
2.3.1 The
nature of meaning
Goddard (1997: 2) defines the meaning firstly by
asking what meaning is not. First, he argued that meaning is not reference,
because, according to him there are some words doesn’t have reference and those words, of course, are not
meaningless, for example the word empty,
usually, but, and, hullo. Further, he provided other example are the word this, here, now and I; those words can refer to any number of things, place, times or
person depending on the context. Nevertheless, he also asserts that meaning and
reference are related because reference made the use of particular expression
on a particular situation depending on the meaning of expression.
Secondly, he
states that the meaning is not scientific knowledge. This is because of the
meaning have to be explained in simpler way and more easily understood terms
than the words being defined. He gave an example, the word water in Concise Oxford Dictionary defined colorless transparent tasteless odorless compound of oxygen and
hydrogen in liquid state. According to him, the technical terms like oxygen
and hydrogen are also word and have meaning so that those words need to be
explained as well. Ultimately, he stated that the meaning is not use because
‘meaning is use’ is can not account for the meaning of whole sentences or
utterance. He argues that only by knowing the use of all the words is not very
helpful. Yet, he does not provide the definition of what ‘meaning’ is
explicitly and clearly. In relation to that, Crystal (2008: 298) expresses that
the topic of ‘meaning’ in the context of language necessitates reference to
non-linguistic factors, such as thought, situation, knowledge, intention and
use. It becomes a difficulty in drawing clear dividing-lines between such
notions.
2.3.2
Approaches to meaning
Many linguistic approaches
have been proposed by the experts to define what exactly the meaning is. Some of them are truth-conditional theories
stated that meaning as truth conditions. According to this theory meaning is a
relationship expression and state of affairs in the world. The meaning of a sentence is the condition in
the world in which that sentence to be true.
Another
approaches is conceptual theories which defines meaning is a structured idea or
concept in the people’s mind who utter the expression. This approach is
associated with John Locke, who believes that human mind is analogous to a
blank state at birth. The ideas that built up in human mind are derived from
the experiences. This approach emphasizes that the knowledge derived from
experience of sense.
Ultimately
approach is semiotic approach or translational approach. This approach stated
that one can explain the meaning of an unknown word by paraphrasing the
original word. In this case, one can translate the meaning of expression by way
of translating into another expression which is more easily understood. Semiotic
approach takes the world of sign as irreducible meaning (Goddard, 1997:8-2). This
view of meaning is adopted into natural semantic metalanguage by
Wierzbicka.
2.4 Semantic
Structure
In
dealing with definition of semantic structure, the writer refers to Beratha
(2000: 242) who stated that semantic structure is a configuration of the
irreducible element of meaning. Further, Beratha added that each verb owns the
different dimension of meaning, so that a verb can have a simple and or a
complex semantic structure depending on typology[3]
of language and culture of the speaker. Seeing that fact, Natural semantic
metalanguage can be used to explore the semantic structure of words, as what is
being stated that “using NSM allows us [the user] to formulate analyses which
are clear, precise, cross-translatable, non-Anglocentric, and intelligible to
people without specialist linguistic training” (Goddard, 2010 in NSM website).
2.4.1
Natural Semantic Metalanguage
Natural semantic metalanguage is originated by Anna
Wierzbicka and her colleagues Cliff Goddard, Felix Ameka, Hillary Chappell and
Jean Harkins. She and her colleagues have developed NSM for thirty years
through a cross linguistics semantics research. Goddard
(2010 in NSM website) states natural semantic metalanguage has been applied to
over 30 languages from many parts of the world. The basic assumption of NSM is derived
from the principle of semiotic approach as cited by Wierzbicka via Goddard
(1994:1) in Beratha (2000:243) as follows:
A
sign cannot be reduced to or analyzed into any combination of things which are
not themselves signs, consequently, it is impossible to reduce meanings to any
combinations of things which are not themselves things.
The main idea of NSM
approach is a paraphrase composed of words in the simplest terms and more
easily understood than the original words. So, the meaning of word semantically
complex and complicated can be described into simpler one, without change the
meaning of the word itself. NSM is also called reductive paraphrase. Reductive
paraphrase can avoid the circular and obscure meaning, because no technical
terms, fancy word, logical symbol or abbreviation is allowed in explication. It
should contain only simple expressions from ordinary natural language e.g. I, you, someone, do, happen, think, know,
good, big, because etc and the explication must be exhaustive and must
portray the full meaning of words expression being explicated (Goddard; 1997:
45).
In order to make a
completely exhaustive semantic analysis, a set of basic expression that cannot
be defined any further is needed as the ultimate elements in analyzing meaning
of expressions or words. Wierzbicka calls them as the semantic prime or
primitive.
2.4.1.1. Semantic
Primes/Primitive
Semantic primitive is unchangeable
and has been inherited since at birth so that it is a reflection of human mind
that can be explicated from ordinary language (Goddard; 1994:2; Indrawati;
2006). Semantic primes are the most fundamental concept of NSM, which is
elementary lexical meanings, cannot be further paraphrased into simpler terms. Furthermore,
semantic primes are the bedrock of linguistic meaning: the terminal elements of semantic analysis in
any language. Besides, semantic primes also have an inherent syntax which is
also appears to be universal in all languages (Goddard, 2006:2).
Study on a wide range
of language suggests that semantic primes have linguistics exponent, as word or
word like elements, in all language. Furthermore, each component of semantic
prime has certain characteristics grammatical properties (pattern of combination),
valency, complementation, and these properties appear to be universal (Goddard
& Wierzbicka eds, 1994; 2002; 2007). Nonetheless, Goddard (2010 in NSM
website) remarks that the formal realization in term of making order, word
order, constituent structure, etc may differ from language to language, but
these combinatorial properties is not being disturbed.
The concept of semantic
prime is actually not a new concept in semantic analysis. For example, Arnauld
(1964: 86-87; via Goddard. 1994: 2) as cited by Mulyadi (2006:70), states that:
It is
impossible to define words. In defining we employ a definition to express the
idea which we want to join to define word; if we then wanted to define ‘the
definition” still other words would be needed, and so on to infinity. Hence, it
is necessary to stop at some primitive words which are not defined.
Nevertheless, it was Wierzbicka who concerned firstly on the
idea of semantic prime and then proposed 14 semantic prime in 1972. But now, it
has reached 64 semantic prime as the fruit of a research program in number
languages in over the world such as Chinese, Japanese, English, Malay,
Aborigin, Polish, Rusian, Spanish etc. Natural
semantic metalanguage has been applied to over 30 languages from many parts of
the world. The result of research on a wide range of language suggests that
semantic primes have linguistics exponent, as word or word like elements, in
all language.
Each component of semantic prime has certain characteristics
grammatical properties (pattern of combination), valency, complementation, and
these properties appear to be universal (Goddard & Wierzbicka eds, 1994,
200) in Goddard (2007). Semantic prime
has grammar, as well as lexicon as seen in table 2.1 below. This semantic prime
was taken from NSM website at http://www.une.edu.au/bcss/linguistics/nsm/semantics-in-brief.php
which is published on 7th October 2010
Table 2.2 Proposed Semantic Primes (2010)
|
Substantives: |
I, you, someone, people, something/thing, body |
|
Relational Substantives: |
kind, part |
|
Determiners: |
this, the same, other/else |
|
Quantifiers: |
one, two, some, all, much/many, little/few |
|
Evaluators: |
good, bad |
|
Descriptors: |
big, small |
|
Mental Predicates: |
think, know, want, feel, see, hear |
|
Speech: |
say, words, true |
|
Actions, Events, Movement, Contact: |
do, happen, move, touch |
|
Location, Existence, Possession, Specification: |
be (somewhere),there is, have, be (someone/something) |
|
Life And Death: |
live, die |
|
Time: |
when/time, now, before, after, a long time, a short time, for some time,
moment |
|
Space: |
where/place, here, above, below, far, near, side, inside |
|
Logical Concepts: |
not, maybe, can, because, if |
|
Intensifier, Augmentor: |
very, more |
|
Similarity: |
like/as/way |
Goddard
(2010 in NSM website) stated that indentifying semantic prime there are five
important points that should be noticed namely:
1) To identify the intended meaning is not sufficient
just a merely list of semantic primes because many of their English exponents
have several meaning or polysemous, but it is irreducible and their simplest
sense of the exponents words can be matched across languages. Therefore, those
exponents can be said as the lexical universal. Polysemic meaning may differ
widely from language to language. Semantic primes needs a set of canonical
contexts, in which it can occur. A
canonical context is a set of sentences or sentence fragments exemplifying its
allowable grammatical contexts.
2) Lexical universal of semantic prime is being used
in a broad sense, because an exponent of a semantic prime may be a phraseme or
a bound morpheme, just as long it expresses the requisite meaning. For example,
in English the prime a long time is
expressed by a phraseme, though in many languages the same meaning is conveyed
by a single word.
3) Semantic primes do not need to be simpler
morphology. For example, in English words someone
and inside are morphologically
complex, but their meaning are not composed from the meaning of their
morphology form. Therefore, the meaning of someone
does not equal some + one; the
meaning inside does not equal in +side. However, in meaning terms
those are indivisible.
4) Exponents of semantic primes can have language
specific variant forms or allolexes or allomorph.
5) Exponent of semantic primes have different
morphosyntactics and belong to different part of speech in different languages
without disturbing the principle combinatorial properties.
In summary, exponents of primes can have other
polysemic meanings which differ from language to language, they can have combinatorial
variants (allolexes), they can have different morphosyntactic properties
(including word-class) in different languages, and they have well specified syntactic
(combinatorial) properties.
The
use of those exponents of prime to explicating the meaning of numerous other
word and grammatical construction and without a circular meaning is assured by Goddard
(2002:6) who states:
When
Wierzbicka and colleagues claim that DO, BECAUSE, and GOOD, for example, are
semantic primes, the claim is that the meanings of these words are essential
for explicating the meanings of numerous other words and grammatical
constructions, and that they cannot themselves be explicated in a non-circular
fashion. The same applies to other examples of semantic primes such as: I, YOU,
SOMEONE, SOMETHING, THIS, HAPPEN, MOVE, KNOW, THINK, WANT, SAY, WHERE, WHEN,
NOT, MAYBE, LIKE, KIND OF, PART OF. Notice that all these terms identify simple
and intuitively intelligible meanings which are grounded in ordinary linguistic
experience.
Shortly, by using a set of semantic
prime enables to reduce the complex meaning of words into simpler terms and the
meaning becomes as clear and exhaustive as possible.
Not all exponents of semantic primes can be used in
explicating semantic structure of emotion verbs. Only exponents which deal with
emotion can be used. In NSM viewpoint emotion is a part of mental predicate in
which its exponents are derived from a number of exponents such as feel, think,
know, happen, etc.
2.3.1.2 Non-compositional polysemy
Goddard (2003:4 in prepublication version paper) views non compositional
polysemy as motivated homonymy. Since both refers to a situation in which a
lexical form which expresses a semantically primitive meaning. In this case, he
exemplifies in English, the word think can also express another primitive
meaning such as hear, see, say and want. Because of these other meaning
are semantically primitive and indivisible so that there no common component
shared between them and think. Furthermore,
pair of meaning such as think and hear do not share any common component,
but lexical element can express both meaning. It would be valid to describe it as
homonymy. For instance, in Yankunytjatjara language has two words: kulini1 THINK and kulini2 HEAR. In NSM, pair of
meaning such as the word think and see, think and hear, think and
say is having non-compositional
affiliation so that it can be termed as non-compositional polysemy. In addition, the identification of non-compositional
polysemy is based on the difference of syntactic properties as Goddard and
Wierzbicka (2002: 26) stated that the existence of different syntactic
properties is the key to indentifying non-compositional polysemy. In other word, non-compositional polysemy is a
lexical exponent that can express two different semantic prime, but not having
compositional affiliation between exponents and is determined through
difference of syntactic properties.
Goddard (1996: 29) as cited by Indrawati (2006) states
that in the simple level, exponent of the same semantic prime maybe become
polysemy in different languages by means of a different way as well. For instance, in
Yakunytjatjara the word mukuringanyi WANT,
but in English it can have meaning like,
be fond of and need. Furthermore,
he emphasizes two strongest non-compositional relationships; those are
entailment-like relationship such as do,
happen and implicational relationship such as feel, happen. This entailment-like relationship can be illustrated
as follows:
(1)
X do something to Y
Something happen to Y
Meanwhile the implicational relationship can be
illustrated as follows:
(2)
X feel something
Something happen to X
The syntactic difference
between do and happen (see 1) is that do needs
two arguments, whereas happen takes
an argument. Then, the implicational relationship between happen and feel (see 2),
can be drawn as this example if X feel something, of course, something happen
to X.
2.3.1.3 Allolexy
Anna
Wierzbicka in early 1980 foreshadowed the concept of allolexy, in which she
observed that:
the language of explication cannot be kept entirely
free of contextual variation. For example,
to assure the readability of English-based explications both the forms ‘me’ and
‘I’ have to be used, standing for the same primitive. (1980:36) in Goddard
(2002:20)
However, the concept of
allolexy was firstly introduced by Cliff Goddard 1992 at the semantic symposium
in Canberra (Wierzbicka, 1996b:26-27) in Mulyadi (2006). Alloxexy used to explain the situations in which
several different words or word-forms (allolexes) express a single meaning in
complementary contexts. Allolexy concept takes important role in NSM especially
for inflection language. There are several kinds of allolexy include: positional
allolexy, combinatorial allolexy and inflectional allolexy
Firstly, positional allolexy is illustrated by
English I and me. Both have same meaning between I in I did something or I don’t know and me in You did something to me
or People might say something about
me. Only the position is different in which I pre-verbally and me elsewhere.
Secondly, combinatorial allolexy is illustrated by
the relationship between something and
thing. In the combination with
determiners and quantifiers, thing has function as an allolex of something. For example: this
thing = this something, the same thing = the same something, all things = all
something. It is also in combination with determiner and quantifier, people has function as allolex of someone. For instance, this someone = this person, the same someone
= the same person, two someones = two person. Another example of
combinatorial allolexy is English else, which functions as an allolex of
other when in combination with
indefinites. For example: something else = another something, someone else =
another someone.
The third allolexy is inflectional allolexy.
Considering the following English sentence
(4a) I did something
the word did is
semantically complex, presenting do +
past tense. Yet, if it is paraphrased the content semantic of past tense,
the meaning will be at some time before
now as in sentence (4b) below. In this context, choice of the form did as
opposed to do become automatic and allolexes
(4b) At some time before now, I did*/do something
From the illustration above can be concluded is
that In English did and do are semantically distinct, and not in
an allolexical relationship, so that did in
(4a) are not allolexy of do. Nevertheless,
in English-NSM based, as in (4b) did and
do are allolexes, since within NSM
time reference always be independently represented lexical term, thus the
distribution of did as opposed do can be predicted from the surrounding
context (Goddard, 2002: 22).
Furthermore, in order to assure the full
translatability of NSM, Goddard compares two sample sentences, which is
composed of identical primes between Malay , a language in which inflectional
and positional allolexy does not exist and English as illustrated in sentence
5a and 5b below
(5)
a. At some time before this, I did something bad
b. Pada masa sebelum ini, aku buat sesuatu yang buruk
At time before
this, I do
something LIG
bad
From
this illustration, it can be seen that English do and did in the
sentence 4a, both is equivalent to a single Malay word form buat DO in the sentence 4b. Likewise, English
word I and me, both correspond to a single Malay word form aku I as shown in following sentence
(6)
a. If I do this, people will think something bad about me
b. Jika aku buat ini, orang akan
fikir sesuatu
yang buruk
If
I do this, people will think something LIG
bad
about me
pasal aku
(Goddard,
2002: 23)
2.3.1.4 Syntax Universal of Meaning
Syntax universal of meaning was developed by Wierzbicka
in the late 1980an as the extension of semantic prime (Goddard, 1996a:24;
Mulyadi, 2006). Wierzbicka (1996) in Beratha (2000) states that meaning has
complex structure, and not only composed by semantic prime such as someone, want, know, but also composed
by complex structure. Therefore, notwithstanding semantic prime represents
universally meaningful exponents, but to have meaningful statements such
exponents must be combined in the way they convey meaning. Such meaningful combinations,
in simplest form as sentence constitute syntax of language. Universal syntax
consists of the combination of the semantic prime lexicon, and then they form a
simple proposition according to the set of morphosyntactic[4]
of that language itself.
In NSM
website Goddard (2010) explains that some elements can be combined directly
with substantive. Those elements included determiners
(e.g. this someone, the same thing, somewhere else), quantifiers (e.g.two
things, many people, one part, and many kinds), evaluators (e.g. something
good, something bad) and descriptors (e.g. something small). In addition, they
can also be modified by using ‘like’ e.g. people like this, someone like me.
The universal syntax can be treated
same as a clause, which consist of predicate and one or more substantives and
also other elements depending on the predicate identity. This enables
additional argument to fill out of the slot argument of the predicate in the
extended frame or there is valency option for the predicate. For example, the
element ‘happen’ not only of ‘something happening’, but also of ‘something
happening to someone/something. Likewise, the element ‘do’ possibly to add
an additional argument, so it would be ‘doing something to someone or
something. Even, this frame can be further extended to be ‘doing something to
something with something’. For this syntactic frames, Goddard and Wierbicka (2007:
107) illustrate the syntactic frame for three semantic prime as in table 2.2
below
Table
2.3 the syntactic frame for three semantic primes
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DO X does
something
X does something to someone [patient]
X does something to someone with something [patient
+ instrument]
X does
something to something with someone [comitative]
HAPPEN something
happens
something happens to someone [undergoer]
something
happens somewhere [locus]
SAY X
says something
X says something to someone [addressee]
X says something about something [locutionary
topic]
X says: “ — —
— ” [direct speech]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1]Psychology
is interested in how human mind seek the meaning and work with them
[2]Philosophy
concerns with how any particular fact that people know
as true is related to other possible
fact (Kreidler, 1998:2)
[3]typology
is the classification of languages into
types. For example, languages may be classified according to their most typical
syntactic structures (Richard, Jack & Schmidt, Richard, 2002:568)
[4] Morphosyntactic refers to grammatical categories or properties for whose
definition criteria of morphology and
sytax both apply, as in describing the characteristic of words (Crystal, 2008:
315)
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