Goals of semantic description

The three goals of lexical semantics as a scientific activity are to

1. observe,
2. describe and
3. explain

word meanings. What do these goals involve?

Observation:

Clearly it is not possible to "observe" meanings in any simple sense, in the way that physical objects, states and events can be observed. Word meanings are complex relations between word forms and the physical or abstract world, and also between words. The procedure of "observing" meanings is therefore complex:

• wordforms are observed in the sense of being perceived and analysed;
• verbal contexts in which words are used are also perceived and analysed;
• situational contexts in which words are used (including the speaker, the hearer, with their complex communicative intentions) are perceived and analysed;
• dependencies, implicational relations, correlations between wordforms and these contexts are induced from familiar experiences with words in these contexts.

Observation involves recording - in a sense, transcribing - occurrences of words in verbal and, if possible, situational contexts, and many varieties of corpus linguistics and corpus lexicographyi (both with and without computational support) are concerned with this area.

Description:

Observation is a complex activity, and - as a rough approximation - the task of description to simplify all the detail by applying criteria of relevance to restrict the context to what is needed for interpretation, and by creating generalisations about the similarities and differences of meaning which define overlapping sets of similar items, and disjoint sets of different items. Generalisations involve the formation of hierarchies of sets of words, and of rules of implication which define relations between sets in these hierarchies - if a word denotes human beings then it denotes animate beings (though not necessarily all animate beings, of course); if a phoneme is nasal then it is voiced. There may be exceptions to these rules; this simply means that additional conditions are needed to explain them.

Explanation:

There are many different notions of explanation, from the "excuse" type of explanation in everyday life, to scientific explanation, in which descriptive results are derived from general - final, causal, historical, logical - principles. For example, a logical explanation would derive a description of the forms of English words from general principles of phonological and morphologcal analysis which apply to all languages. Or a historical explanation of differences between English and German would use comparisons between similar dialects and languages to re-construct hypotheses about older stages of a language, ultimately arriving at shared forms at an older stage of the languages concerned, from which modern forms can be derived by regular rules of language change.

In previous classes, the level of Observation has been foremost - the study of words in corpora, by means of corpus lexicography.

The level of Description was focussed in the discussion of definitions by nearest kind and specific differences; the level of Description will be focussed in the remainder of this class.

Explanation has not been (and will not be) focussed in this class.