Relationships between form and meaning

In this section we'll consider in very general terms what is necessary for sentences to be produced or understood. We'll only look at some of the possibilities for how this is accomplished in human languages. You'll learn a lot more about this in later units.

To understand a sentence, a person takes a form and divides, or segments, it into meaningful elements. For now, we'll assume that these meaningful elements are words; later we'll see that they need not be. In section 1.2, you already saw that this segmentation process is not trivial because for languages such as spoken human languages and the mini-languages in MiniLing, the boundaries between words are not indicated.

Let's assume that an understander has isolated a word within a sentence. The next step is to figure out what this word means, that is, what category of things or situations in the world it is associated with. A language has a set of conventions for this, that is, a set of patterns of behavior that the language users have agreed on. For each word form there is a convention specifying what it means. I'll call such conventions lexical conventions; the word lexical means 'pertaining to words'. For example, English has a lexical convention that associates the word form snake (both a particular pronunciation and a particular spelling) with a category of legless reptiles that users of English know how to identify.

Once the understander has figured out the meanings for a group of words, the problem is to put the meanings together. For this, languages have a further set of conventions, each specifying how groups of words are associated with groups of meanings. These conventions are the main business of the grammar of a language, and I will call them grammatical conventions. For example, consider the English sentence the snake is inside the pipe. English has a grammatical convention that specifies that for this sentence it is the snake that is inside and the pipe outside, not the other way around. Note that the sentence the pipe is inside the snake consists of the same words but means something different, that the pipe is the thing that's inside and the snake outside. In English sentences like this, the order of the words specifies tells us something about the meaning. This is one kind of grammatical convention.

Now let's take the position of the producer of a sentence. A producer starts with something to talk about, for example, a situation involving one of more things that are arranged in a particular way. Normally the producer has to divide the situation into its constituent things; note that this is again a kind of segmentation problem. Next the producer has to figure out how to describe the things and the relation between them with particular words. For this, the producer uses the same lexical conventions that an understander uses for the language. For example, if the producer recognizes that one of the things in the situation is a kind of legless reptile and the language being produced is English, the producer might choose to use the word snake to refer to that thing.

Finally the producer has to figure out how to arrange the words to make a sentence. For this the speaker uses the same grammatical conventions that an understander uses for the language. For example, if the situation involves a snake that has swallowed a pipe, the producer might arrange the words for the things (snake, pipe) and the word for the relation between them (inside) in the following order: the pipe is inside the snake. Of course there are many other ways the producer could have chosen to describe the scene. As we'll see later, this flexibility is part of what makes human language hard to describe and explain.

In summary, there are two kinds of conventions that associate form with meaning. Lexical conventions specify how word forms are associated with particular categories of things or situations, and grammatical conventions specify how combinations of word forms are associated with particular combinations of those words' meanings.

Exercise 1.4

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