Approaches to the study of semantics

The study of semantics has developed from the earliest times to the modern period,giving it a historical view. That way, we can focus on four major approaches – traditional, behavioural, structural and generative perspectives.

A.    Traditional Semantics

Traditional semantics is associated with the works of such great philosophers as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle as well as many others who came after them. Their main focus was on the nature of human language itself. Based on their views of the nature of human language, these early philosophers were divided into two – the naturalists and the nurturists.

To the naturalists, language was God-given such that there was hardly anything anybody could do to understand language. Man was not expected to make alterations, but should concern himself with merely observing and describing the rules of language. The Greek language was perceived to be the chosen language upon which all other languages should be based. Later, Latin became the focus of philosophical analysis.

        The nurturists, on the other hand, viewed language as a social property common to a speech community. Language was therefore perceived to be man’s creation for the convenience of communication. Thus, in spite of difference in languages, the uniting point is that they are all for communication.

        Traditional semantics was also concerned with the relationship between form and meaning. The meaning of a word was considered as what it refers to. This view has also been shared by Ogden and Richards (1923). There have also been later scholars who believed that the image of a word takes shape in the speaker’s or hearer’s mind. Another major view of traditional semantics is that the meaning of a word can be decoded from its shape or sound. Words in this category are onomatopoeic. The major ideas in traditional semantics are reference, concepts, truth conditions etc. 

B.     Behavioral Semantics

The external environment is perceived to be the major stimulus to all human utterances. The stimulus- response scenario is synonymous with the cause and effect connection in most natural situations.

Those who favour the behavioural approach to semantics have argued that by reducing meaning to observable entities, language, as an aspect of human favour can lend itself to examination. They also argue that meaning is influenced by reinforcement. The theory stresses nurture rather than nature. Thus, the physical environment is perceived to contribute to meaning rather than the internal thought processes.

Though behaviourism tends to lend meaning to experimental explanation, it has been criticized for its rejection of introspection, concepts and ideas. It is not everything in language that can be observed physically. The over-reliance on reinforcement tends to present animal and human behaviour as identical.

C.    Structural semantics

The father of structuralism is Ferdinand de Saussure. Structuralism as a linguistic theory considers the structures and systems in language. Emphasis is on the process of segmenting and classifying the features of utterances.

Under structuralism, emphasis is on the analysis of sense relations that connect words and meaning. Sense is an expression of the system of semantic relationships a given word keeps with other expressions in a given language. This relationship is usually paradigmatic in terms of similarity and dissimilarity. The relationship of similarity occurs as synonymy, while the relationship of dissimilarity is referred to as antonymy. Structural processes are useful in lexical relations in the study of words.

D.    Generative Semantics

Noam Chomsky is the father of generative grammar. According to the theory of transformational generative grammar, knowledge of language is generated in the mind. A language user has a finite set of rules from which he can generate an infinite number of sentences. This power of generations is facilitated by the power of transformational rules which convert deep structure sentence types into other various forms via transformations. At the beginning of Chomsky’s generative grammar, there was the assertion that syntax was autonomous and independent of semantics. It was only later in Aspects of the theory of Syntax (1965) that Chomsky pointed out that the semantic component specifies the rules necessary for the interpretation of deep structures. This observation enhanced the semantic representation of sentences. Deep structures specify the original meaning of sentences before the application of transformations.

There was the immediate problem of explaining the meaning of multiple paraphrases from a single deep structure. Thus, generative semantics would be concerned with sentence meaning and interpretation. This will require the interpretation of functional roles in sentences. This interpretation has been explained by the Case theory as propounded by Charles Fillmore, and further elaborated in Chomsky’s Case theory and Thematic theory.

The semantic component has been presented as being partially dependent on syntax and at the same time distinct. This produces a composite relationship between grammar and meaning. The deep structure is deemed to determine how sentence parts combine to make meaning for the whole. The syntactic component is the generative source of grammar. Thus, the output of syntax forms the input to the semantic component. The semantic component is perceived to operate on the structural description of sentences to provide a representation of the meaning of sentences. Grammar as used here is the totality of the mechanism and rules of language organization including meaning. As a result of the complexity of this theory, we shall have a more elaborate discussion of its implication in another unit. Perhaps the philosophical postulations of Aristotle provided impetus to critical thinking in semantics. Based on the major areas of concern, there have been traditional semantics, behavioural semantics, structural semantics and generative semantics.