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These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
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Semantics In Chomsky's linguistic world, the "meaning" of a sentence was its
logical form. At the end of the process of parsing a sentence, a logical
translation would be produced which allowed for mathematical processing, and
that logical form was considered to be the meaning of the sentence. Unfortunately, syntax is
ambiguous. Sentences like
"Prostitutes appeal to Pope" or "Soviet virgin lands short of
goal again" (actual newspaper headlines reported by Keith Devlin) are "ambiguous". Language does that. In every language one
can build a sentence that is perfectly valid but not clear at all. Solving
ambiguities is often very easy. If the second sentence is encountered in the
context of the development of Siberia, one may not even notice the ambiguity.
The context usually solves the ambiguity. A related problem is that of
"anaphora". The sentence "He went to bed" is ambiguous in a
different way but still ambiguous: technically speaking, "he" could
be any of the 3 billion males who live on this planet. In practice, all we have
to do is read the previous sentences to find out who "he" is. The context,
again, helps us figure out the meaning of a sentence. Not to mention expressions
such as "Today is an important day" or "Here it is cold":
when and where are these sentences occurring? Because of linguistic
phenomena like ambiguity and anaphora, understanding a discourse requires more
than just figuring out the syntactic constituents of each sentence. In fact,
even understanding the syntactic constituents may require more than syntax: the
"lies" in "Reagan wins on budget but more lies ahead" is a
noun (plural of "lie") or a verb (third person of "to
lie")? The scope of semantics lies
beyond the single word and the way the words relate to each other. In the 1960s the US linguist
Jerrold Katzprovided one of the most extensive studies on semantics. His basic tenet is that two components are
necessary for a theory of semantics. The first one is a dictionary, which
provides for every lexical item (i.e., for every word) a phonological description,
a syntactic classification ("grammatical marker", e.g. noun or verb)
and a specification of its possible distinct senses ("semantic
marker", e.g. light as in color and light as the opposite of heavy).
The second one is a set of projection rules that determine how the meaning
of a sentence can be composed from the meaning of its constituents. Projection
rules, therefore, produce all valid interpretations of a sentence. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Language: Minds Speak" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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