What does the word semantic mean? What is semantics? Term meanings and examples

SEMANTICS

SEMANTICS

A branch of semiotics and logic that studies linguistic expressions to designated objects and expressed content. Semantic issues were discussed in antiquity, but only at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. In the works of C. Pierce, F. de Saussure, C. Morris, S. began to take shape as an independent discipline. The most consistent and accurate development was received by S. logical, oriented ch.arr. in formalized languages. G. Frege, B. Russell, A. Tarski, R. Carnap, and others made a significant contribution to its creation. The results obtained by logical semantics in relation to formalized languages ​​are also used in the study of the semantic properties of natural languages.
In logical symbolism, it is customary to single out two areas of research—the theory of reference (notation) and the theory of meaning. The theory of reference explores the relation of linguistic expressions to designated objects, its main categories are: "", "designation", "feasibility", "", "", "", etc. The theory of reference serves as the basis for the theory of proofs in logic. The theory of meaning tries to answer what the language expressions are, when the expressions are identical in meaning (synonyms), how the meanings relate, and so on. A significant role in the development of logical semantics was played by the discussion of semantic paradoxes, which serve as an important criterion for the acceptability of any semantic theory.

Philosophy: Encyclopedic Dictionary. - M.: Gardariki. Edited by A.A. Ivina. 2004 .

SEMANTICS

(from Greek- denoting), logic section (or metalogics) and semiotics, devoted to the analysis of a complex of interrelated concepts, the central of which are the concepts of meaning and meaning. All the problems of S. are expressed by questions of the form: what does this or concept mean? (term) or a statement (record, text, formula) how should they be understood? Similar questions arise primarily in relation to general logic. concepts ("", "", "match", "logical" and T. P.), and on this basis - to the actual semantic. concepts and terms ("", "", "feasibility", "designation", "name", "meaningfulness"), as well as to the very concepts of "", "meaning" and "interpretation".

In formalisms. languages, the object in relation to which the question of its meaning and sense is raised turns out to be otd. sign, symbol or c.-l. others text snippet. According to the concept, dating back to J. S. Mill and Frege, a sign that plays with formalisms. language role of term (an analogue of the grammatical subject, complement or subject of a certain sentence), serves as the name of some object (names or denotes this item) or class (sets, aggregates) items. Finding a denotation (objective value) For c.-l. a specific name gives creatures. information about this name, but does not exhaust the semantic associated with it. problems: the denotation indicates the scope of the concept denoted by the given name, but does not explain its content. The name has some meaning, determined by a set of features that characterize it, and this meaning not only does not imply knowledge, but even the existence of a denotation of this name. Name, denoting (naming) its denotation, expresses a certain meaning; this meaning is said to determine the denotation, being its concept. Obviously, the same denotation can be defined by different concepts. At the same time, different names, which in this case are called synonyms, can have the same meaning. input T. O. on the set of names of a given language, the synonymy relation is an equivalence relation, i.e. it is reflexive (each name is synonymous with itself), symmetrical (the expressions "o is synonymous with e" and "in is synonymous with a" are equivalent) and transitively (the same words are synonymous with each other).

All these semantic concepts extend from "atomic" objects of formalizations. languages ​​- signs and names into more complex character combinations - sentences expressing statements for which the concept of truth is defined in suitable metalanguages (and falsities), and further - to calculus in general, for which the concept of interpretation is introduced.

Developed in the works of Tarski, Carnap and others system so-called. extensional (cm. extensionality) semantic characteristics describing the language with t. sp. scope of concepts ("designation", "name", "true"), "built on top" of the concept of meaning (denotation) and forms, according to Kuyan, the theory of reference (notation theory). A much less developed part of S. - meaning, interpreting intensional (cm. intensionality) properties of languages (sign systems), is devoted to concepts that characterize languages ​​with t. sp. content of concepts ("meaning", "", "meaningfulness", "synonymy", "following"). While the first concept is introduced on the basis of a purely conventional idea of ​​assigning meanings, the second group of concepts is intended to clarify in a sense the essence of S. - that which should be understood in the language, regardless of the designations used.

The language of C. formalisms. languages, in turn, can be formalized. The system of formalized S. was developed, in particular, by Amer. logician J. Kemeny. Based on ideas owls. D. A. Bochvar’s formalized logic is constructed by means of many-valued logic; involved in this kind of research.

Philosophical encyclopedic dictionary. - M.: Soviet Encyclopedia. Ch. editors: L. F. Ilyichev, P. N. Fedoseev, S. M. Kovalev, V. G. Panov. 1983 .

SEMANTICS

SEMANTICS, also semasiology (from Greek sema - sign), (from lat. signum - sign) - the doctrine of meaning, of the relationship between signs, i.e. between words and sentences and what they mean; cm. LOGISTICS.

Philosophical Encyclopedic Dictionary. 2010 .

SEMANTICS

in logic (Greek σημαντικός - meaning, from σημαίνω - I mean) - a department of logic that studies the meanings of concepts and judgments, especially when writing them in the form of expressions of the so-called. formal systems (see Syntax in logic). The tasks of S. include, first of all, the clarification of such general logic. concepts, "as "meaning", "correspondence", "object", "set", "", "interpretation", etc. Important in S. is occupied by the issues of distinguishing between the scope of a concept and the content of a concept, between the meaning of the truth of a judgment and the meaning of the judgment. The properties associated with the scope of the concept and the value of the truth of the judgment are called extensional, and the properties associated with the content of the concept and the meaning of the judgment are called intentional. extensionally (their truth values ​​are the same), differ intentionally (they have different meanings).

The exact meaning of the problem of systems is acquired in connection with the construction and study of formal systems. At a research to. - l. formal system of semantic. problems arise when the system receives an interpretation, i.e. is interpreted as reflecting a certain substantive theory or section of science, due to which the expressions of this system acquire the meaning (meaning). The system itself in this case is called semantic, or interpreted. In the study of formal systems, the object of S. is the general questions of the relationship between a formal system and its interpretations. Thus, S. studies such problems as truths (correspondence of formulas or sentences of a semantic system to the “state of things” in the area depicted), problems related to the relationship between the sign and the signified, the problem of determining the meaning of system expressions, etc. S. at the same time cannot be divorced from the syntax, to which it naturally complements. (There are questions that are both syntactic and semantic. Thus, for example, one of the definitions of the completeness of a formal system is that the system is complete if the addition of a formula that is not a theorem to its axioms makes the system inconsistent; this very definition has syntactical . , however, the concept of consistency, which is essentially used in it, can also be defined semantically). But, unlike syntax, S. considers the expressions of formal systems not just as such, but as records of judgments and concepts. The record of a certain concept (for simplicity, a single one) can be considered the name of an object constituting the scope of this concept. Thus, there is a three-term correspondence (often called the "basic semantic triangle") between the subject, the content of the concept and the name. To emphasize the relation of the first and second members to the third, they are called the subject (or denotation) of the name and the concept of the name. So, the names "A. S. Pushkin" and "the author of "Eugene Onegin"" have the same objects, but different concepts.

Many important problems of logical S. are traditional. However, traditional ideas (especially Greek and Middle-Century authors) were more or less complete and developed only at the end of the 19th - beginning. 20th century in the works of G. Frege, B. Russell and logicians of the Lviv-Warsaw school. A. Tarsky laid the foundations for systematic. construction of modern logical S. (1929), which he continued to develop in his later works. Main Tarsky pays to the analysis of semantic. concepts ("truth", "definition", "feasibility", "designation", etc.) and finding out the possibility of their definition. According to Tarski, semantic. concepts can only be defined for formalized languages, i.e. languages ​​built as a certain swarm (interpreted) . In order to determine the semantic concepts for non-formalized, incl. natural, languages, it is necessary to build formalized languages, approximations to a given language. As Tarski showed, an attempt to define semantic concepts, in particular the concept of truth, in the system of the language in which they appear, inevitably leads to the emergence of semantic paradoxes such as the "Liar" paradox. Therefore, to determine the semantic. concepts, in addition to the studied, or object, language, should be introduced, in which a discussion should be conducted about the semantic defined by its means. concepts of an object language. Tarski's work influenced R. Carnap, who created the most developed system of semantics in a series of works under the general title "Studies in semantics" ("Studies in semantics", 1942–47). W. Quine opposes the views of Carnap and Tarski. What is usually understood as S., he divides into two parts: the theory of meaning and the theory of designation. The first is characterized by such concepts as "meaning", "synonymy" (see Synonyms), "meaningfulness", "following". The second - the concepts of "designation", "name", "truth". According to Quine, these two disciplines are so different from each other that it is inappropriate to unite them under the general name C. Quine considers the theory of notation to be more or less developed of them, to which he refers, for example, most of Tarski's works. J. Kemeny in his work "A new approach to semantics", "T. J. Symbolic Logic", 1956, v. 21, No 1–2) proposed a new system of formalized C. He builds, in which the concepts of "model" and "interpretation" are defined. On the basis of the concept of interpretation, Kemeny introduces analytic. and synthetic. statements: the analytic takes place in all interpretations of a given calculus, while it takes place only in a certain given interpretation. Accordingly, concepts defined in terms of all interpretations belong to what Quine called the theory of meaning, and concepts defined in terms of one interpretation belong to the theory of designation. See also semiotics.

Lit.: Finn V.K., On some semantic concepts for simple languages, in: Logical scientific. knowledge, M., 1965; Smirnova E. D., Formalized languages ​​and logic, ibid.; Ajdukiewicz K., Sprache und Sinn, "Erkenntnis", 1934, Bd 4, ; Church A., Carnap's "Introduction to semantics", "The Philosophical Review", 1943, v. 11 (52), No 3; Linsky L., Semantics and the philosophy of language, Urbana, 1952; Frege G., Translations from the philosophical writings, Oxf., 1952.

Philosophical Encyclopedia. In 5 volumes - M .: Soviet Encyclopedia. Edited by F. V. Konstantinov. 1960-1970 .

SEMANTICS

SEMANTICS - studying signs and sign systems from the point of view of their meaning, as, is considered within the framework of semiotics (the science of sign systems) together with its two other sections: syntactics and pragmatics. The first of them studies the relations of signs among themselves (syntax), the second - the relations between signs and the subjects that produce and interpret them, while semantics considers signs in their relation to designated (not having a sign nature) objects. The most important subject of study for semantics is, and therefore it is included as an integral part of linguistics (as the semantics of natural language) and logic (as the semantics of formal languages). The semantic problem that arises in both logic and linguistics is an expression of the general philosophical problem of the connection between thinking and being. The question of the extent to which language is able to express non-linguistic , is closely correlated with the question of thought to understand an object external to it. Of the basic views on the nature of the sign, underlying semantic constructions, it is necessary to single out those that were formulated at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. in the works of G. Frege cf. de Saussure. Their concepts (largely opposed to each other) still determine the methods of research and terminology in linguistics and logic. Frege owns the theory of the triple nature of the linguistic sign. The sign itself (single), firstly, points to the object (the meaning of the sign), and secondly, to the concept corresponding to the signified object (the meaning of the sign). Introduced so. the distinction between sense and meaning subsequently became the key to many logical and linguistic theories, in which, however, a different one than Frege's was adopted. For the signified object, the terms “referent”, “denotation”, “designate” are used. What Frege called "meaning" is sometimes called "sychification". However, the interpretation of these terms by different researchers varies greatly. Often used to express the semantic distinction introduced by Frege is also the pair "extension" - "intension". Frege also introduced the distinction between sense and meaning for sentences of language, arguing that for a wide class of sentences, meaning is true or false. He also pointed to language constructs that make sense but have no meaning (eg, statements about fictitious objects).

According to Frege, the basis of any mental act is the desire to express, an independently existing object, which is indicated in the language by its name and about which its concept speaks. Saussure considers the nature of the sign as dual, calling the sign the unity of the signifier and the signified. The latter means exactly what Frege called meaning, but Saussure's approach is fundamentally different. The semantic properties of a language are determined by the fact that it is a system. Signs exist only in relation to each other, and it is these relations, and not with extralinguistic entities, that determine the meaning of the sign. Therefore, referential semantics is completely absent in Saussure. This is still shared by many linguists (chiefly French). Greimas and Kurte call "the exclusion of the referent a necessary condition for the development of linguistics."

Saussure's approach is a linguistic correlate of the philosophical attitude that seeks to exclude the category of essence from consideration. It was developed, for example, in the Marburg school, for whose philosophers the criterion for the objectivity of knowledge is not the relation of knowledge to a “really existing” object (which is absolutely impossible to establish), but the internal consistency of knowledge itself. The latter is considered as, i.e., a set of relations of elements, determined (like Saussure's units of language) only by their place in the system and relations with each other.

In logic and mathematics, an analytical apparatus has been developed that makes it possible to describe the semantics of formal languages. This apparatus is based on the concept of interpretation. The latter is , which maps to each name (individual constant) of the language some object from a given set, and to each expression of the language (predicate constant) some relation of objects of the same set. The most important element of the semantics of formal languages ​​is the concept of truth, which is considered as a formal well-formed expression of the language. Essential in this case is the introduction of a metalanguage. Only with its help it is possible to describe the area of ​​objects, set an interpretive function and draw conclusions about the truth of linguistic expressions. Formal grounds for distinguishing between an object language and a metalanguage were obtained by A. Tarekhim. The subsequent development of logic (S. Krinke, R. Martin, P. Woodruff), however, led to the construction of “semantically closed” languages, i.e., those that themselves contain the ability to draw conclusions about semantic properties (in particular, about truth) of language expressions. However, a common feature of any formal approach is the need to express nonlinguistic objects by means of a language (even a metalanguage). The study of the semantics of properties is therefore the study of relations between signs, and not of relations between a sign and an object that does not have the nature of a sign. That. semantics turns into syntactic.

When describing the semantics of natural language, linguists also resort to the concept of functional dependency, implementing a scheme very similar to the scheme of interpretation of formal languages. In this case, the apparatus of semantic categories introduced by K. Aidukevich is used (see Semantic categories theory). The simplest categories are name and . The first has an object as an extension, the second a true or false value. The extension of a linguistic sign belonging to these categories is a function (in the strict, set-theoretic sense - D. Lewis, and even earlier R. Carnap), which puts it in correspondence with its extension. More complex ones are obtained from the simplest ones according to the rules of syntax and must include all possible grammatical forms. Their semantics is determined by the construction of intensions, which are also functions, but more complex. The nature of the intension is often defined in different ways. N. Chomsky, for example, sees in them innate schemes of action inherent in the human psyche. R. Montagu presents them as objective ideal entities that are grasped by consciousness.

In essence, in the logic describing formal languages, and in linguistics, which studies natural language, the same procedures are introduced: the establishment of a functional connection between language expressions and “real” objects and relations. However, logic (and even more so) requires an explicit description (again with the help of language) of both functions and areas of interpretation. In linguistics, when talking about an interpretive function (intension), some cognitive function (not explicitly described at all) performed by a native speaker who produces and interprets signs can be implied. Therefore, if logic brings semantics closer to syntactics, then linguistics turns it into pragmatics. This "loss" of semantics occurs in those theories that share an essential element of Frege's teaching: language is seen as for the expression of non-linguistic entities, that is, for the representation of objective reality. In such theories, they try to establish a connection between thought and the unthinkable, which gives rise to natural difficulties. An alternative to the Fregean understanding of semantics (besides the school of Saussure mentioned above) is the theory of semantic primitives (A. Verzhbitska). It is directly related to the teachings of R. Descartes, that any complex can be reduced to simple, intuitive and not in need of any clarification. Even more reveals the theory of semantic primitives from the philosophy of G. Leibniz, since it can be presented as a development of his attempt to create a universal characteristic. According to Verzhbitskaya, everyone is a construction built from fairly simple elements according to known rules. The meaning of any language construction is clear to the extent that the construction procedure is clarified, as well as the meaning of these elements. The latter, called semantic primitives, are intuitively clear. They do not need to resort to special techniques (eg, the introduction of intensions AND extensions), since their meaning is absolutely transparent and does not need any expression. It is important that these primitives are small and their numbering is easily achievable.

Lit .: Shreyder Yu.A. The logic of sign systems. M., 1974; Semiotics (collection of works; ed. Yu. S. Stepanov). M., 1983; Smirnova E. D. Logic and

We have released a new book, "Social Media Content Marketing: How to get into the head of subscribers and make them fall in love with your brand."

The semantics of the site are the keywords corresponding to the relevant search queries of users, on the basis of which the structure of a certain resource is built.

More videos on our channel - learn internet marketing with SEMANTICA

Keywords do not exist in isolation, but form an interconnected network to fully cover all requests related to the subject of the portal. Thus, a semantic core is created, which provides for all queries that are relevant for a particular site.

Consider the semantics for website promotion using an example.

You are creating web resources. The user enters a query in the search: "How to make a website." If your site does not answer this question, then there are problems with semantics, i.e. you poorly composed the semantic core, without which it is difficult to promote the site and raise it to the TOP of search results for the keys you are interested in.

What is website semantics

Any type of activity presented on the Internet falls under search engine optimization. Among the key tools by which promotion is carried out is the semantics of the site or the creation of a semantic core for a specific resource. This is a list of phrases and phrases that fully describe the subject and focus of the resource. The size of the core depends on how big the project is. The task of how to work out the semantics of the site is considered relevant and in demand when its owner decided to start promoting in search in order to increase customer traffic.

How to collect semantics for the site

To correctly compose a semantic core, two questions must be taken into account:

1. What does the target audience need?
2. What services and products are you going to sell.

When compiling the semantic core and, based on it, the structure of the site, remember the important facts:

• The content must meet the expectations of the users of the resource.
• A website page is the answer to a visitor's question.
• The site as a whole should give maximum answers to all questions on the subject.
• The full semantics of the site repeats its structure.

Main groups of queries by frequency

In the process of forming semantics for website promotion, it is necessary to understand the frequency of requests, which may differ in the features of promotion on them, but in general contribute to an increase in traffic.

Allocate:

• high-frequency;
• midrange;
• low frequency requests.

Such a division is made to understand the structure of the site as a whole, the formation of meta tags, the search for queries for internal page optimization.

Key rules of semantics

• One request - one page. You can't have multiple resource pages matching the same query. But one page can be assigned several keys for promotion.
• The semantic core should include all types of queries by frequency.
• In the process of arranging queries into groups, it is necessary to include only those for which a specific page is being promoted.

Only 1-2 places on a certain topic can be provided in the Yandex top, which increases competition. In addition, Yandex.Direct and other advertising tools shift organic search results down. In this case, semantics alone will not be enough to successfully optimize the site.

Stages of creating a semantic core

1. Make a list of goods, services and other information that is covered on the site. Analyze potential visitors and target audience in general. For example, when selling expensive goods, it does not make sense to use the phrase "buy cheap", etc.
2. Choose queries that match your topic. Consider all requests for which they can search for an offer on the site.
3. Select queries from search engines using special services (for example, Yandex.Wordstat).
4. Filter requests. Eliminate empty phrases and repetitions. Combine all lists of phrases collected in various ways for further analysis. Use special programs. The most popular is Key Collector.
5. Group requests into separate categories, which will promote sections and pages of a particular resource.

How to gain additional advantages over competitors

The question of how to collect the semantics of the site is not solved by the selection of search queries alone. For promotion, it is necessary to correctly apply SEO tags. They contain key data for search engines, which is not recommended to be neglected.

SEO tags for website semantics:

• Title - page title displayed in the status bar. The title must be clear, as it attracts the attention of users.
• Description - a brief summary of the page. The tag has a service value - it assists the search engine in the process of issuing.
• IMG is a textual description of the image on the page.
• A is the link tag.
• Noindex - is used when the indexing of the site page is not needed for a certain period.
• Robots is a tag that gives an indication to the search robot.
• Revesit - defining the resource indexing frequency for the robot.

It is extremely important to know how to compose the semantics of the site and follow the standards set out in the process. This will greatly facilitate the process and help prevent many of the problems associated with optimizing your site for search.

Having created semantics once, do not leave it unchanged for a long period. New products and services appear regularly, and old ones lose their relevance. Therefore, you should not only know how to work out the semantics of the site, but also update it once every six months or a year in order to introduce new search queries and delete old ones that have lost their relevance.

Yu. S. Stepanov.

Semantics of the Russian language

(from Greek σημαντικός - denoting) - 1) all content, information transmitted by the language or any of its units (word, grammatical form of the word, word-with-che-ta-ni-em, sentence); 2) a section of linguistics that studies this content, information; 3) one of the main sections of semiotics.

Semantics (in the 1st meaning) is a system that is not rigidly determined. A directly observable cell of semantics - a full-fledged word (for example, a noun, a verb, an adverb, an adjective) - is organized according to the principle of a "semantic triangle": outer element- a sequence of sounds or graphic signs (meaning) - is connected in the mind and in the language system, on the one hand, with subject of reality(thing, phenomenon, process, sign), called in the theory of semantics denotatum, referent, on the other hand - with concept or idea about this subject, called meaning, signification, intension, signified. This schema summarizes the semantic relationships; a more complete system is given in Art. Concept. Since it is possible to associate a word with an object only on condition that the object is somehow recognized by a person, insofar as the denotation, like the significate, is a certain reflection (representation) of a class of homogeneous objects in the mind, however, unlike the significate, this reflection is with a minimum number identification signs, often unsystematic and not coinciding with the concept. For example, for the word "straight" the significate (concept) is 'the shortest distance between two points', while the denotation is associated only with the idea of ​​'a line that deviates neither to the right nor to the left, neither up nor down' (significate and intension usually approach the scientific concept to some extent). There are also predominantly denotative (referential) words, such as pronouns, personal names, and predominantly significative (non-referential, non-denominative) words, such as abstract nouns.

Another universal cell of semantics is a sentence (statement), in which a denotation (or referent) is also distinguished as a designation of a fact of reality and a significat (or meaning) corresponding to a judgment about this fact. Denotation and significat in this sense refer to the sentence as a whole. In relation to parts of a sentence, the subject (or subject) is usually denotative, referential, and the predicate (or predicate) is significative.

The semantics of all language units is organized similarly to the word and sentence. It is divided into two spheres - subject, or denotative (extensional), semantics and the sphere of concepts, or meanings, - significative (intensional) semantics. The terms "extensional semantics" and "intensional semantics" go back to the description of a separate word-concept, where, in the tradition of medieval logic, the scope of a concept (i.e., the scope of its applications to objects, the subject area covered) was called the term extensio 'extension', and the content concepts (i.e., the totality of attributes conceivable in this case) - by the word intensio 'internal tension'. The denotative and significative spheres of semantics in natural languages ​​(unlike some special artificial languages) are built quite symmetrically, while the significative (conceptual) to a large extent copies the denotative (objective) sphere in its structure. However, there is no complete parallelism between them, and a number of key problems of semantics are solved only in relation to each area separately. So, subject, or denotative, synonymy, extensional identity of linguistic expressions does not necessarily entail significative, or conceptual, synonymy, intensional identity, and vice versa. For example, the words "poison" and "poison" in Russian denote the same phenomenon - "poisonous substance" (they are extensionally identical), but have different conceptual content, different meanings (intensionally different): one cannot say "Some diseases are treated with poison ". On the other hand, the expressions "armed forces" and "army, navy, aviation" (the last three words - in the aggregate) are intensionally identical, but extension-si-o-nal-but not necessarily interchangeable: one can say "Petya serves in the armed forces ”, But it’s impossible - “Petya serves in the army, aviation and navy.” The semantics of words and sentences is perceived by native speakers to a certain extent directly, which is what communication consists of.

With the help of linguistic analysis, the semantics of parts of a word - morphemes and parts of a sentence - syntagm phrases can be established. Morphemes of full-meaning words - roots and affixes carry two different types of meanings. The roots express the so-called real value - the main part lexical meaning of the word, for example, in Russian, the roots krasn- ‘the concept of redness’, dvig- ‘the concept of movement’, etc. Affixes express grammatical meanings, which, in turn, fall into two types: one, called categorical, serve to generalize real values, subsuming the latter under the most general categories; others called relational,intralingual,syntactic, serve to connect words and other significant parts in a sentence. Relational grammatical meanings are closely related to the morphology of a particular language and, as a rule, are nationally and historically specific. These include the features of agreement, control, case system, “coordination of tenses” (consecutio temporum), etc. Categorical meanings include 'subject - predicate' (or 'name - verb'), 'subject - object', 'activity — inactivity', 'animation — inanimateness', 'definiteness — uncertainty', 'alienable — inalienable belonging', 'action — state', etc.; cf. also genders of nouns, number, verb tense, case, etc. Unlike relational, categorical values make up systems of paired oppositions from positive and negative members, oppositions and always form a hierarchy. They are universal (see Linguistic universals) and are associated primarily with the universal laws of constructing a sentence (statement) in all languages ​​(the morphology of each language in this case acts only as a “technique” for their design). So, depending on what kind of categorical opposition is implemented in the sentence, there are three main types of sentences that largely determine the difference between the three main types of language: the opposition “subject-object” determines the nominative type of the sentence and the type of language (see Fig. Nominative system); the opposition “activity - inactivity” of the subject determines the active type (see Active system); the opposition “active subject and inactive object” (to a certain extent it can be considered as a combination of the two previous features) is typical for ergative system offers. Categorical grammatical meanings thus act both as relational, syntactic categories and as elementary semantic features, semes in the lexicon; for example, in Russian, the animation of nouns acts as a special category (sema) in the lexicon and requires a special type of agreement - control in the syntagma, in the sentence; in the Georgian language, the so-called inverse verbs (verbs of feelings, etc.) are a special category of the lexicon and require a special construction of the sentence.

Semantic relations are described by semantics as a branch of linguistics from different points of view. Towards paradigmatics groupings of words in the language system, the basis of which is opposition, are synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, paronymy, nest of words, family of words, lexical-semantic group, as well as the most common grouping of words - field. There are two main types of fields: 1) associations of words in relation to one subject area - subject, or denotative, fields, for example, color designations, names of plants, animals, measures and weights, time, etc.; 2) associations of words according to their relation to one sphere of representations or concepts - conceptual, or significative, fields, for example, designations of states of the spirit (feelings of joy, grief, duty), processes of thinking, perception (vision, smell, hearing, touch), possibilities, necessity, etc. In subject fields, words are organized mainly according to the principle of “space” and according to the principles of the relationship of things: part and whole, function (purpose) and its arguments (producer, agent, tool, result); in conceptual fields - mainly according to the principle of "time" and according to the principles of the correlation of concepts (subordination, hyponymy, antonymy, etc.). Paradigmatic relations are formalized with the help of mathematical set theory.

To syntagmatics groupings of words according to their location in speech relative to each other ( compatibility, arrangement). The basis of these relations is distribution (see. Distributive analysis). They are formalized with the help of mathematical probability theory, statistical and probabilistic approach, predicate calculus and propositional calculus, algorithm theory.

When correlating the results of describing semantics in paradigmatics and syntagmatics, some of their common features, the presence of semantic invariants, as well as smaller and more universal than the word, semantic units are revealed - semantic features, or seme (also called a component, sometimes a semantic parameter or function). Basic semes in vocabulary coincide with categorical grammatical meanings in grammar (grammemes). In paradigmatics, the seme is revealed as the minimum sign of opposition, and in syntagmatics, as the minimum sign of compatibility. For example, the verbs "burn" and "burn" in paradigmatics are contrasted on the basis of 'state' - 'causing this state to life', and in syntagmatics one of these features of the verb "burn" requires an active subject capable of causation (" man”, “opponent”, “stoker”, etc.), while in the verb “burn” one of these signs requires the subject of the state (“coal”, “manuscript”, “village”, etc. ). Thus, a sentence always contains some common feature of the subject and the predicate - the semantic component (seme).

The semantics of words in different languages ​​can be largely reduced to different sets of the same or similar semantic features. For example, a set of features: 1) 'solid formation', 2) 'in the body of an animal, in meat', 3) 'in the body of a fish, in a fish', 4) 'as part of a plant, in a plant', is distributed in Russian differently than in French. The 1st, 2nd, 3rd signs are summarized in Russian in the word "bone", the 1st, 4th - in the word "awn"; in French, 1st, 2nd - in the word os, 1st, 3rd, 4th - in the word arête. The fields in semantics are also ultimately organized on the basis of similarities and differences not of words, but of semantic features, so the same word can be included (according to different features) in several semantic fields.

The semantics of natural language consolidates the results of reflection and cognition of the objective world, achieved in the social practice of people. Thus, European culture has developed the concepts of "to be", "to have", "time", "past", "present", "future", "form", "content" and others, which are expressed by the corresponding words and grammatical forms in every European language. language. The same concepts in the same combination of features may not exist in other languages; for example, in the Hopi language (the language of North American Indians) there are no nouns like "spring", "winter", "present", "future", and the corresponding (but not identical) concepts are transmitted in the form of adverbs - "when it's warm", etc. .; "rain" - an object (object) in the Indo-European languages ​​- is categorized as a process (lit. - "it falls") in the Amerindian language Hupa. At the same time, the opposition between object and process, between object and attribute, is objective and universal—in every language they exist as opposition between name and predicate in an utterance. Thus, vocabulary, nationally unique and historically changeable, also acts as a "technique" for the design of more universal and historically stable essences of semantics, subject only to the fundamental laws of evolution.

The semantics of a sentence (statement) is determined, on the one hand, by the subject area (which can be structured differently in different areas of the world, cf., for example, the opposition of the “active”, human principle and “inactive”, natural in the “active” languages ​​of the American Indians ), on the other hand, by the same communicative purpose for all languages ​​of the world. The latter determines its universal features. In the sentence, patterns of the relationship between the subject and the predicate, common to all languages, are formed. The universal laws of historical changes in semantics also originate there: the formation of subjective language expressions and predicate expressions different from them: metaphorization of lexical meanings, proceeding differently in the position of the subject and in the position of the predicate; the transfer of lexical meaning according to the language function (for example, the designation of a process can always turn into a designation of a result, cf. “organization” as a process and “organization” as a result, institution), etc.

The proximity of sentences in meaning (significant, intensional) with a possible difference in the subject of designation (denotation, or referent) is the source of the existence of transformations (for example: “Workers are building a house” - “The house is being built by workers”, the so-called transformation of the pledge); the proximity of sentences on the subject of designation with differences in meaning is the source of the existence of periphrases (for example: “Peter buys something from Ivan” - “Ivan sells something to Peter”), sentence relations as in paradigmatics (for example, intensional and extensional identity), and in syntagmatics (for example, the connection of sentences in a text) constitute the main direction of scientific research in the semantics of a sentence.

The difference between the concepts of paradigmatics, syntagmatics, etc. (used simultaneously in modern linguistics) was originally associated with different approaches in the history of semantics as a science.

For semantics as a science (as well as for the semantics of a language), a cumulative type of development is characteristic: the stages of the formation of science are formed into constant flows in it.

Semantics as a science begins to develop in the second half of the 19th century, when, on the basis of the pioneering ideas of W. von Humboldt, expressed at the beginning of the century, the fundamental linguistic-epistemological concepts of H. Steinthal, A. A. Potebnia and W. Wundt appeared, determined 1st stage in the development of semantics, which can be called psychological and evolutionary. This stage is characterized by a broad evolutionary (but not always concrete historical) approach to culture and the assimilation of the linguistic semantics of the psychology of the people. The unity of semantics is explained by the common psychological laws of mankind, and the differences - by the difference in the "psychology of peoples". According to Potebnya's teaching, thinking evolves in close connection with language according to patterns that are semantic in nature (that is, in Potebnya's understanding, psychological, but not logical). The most important of the regularities is the constant sign substitutions that occur both in the word (“internal form of the word”) and in the sentence (“replacement of parts of speech”). Potebnya was the first to substantiate these theses with numerous facts. Like Wundt, he considered these patterns in close connection with "folk life", which also manifests itself in the field of folklore and "folk psychology" (a number of Potebnya's views almost literally coincide with the views of the literary historian A. N. Veselovsky in the field of historical poetics). The weaknesses of the theoretical views of this period are the refusal to consider logical patterns in favor of exclusively psychological ones and insufficient attention to specific history, relegated to the background by the ideas of general evolution and universal typology. In the 20th century global ideas of evolution and typology served as the starting point for the concepts of the “linguistic picture of the world” (neo-Humboldtianism in Germany, the concepts of E. Sapir and B. L. Whorf in the USA, etc.), for the fundamental semantic-syntactic concept of I. I. Meshchaninov, but they also led to the rejection of a specific historical study of semantics in the forms of morphology and vocabulary in "new doctrine of language" N. Ya. Marra. However, Marr owns a generalization of the principle of "functional semantics", that is, the transfer of a name from an old object to a new one, which began to perform the function of the former in material culture (for example, Russian cannery knife, breaker hammer; Old Indian takṣ = ‘cut, hew’ reflects an early stage of this Indo-European root, while Lat. tex- ‘to weave’ is a later stage, when the terms of weaving from rods were transferred to weaving).

2nd stage, comparative historical, was marked by the allocation of semantics to a special area of ​​linguistics under the name " semasiology” (in the works of M. M. Pokrovsky and other Russian and German scientists) or “semantics” (initially in 1883 in the work of M. Breal, and then other French linguists). This period is characterized by the introduction into semantics of the general principles of concrete-historical comparative research and by an attempt to formulate—mostly successful—historical laws of semantics. So, Pokrovsky formulated the following main provisions: 1) the laws of semantics are revealed not in individual words, but in groups and systems of words, in "fields of words"; 2) these groups are of two kinds: intralinguistic associations, according to “spheres of representations” (or, in modern terminology, significat), and extralinguistic associations, according to subject areas, for example, the concepts of “fair”, “market”, “games and spectacles”, "weights and measures", etc. In non-linguistic associations, there are specific historical patterns associated with the industrial and social life of society: in intra-linguistic associations, other, psychological patterns operate; both can be combined, leading, in particular, to the conceptualization of the spiritual world on the model of the material (for example, the philosophical term "matter" goes back to the Latin māteria "wood, the basis of the trunk" and the same root as the Russian "mother"), cf. above about copying the objective world in the significative sphere of semantics; 3) universal, mainly syntactic, patterns are associated with the construction and transformation of sentences (statements), for example. the transition from the abstraction of the process, from the verb, to the designation of the material result of the process, the subject: "institution" "establishment" → "institution" "public or state organization". Extralinguistic combinations of words and patterns of semantics became the main subject of research by scientists grouped around the journal Wörter und Sachen (Words and Things, 1909—).

The comparative-historical approach is further developed in modern research, mainly in connection with the study of etymology. Based on the ideas of "functional semantics" and "fields", ON Trubachev (1966) showed a massive transition of the ancient Indo-European terms of weaving and pottery to weaving; see also: under his editorship, the multi-volume edition “Etymological Dictionary of Slavic Languages. Proto-Slavic lexical fund, v. 1-15, 1974-88; "Dictionary of Indo-European social terms" E. Benveniste, vol. 1-2, 1969; "Historical and etymological dictionary of the Ossetian language" by V. I. Abaev, vols. 1-3, 1958-79, "Indo-European language and Indo-Europeans" by T. V. Gamkrelidze and Vyach. Sun. Ivanova, vol. 1-2, 1984, and others. A special branch is the study of the terms of spiritual culture, which in Russia was started by J. Grot's "Philological Research" (1873) and continued in the USSR by the works of V. V. Vinogradov, Yu. Sorokin, V. V. Veselitsky, R. A. Budagov, Yu. A. Belchikov and others.

The universal-syntactic approach, which was only outlined within the framework of this stage, was fully developed later.

3rd stage starts around the 20s. 20th century It is characterized by the convergence of semantics with logic and philosophy, orientation towards syntax, so it can be called syntactic-semantic or logical-semantic. This stage is characterized by the following main theoretical propositions: 1) the objective world is considered not as a set of "things", but as a set of ongoing events or "facts", respectively, the main cell of semantics is not a word - the name of a thing, but a statement about a fact - a sentence; 2) some words of the language have direct “exits” to extralinguistic reality, they are defined in terms of observable objects or facts, for example, “forest”, “make noise”, “children”, “walk”: ‘the forest is making noise’, ‘children are walking’; other words and expressions of the language are definable only through their intralinguistic transformations, which are carried out by means of a sentence, for example, "noise", "walk" are defined by us through "the noise of the forest", "the children's walk" and ultimately are reduced to "the forest makes noise", "children are walking"; 3) for the latter, the main method of analysis is the nature of the mutual arrangement of such words and expressions in a sentence and in speech in general - their distribution, as well as their mutual transformations - transformations (see. transformational method), paraphrases, functions; 4) the description of the primary, initial values, to which the rest are reduced, constitute a special task - the so-called establishment of "semantic primitives". These linguistic views were formed and the tasks corresponding to them were set and solved in close connection with the evolution of general methodological and logical views on the language (see. Methodology in linguistics, Method in linguistics). Initially, they arose in Anglo-American linguistics, where they turned out to be closely connected with the general evolution of logical positivism - from the "logical atomism" of B. Russell and the early L. Wittgenstein (works of the 1920s) to the "logical analysis of language" of the 50-70s. x years. (works by Wittgenstein, A. J. Ayer, W. O. Quine, J. R. Searle, P. F. Strawson, Z. Vendler, and others). In the early period associated with logical atomism, the striving to establish certain "primary", "nuclear", etc. expressions (mainly sentences), from which other expressions could be derived through various transformations, prevailed. In a later period, associated with logical analysis, a view is established of "meaning as use" ("Meaning is not any object associated with a given word; the meaning of a word is its use in language" - Wittgenstein's thesis). There is a direct connection between this statement and the concept of distribution in the semantics of American linguists: the meaning of a word is the totality of its surroundings with other words, together with which the given word occurs when it is used in the language. Despite the limitations of this understanding of meaning, the distributive analysis of meanings played a role in the development of semantics and, as a private technique, continues to be used.

By the beginning of the 1970s, mainly in Soviet linguistics, thanks to the criticism of distributive analysis by Soviet linguists, a more harmonious and complete, complex approach to semantic phenomena was being established. On the one hand, the objective, extralinguistic, denotative connections of words and other signs and statements, the reflection of reality in their semantics are studied, for which special methods are used (see Thesaurus, Component analysis method, Oppositions) in the works of Yu. N. Karaulov, L. A. Novikov, A. A. Ufimtseva and others. V. A. Zvegintseva, Yu. D. Apresyan, N. D. Arutyunova, E. V. Paducheva, O. N. Seliverstova and others. At the same time, the main orientation is the analysis of not an abstract, isolated sentence, but the consideration of a sentence in real speech , in dialogue or text, taking into account the pragmatics of the language. Research continues on the so-called grammatical semantics, mainly the semantics of morphological forms (A. V. Bondarko, T. V. Bulygina, and others). The search for "semantic primitives" remains an independent task of semantics (for example, the work of A. Vezhbitskaya).

• Grotto Ya., Philological research. Materials for the dictionary, grammar and history of the Russian language, 4th ed., St. Petersburg, 1999;
• Veselovsky A. N., Historical poetics, L., 1990;
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• Ufimtseva A. A., Word in the lexical-semantic system of the language, M., 1998;
• Budagov R. A., The history of words in the history of society, M., 1991;
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• Arutyunova N. D., Proposal and its meaning. Logical-semantic problems, M., 1996;
• Karaulov Yu. N., General and Russian ideography, M., 1976; Language nomination. General questions, M., 1997;
• Vinogradov VV, Selected Works. Lexicology and lexicography, M., 1997;
• Bondarko A. V., Grammatical meaning and meaning. L., 1988;
• Mulud N., Analysis and meaning, trans. from French, Moscow, 1999;
• New in foreign linguistics, c. 10 - Linguistic semantics, M., 1981;
• Stepanov Yu. S., Names. Predicates. Offers. Semiological grammar, M.. 2000

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SEMANTICS, in the broad sense of the word, an analysis of the relationship between linguistic expressions and the world, real or imaginary, as well as this relationship itself (cf. an expression like word semantics) and the totality of such relations (for example, we can talk about the semantics of a certain language). This relation consists in the fact that linguistic expressions (words, phrases, sentences, texts) denote what is in the world - objects, qualities (or properties), actions, ways of performing actions, relationships, situations and their sequences. The term "semantics" is derived from a Greek root associated with the idea of ​​"designation" (cf. semantikos "signifying"). The relationship between natural language expressions and the real or imaginary world is explored by linguistic semantics, which is a branch of linguistics. Semantics is also called one of the sections of formal logic, which describes the relationship between the expressions of artificial formal languages ​​and their interpretation in some model of the world. This article deals with linguistic semantics.

Semantics as a branch of linguistics answers the question of how a person, knowing the words and grammatical rules of a natural language, is able to convey with their help a wide variety of information about the world (including his own inner world), even if he first encounters with such a task, and to understand what information about the world is contained in any statement addressed to him, even if he hears it for the first time.

The semantic component has long been recognized as a necessary part of the complete description of the language - grammar. Various theories of language contribute to the formation of general principles of semantic description. For example, for generative grammars, the principles for constructing a semantic component were laid down by the American linguists J.Katz and J.Fodor and further developed by R.Jackendoff, and, say, for grammars (models) of the "Meaning - Text" type, the corresponding component was developed by representatives of the Moscow Semantic School: Yu D. Apresyan, A.K. Zholkovsky, I.A. Melchuk and others. The semantic component necessarily includes a dictionary (lexicon), in which each word is reported what it means, i.e. each word is compared with its meaning in a given language, and the rules of combination (interaction) the meanings of words, according to which the meaning of more complex structures, primarily sentences, is formed from them.

The meaning of a word in a dictionary is described using a dictionary definition, or interpretation, which is an expression in the same natural language or in an artificial semantic language specially developed for this purpose, in which the meaning of the interpreted word is presented in a more detailed (explicit) and, ideally, strictly. So, the meaning of the Russian word bachelor in the dictionary of the semantic component of the description of the Russian language, it can be represented, as is done in ordinary explanatory dictionaries, in the form of a common Russian phrase "a man who has reached marriageable age and is not married and has never been married" or as an entry in a special semantic language, for example , (l x) [HUMAN ( x) & MALE ( x) & ADULT ( x) & (MARRIED-( x)]. There are quite a few different artificial semantic languages, and they are arranged in very different ways.

As can be seen from the above examples, when interpreting the meanings of words and phrases using natural language, the resulting expressions, as well as their individual components, if they are mentioned separately, are usually written in single quotes in writing; dictionaries do not do this, because from the very structure of the dictionary entry it is already clear that to the right of the word that is the entrance to the entry in the explanatory dictionary is precisely the interpretation of this word (). Natural language expressions that interpret the meaning of sentences are usually written in double quotes. Recording natural language words in capital letters and using hyphens in unusual places means that these words in this notation are elements of an artificial language that may not coincide with natural language; so, MARRIED is one element, not three words; variable x and the conjunction sign & are also elements of an artificial language. Artificial languages ​​can be used to interpret the meanings of both words and sentences. Regardless of whether natural or artificial language is used for interpretation, in relation to the language whose expressions are interpreted, it has the status of a metalanguage (from the Greek meta "after"), i.e. the language spoken about the language; natural language can thus be a metalanguage in relation to itself. Metalanguage elements can also be (and often are, for example, in illustrated dictionaries) various kinds of graphic images - diagrams, drawings, etc.

How dictionary definitions are created and what requirements are imposed on them will be discussed below.

The semantic component of a complete description of a language is a model of that part of language knowledge that is related to the relationship between words and the world. In this model, such empirically established phenomena as equivalence (synonymy), ambiguity (polysemy), semantic anomaly (including inconsistency and tautology) of linguistic expressions should be explained. So, it is easy to check that for all native Russian speakers the sentence He wore a wide-brimmed hat denotes the same state of affairs as the sentence He was wearing a wide hat fields. It is believed that this fact is adequately reflected in the semantic component of the language description, if, taking the interpretation of the meanings of the corresponding words from the dictionary and acting according to the explicit rules for combining meanings, we get the same semantic records, called "semantic representations" or "semantic interpretations" of these sentences. Likewise, all native speakers of Russian would agree that the sentence Visiting relatives can be exhausting denotes two different possibilities: the possibility of being tired by visiting relatives, and the possibility of being tired by receiving relatives who have visited you. This means that in the semantic component, this sentence must be compared with two semantic representations that differ from each other, otherwise it will not be an adequate reflection of semantic knowledge about the Russian language.

As an independent linguistic discipline, semantics emerged relatively recently, at the end of the 19th century; the term "semantics" itself to designate a branch of science was first introduced in 1883 by the French linguist M. Breal, who was interested in the historical development of linguistic meanings. Until the end of the 1950s, along with it, the term "semasiology" was also widely used, now preserved only as a not very common name for one of the sections of semantics. However, questions related to the conduct of semantics were raised and, one way or another, resolved already in the oldest linguistic traditions known to us. After all, one of the main reasons forcing us to pay attention to the language is a misunderstanding of what the oral or written statement (text) addressed to us, or some part of it, means. Therefore, in the study of language, the interpretation of individual signs or entire texts - one of the most important activities in the field of semantics - has long occupied an important place. So, in China, in ancient times, dictionaries were created that contained interpretations of hieroglyphs. In Europe, ancient and medieval philologists compiled glosses, i.e. interpretation of incomprehensible words in written monuments. A truly rapid development of linguistic semantics began in the 1960s; at present, it is one of the most important sections of the science of language.

In the European scientific tradition, the question of the relationship between words and "things", the objects to which they belonged, was first raised by ancient Greek philosophers, but to this day various aspects of this relationship continue to be refined. Let us consider the relation of the word to the "thing" more closely.

Words allow us to mention things both in their presence and in their absence - to mention not only what is "here", but also what is "there", not only the present, but also the past and the future. Of course, the word is just noise that has come to be used to talk about something; in itself this noise has no meaning, but acquires it through its use in the language. When we learn the meanings of words, we learn not some fact of nature, like the law of gravity, but a kind of convention about what noises usually correspond to what things.

The words of a language, being used in speech, acquire a relation or reference to the objects of the world about which the statement is made. In other words, they have the ability to "refer" to objects, introducing these objects (of course, in an ideal form) into the consciousness of the addressee. (Of course, it would be more accurate to say that speakers, using words, can “refer” to this or that fragment of the world.) That entity in the world to which the word refers is called its referent. So, if I, describing an event that happened to someone, say: Yesterday I planted a tree under my window, then the word tree refers to a single individual entity - that one-of-a-kind tree that I planted under my window yesterday. We may well say that the word tree in this statement means this most tree planted by me. Perhaps this real individual essence is the meaning of the word tree?

Representatives of that relatively young trend in semantics, which is commonly called "strong semantics" (it can include "formal semantics" and other varieties of model-theoretic semantics that follow formal logic in resolving the issue of the nature of relations between language and the world), would give a positive answer to this question. In any case, from the point of view of “strong semantics”, the goal of a semantic description of a language is that each linguistic expression should be interpreted in one or another model of the world, i.e. in order to establish whether any element (or configuration of elements) of the world model corresponds to this expression, and if so, which one (which one). Therefore, the problems of reference (relationship to the world) are in the focus of "strong semantics".

In contrast, the more traditional "weak semantics" in the study of the relationship between language and the world dispenses with direct reference to the actual state of affairs in this world. She recognizes as the subject of her research - the meaning of a linguistic expression - not the element (fragment) of the world to which this expression refers, but the way in which it does it - those rules of use, knowing which a native speaker in a particular situation is able to either implement a reference to the world using this expression, or to understand what it refers to. In the future, we will consider the problems of semantics from this position.

If someone wants to invent a procedure for applying words to the world, it may at first seem to him that for every real entity there must be a word. But if this were so, then the number of words required for this would be as infinite as the number of things and relations in nature is infinite. If every tree in the world needed a separate word, then just for trees alone it would take several million words, plus the same number for all insects, for all blades of grass, etc. If the language were required to comply with the principle of "one word - one thing", then it would be impossible to use such a language.

In fact, there are some words (there are relatively few of them) that really correspond to a single thing, and they are called proper names, for example Hans Christian Andersen or Beijing. But most words are applied not to a single person or thing, but to a group or class of things. generic name tree is used for each of those many billions of things we call trees. (There are also words for subclasses of trees, maple,birch,elm etc. - but these are the names of smaller classes, not individual trees.) Run is the name of a class of actions distinguished from other actions, such as crawling or walking. Blue is the name of a class of colors that smoothly turn green at one end and blue at the other. Above there is a relation class name, not a proper name, for the relationship between my ceiling lamp and my desk, because it also applies to the relationship between your ceiling lamp and your desk, and an innumerable number of other relationships. Thus, languages ​​have achieved the necessary economy through the use of class names. A class, or a set of those entities, in relation to which a given linguistic expression (in particular, a word) can be used, is called the denotation or extension of this expression (often, however, the term "denotation" is also used as a synonym for the term "referent" introduced above ). In one of the existing approaches to the definition of the meaning of a word in semantics, the meaning is precisely the denotation - the set of entities that can be denoted with the help of a given word. But another understanding of meaning is more widespread, in which it is identified with the conditions of its applicability.

What allows us to use a relatively small number of words for so many things is similarity. Things that are sufficiently similar to each other, we call the same name. Trees differ from each other in size, shape, distribution of foliage, but they have some similar features that allow us to call them all trees. When we wish to draw attention to differences within this gigantic general class, we look for more detailed similarities within more sub-groups and thus identify specific tree species. Finally, if we intend to repeatedly refer to a particular tree, we can give it its own name (for example, Elm on Povarskaya) just like we name a child or a pet.

In addition to the economy of linguistic means achieved, the existence of generic names has another advantage: it emphasizes the similarities between things that are in many respects different from each other. Pomeranian Spitz and Russian Borzoi are not very similar to each other, however, both belong to the class of dogs. The Hottentot and the American manufacturer are in many respects physically and mentally different, but both belong to the human class. However, the existence of common nouns also carries with it a possible drawback: the indiscriminate dumping of dissimilar things can make us consider only the similarities between things, and not the differences, and therefore think not about the distinctive features that characterize this or that separate thing as an individual, but about a label, standing on this thing (i.e., about a generic term applicable to all things of the same class). “Another pensioner,” the saleswoman thinks, thinking exclusively in labels and stereotypes.

These similarities between things certainly exist in nature before and independently of our use of language. But which of the innumerable similarities of things will be the basis for classification depends on people and their interests. Biologists usually use skeletal structure as the basis for assigning birds and mammals to certain species and subspecies: if a bird has one bone structure, then it is assigned to class X, and if another, then to class Y. Birds could be classified not by structure skeleton, but by color: then all yellow birds would receive one generic name, and all red birds - another, regardless of other characteristics. Biologists have not yet classified animals in this way, mainly because the offspring regularly have the same skeletal structure as the parents, not the same color, and biologists would like to be able to apply the same name to the offspring as to the parents. But this is a decision made by people, not by nature; natural things do not appear before us with labels that tell us which sections of the classifications they fall into. Different groups of people with different interests classify things in different ways: a certain animal may be listed by biologists in one classification heading, fur producers in another, and tanners in a third.

Bringing natural objects under classification headings is often a simple matter. For example, animals called dogs usually have long noses and bark and wag their tails when they are happy or excited. Things made by people are also often quite easily subsumed under specific headings: this building belongs to the class of (residential) houses, then to the class of garages, and that one to the class of sheds, etc. But here a problem arises: if a person, say, lives in a garage or a barn, then isn't this building also his home? If the garage was once used to house cars, but in recent years has been used to store firewood, isn't it now a shed? Do we classify a structure on the basis of its external appearance, or on the basis of the purpose for which it was originally created, or on the basis of what it is currently used for? Obviously, the way in which a particular object is assigned to a class depends on the criterion we use, and we choose the criterion depending on what kind of groupings we are most interested in.

DICTIONARY DEFINITION

When using common nouns, the obvious question immediately arises as to what our criteria for the use of any such word will be: what conditions must be set to determine when we should use this particular word and not another? We made sure that the objects of reality have similarities with each other, i.e. common features. No matter how many features unite a given subject with another subject, the defining (distinctive) features of the subject are only those features, in the absence of which the given word is not applicable to the given subject at all. We will not call a geometric figure a triangle if it does not have the following three features: it is a figure (1) flat, (2) closed, (3) bounded by three straight lines. The signs that serve as a condition for the applicability of the word, in their totality, form the significat of the word (the term was introduced by the medieval scholastic John of Salisbury), or, in another terminology, its intension.

Unlike the denotate of a word, which is a class of objects or situations named by the word, the significate is not the class itself, but those signs on the basis of which these objects / situations are combined into a given class and opposed to members of other classes. In traditional semantics, the meaning of a word in a language is considered to be its significate, and not its denotation. At the same time, it is believed that the word refers to the “thing” (denotation) not directly, but indirectly, through a significat, considered as a concept of a given class of things that exists in the mind of a person.

Many scientists now recognize the need to distinguish between the linguistic meaning of a word and the mental content associated with this word - a concept. Both linguistic meaning and concept are categories of thinking. Both are reflections of the world in our minds. But these are different types of reflection. If a concept is a complete (at a given level of cognition) reflection in consciousness of the features of a certain category of objects or phenomena, then the linguistic meaning captures only their distinctive features. So, in the meaning of the word river includes such "differential features" of the concept of a river as "reservoir", "open", "natural origin", "sufficiently large size", according to which an object named river, is different from the objects named ditch, by sea, pond, lake, creek. The concept of a river includes, in addition to data, other signs, for example, "it feeds on the surface and underground runoff of its basin." We can say that the meaning of the word corresponds to the "naive", everyday concept of the subject (in contrast to the scientific one). It is essential that the attributes of an object that are included in the meaning of a certain word may not coincide with the attributes that make up the corresponding scientific concept. A classic example of the discrepancy between the linguistic meaning, which embodies the naive idea of ​​a thing, and the corresponding scientific concept was given by the Russian linguist L.V. distance between two points". But the expression straight line in the literary language has a meaning that does not coincide with this scientific idea. We call a straight line in everyday life a line that deviates neither to the right nor to the left (and also neither up nor down).

So, to describe the meaning of a certain word in a language, or to interpret it, means to list in one form or another all those features of a “thing” that, individually, are necessary, and collectively sufficient conditions for designating it with the help of a given word. It is these distinctive (defining, characteristic) features that should be included in the definition of words in explanatory dictionaries.

Features of an object that are not included in its dictionary definition are called accompanying features. If all objects to which the given word is applicable have this feature, then such a feature is called a universal accompanying feature. So, if the chemical formula H 2 O is considered as the definition of water, then such features as freezing at zero degrees Celsius, transparency, having a certain weight per unit volume, will be universal accompanying features of water, since any instance of water has these properties. The test for whether a feature is distinctive is this: if that feature were absent while all the others were present, would we still place that item in class X? If the answer is no, then this feature is distinctive.

There are many such combinations of features for which we do not consider it necessary to specially invent a word. For example, we can give a generic name to all creatures that have four legs and feathers; but since we have not yet found any creature with this combination of characters, we do not consider it expedient to have any generic name for such a creature. When we invent a generic name to be attributed to any object that has a given combination of features, we agree on a definition, and when we establish or convey which combination of features has already been named by a certain word, we communicate the definition. Contractual definitions, like orders and assumptions, are neither true nor false; but the definitions included in the message have the property of true/false, since the statement that a certain word is already used in a given language to refer to any object that has a certain set of features is either true or false.

This sense of the term "definition" or "definition" is the most general, and dictionaries tend to provide us with definitions in this sense. Since such definitions are an attempt to formulate the word's signification, they can be called significative or designative. But to define the meaning of a word in the widest possible sense is to indicate in some way what the word usually means. There are several ways to achieve this goal. Let's consider them in order.

Significative or designative definitions.

Traditionally, the most accurate way to determine the meaning of a word is to specify a list of features that an object must have in order for a given word (or phrase) to be applicable to it. This is exactly what we did above in the “triangle” or “river” examples. This is called a designative definition; it is said that the word denotes those features that an object must have in order for this word to be applicable to it.

denotative definition.

Quite often (if not in most cases) people do not have a clear understanding of what the distinguishing features of something are; they only know that the word applies to this or that particular individual. “I don’t know how to define a bird,” someone might say, “but I know for sure that a sparrow is a bird, a thrush is a bird, and Polly’s parrot is also a bird.” The speaker mentions some individuals or subclasses to which we apply the term; those. he mentions certain denotations of the word in order to interpret its meaning.

Obviously, as a way of interpreting what a word usually means, such a definition is less satisfactory than giving a significate. If we know the signification of a word, we know the rule for its use (similar to the one they try to give in dictionaries) - we know under what conditions a given word should be applied to a given situation. But when we learn one, two, or even one hundred denotations of a word, we do not know what other things it can apply to, since we do not yet have a general rule. If someone knows that sparrows and thrushes are birds, then he still does not know what other things the word is applied to. bird. After a hundred cases, having considered what common features all the things designated have, it will be possible to come to a certain thought; but at best it would be an educated guess. After fixing hundreds of cases of the appearance of birds, it can be concluded that the bird is something flying. Of course, this conclusion would be false: bats fly but are not birds, and ostriches are birds but do not fly. This cannot be learned from the denotation, unless it happened that ostriches were listed in the denotation; but even that would not mean knowing the rules for using the word bird; one could only conclude that, whatever this rule may be, it does not include such a feature as the ability to fly.

Moreover, there are also words that do not have denotations at all. As far as is known, elves and brownies do not exist in nature; hence these words have no denotations at all in the real world. We agree that they exist only in the human imagination - we can say that only expressions have denotations elf image And brownie image. However, these words also have a meaning, and if any reader of Irish myths had a chance to meet these creatures, he would know how to distinguish one from the other. Despite the fact that these words do not have denotations, they have quite clear significative definitions, so that any creature with the required distinctive features could be identified as an elf or brownie.

Ostensive definitions.

The ostensive definition is similar to the denotative definition, however, instead of mentioning examples of birds (which would be meaningless if the listener does not first know the meanings of the words sparrow And thrush) it shows or presents these examples. Any child who learns the meaning of words does so with ostensive definitions. To one who does not know in advance the meanings of any words, other words will not help.

There are some words whose meanings people usually learn ostensively, although they could be learned in other ways. What does the word mean hexagon, we can learn from his significative definition: "any flat closed figure having six sides that are straight lines" - but we can learn this also from the drawing shown to us of a hexagon. There are, however, some words whose meaning seems to be learned only ostensively, such as the names of our simplest sensory impressions. Will a person blind from birth be able to find out what the word means red if he could never see a single example of red? Can anyone understand what is pain or anger if he himself has never experienced these feelings? Words cannot replace impressions, they only help us identify the impressions we have already received.

On the other hand, there are also such words, the meanings of which cannot be shown or indicated, but must be determined verbally, i.e. with the help of other words or sometimes with the help of combinations of words with gestures: reality,being,concept,explanation and most of the terms used in some abstract discipline like philosophy.

The information that is associated with a certain word is not exhausted by its meaning. Words also have connotations (sometimes also called semantic associations) that are not included in the meanings of words in a strict sense and thus are not reflected in their interpretations. The connotations of a word are insignificant, but stable signs of the expressed concept, which in a given culture are attributed to the corresponding object or phenomenon of reality. An example of connotations are the signs of "stubbornness" and "stupidity" in the word donkey, a sign of "monotonicity" of the word to nag, signs of "quickness" and "inconstancy" of the word wind.

So, the most accurate or, in any case, the preferred way to determine the meaning of a word in semantics is considered (or, at least, until recently it was considered) cm. COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS) setting a list of features that an object must have in order for a given word (or phrase) to be applicable to it. But how are the signs that make up the interpretation stand out?

SEMANTIC RELATIONS

The selection of features used in the interpretation of the word is carried out on the basis of a comparison of this word with other words that are close to it in meaning, i.e. related to the same subject or conceptual area. To designate a group of words that correspond to the same area of ​​representations and, as it were, without a trace, dividing it into parts corresponding to the meanings of these words, the German linguist J. Trier introduced the concept of a semantic field. Examples of semantic fields: the field of time, the field of animal husbandry, the field of kinship names, the field of color designations, the field of verbs of motion, the field of directional prepositions, etc. Within the semantic field, words are interconnected by semantic relations. Establishing the types of such relationships and identifying their presence between words within specific semantic fields is traditionally considered one of the main tasks of lexical semantics.

In vocabulary, it is customary to distinguish the following types of semantic relations.

Synonymy.

This type includes relationships based on full or partial coincidence of values. Words linked by the relation of synonymy are called synonyms. Depending on whether differences in the meaning of words are allowed at all, and if they are allowed, then which ones, varieties of synonymy and synonyms are distinguished. The relation of complete or exact synonymy connects words that do not show any semantic differences. Exact synonymy is a rare phenomenon, which is usually explained by the redundancy of coding the same content by different formal means. Examples of candidates for exact synonyms in Russian: hippo - hippopotamus; throw - toss;look - look; plebiscite - referendum; everywhere - everywhere; fall asleep - fall asleep. If the signifieds of two words coincide in everything except for the expressive-evaluative elements of their meaning, then the relation connecting them is called (expressive-) stylistic synonymy. Examples of expressive-stylistic synonyms: run away - run away - run away or English. policeman-cop"police officer".

Words whose meanings are quite close, but also contain features that distinguish them, are called quasi-synonyms. For example, the words are quasi-synonymous order And demand: both denote the inducement of the addressee to the action that he, from the point of view of the instigator, must perform. But if order only one who controls the situation in one way or another (due to his authority, social status or just a weapon in his hands) can demand maybe someone who is not the master of the situation, but believes that in this case the law or other legal norm is on his side. Thus, an inhabitant whose passport was taken away by a policeman can demand, but not order last to return it. Among the varieties of quasi-synonymy, hyponymy and incompatibility stand out.

Hyponymy.

Hyponymic, or genus-species relation connects a word denoting a genus of entities or phenomena with words denoting species distinguished within this genus. This relationship is related to the words in pairs tree - oak; relative - nephew;color - blue;to move - to go;vessel is a glass. A word expressing a more general concept in this variety of semantic relations is called a hypernym, and a word denoting a particular case, a type of a specified kind of objects or phenomena, is called a hyponym. Words that have a common hypernym are called cohyponyms (or cohyponyms). Yes, the word tree is a hypernym for words oak,ash,birch,palm,saxaul etc., which are co-hyponyms.

Incompatibility

is the relationship between cohyponyms. So, with regard to incompatibility, there are words mother And father,go And run away,sweet And salty and so on. These words are incompatible in the sense that they cannot simultaneously characterize the same phenomenon, refer to the same object. In other words, the denotations (extensions) of words connected by the relation of incompatibility do not intersect, despite the fact that their significations have a common part - a set of features that make up the signification of their common hypernym. This is the difference between incompatibility and a simple difference in meaning. Yes, the words youth And poet have different meanings, but they are not connected by the relationship of incompatibility (sets of young men and poets can intersect), while the words youth And old man are incompatible in meaning. Words can also be in a relationship of incompatibility when there is no word in the language that expresses that generic general concept, the types of which denote these words. So, for example, there is no word that would express a generic concept for words that are in relation to incompatibility excellent student,good,troechnik etc.

The relation "part - whole"

associates the name of some object with the names of its component parts. Yes, the word tree connected by the relation "part - whole" with the words branch,sheet,trunk,roots. IN difference from representatives of a certain species, each of which is also a representative of the corresponding genus (for example, oak / birch / alder and so on. essence trees), none of the parts of the whole is a whole in itself (e.g., neither branch, neither sheet, neither trunk, neither roots do not eat tree).

Antonymy.

This relation is based on the opposition of the concepts expressed in words. The three main varieties of antonymy differ in the nature of the opposite. The relation of complementarity, or complementary antonymy, implies a situation in which the statement of what one of the antonyms means entails the denial of what the second means, for example dry – wet,sleep - stay awake,with - without. Complementarity can be viewed as a special case of incompatibility, when a certain content area common to two words is completely distributed between their meanings. The relation of vector antonymy connects words denoting multidirectional actions: fly in - fly out,say hello - say goodbye,freeze - thaw and so on. The relationship of counter-antonymy connects words, the meaning of which includes an indication of opposite zones of the scale corresponding to one or another dimension or parameter of an object or phenomenon, such as size, temperature, intensity, speed, etc. In other words, this kind of antonymy is typical for words with a "parametric" meaning: big small,wide narrow,heat - cold,high - low,crawl - fly(about time), etc. In contrast to complementary antonymy, the words associated with this relationship do not cover the entire scale with their meanings, since its middle part is indicated by some other expressions.

Conversibility.

This semantic relation can link words denoting situations with at least two participants. Conversives are words that describe the same situation, but considered from the point of view of its different participants: win - lose,above under,to have - to belong,younger - older and so on. Thus, the same state of affairs can also be described as X ahead of Y by 10 points, And How Y is 10 points behind X, but in the first case due to the use of the verb get ahead of the main character is represented X, and in the second verb fall behind puts the other participant in the spotlight Y-a.

Of course, the relationships discussed above do not exhaust the set of systemic semantic relationships between words in a language. Many other relations, which Yu.D. Apresyan called relations of semantic derivativeness, are distinguished and described in the “meaning - text” model as lexical functions - substitutions that match any word to which they are in principle applicable to another word (words), related in some way to it. For example, the lexical function Sing matches a word denoting a homogeneous whole, a word denoting a single element, or a quantum of this whole. So, Sing beads) = bead; Sing ( fleet) = ship; Sing ( kiss) = kiss etc., and the lexical function Able i connects the name of the situation with the name of the typical property of the i-th participant in this situation. So, Able 1 ( cry) = tearful; Able 2 (transport)= transportable.

SEMANTIC RESEARCH METHODS

Semantics uses a wide range of research methods - from general scientific methods of observation (including introspection, which plays an important role in semantics, i.e. observation of one's own inner world), modeling and experiment to private methods, often based on the achievements of related sciences - for example, logic (presuppositional analysis) and psychology (various associative experiments). The most famous of the semantic methods proper is the method of component analysis.

Component Analysis of Meaning

in the broadest sense, it is a set of procedures, as a result of which a word is compared with its definition, which is, in one way or another, a structured set of semantic components that specify the conditions for the applicability of a given word.

To give some idea of ​​the component analysis of meaning as a method of obtaining a dictionary definition of a word, we will demonstrate one of its variants on a specific example of analyzing the meaning of a word. magazine. First you need to find a word or phrase denoting the kind of thing, the kind of which are magazines. Such a phrase would be periodical. The meaning of this generic in relation to the word magazine name (hyperonym) will be the first semantic component included in the definition of the word magazine. This component - "periodical" - reflects the features that the journal has in common with other things of the same kind (these features are "edition" and "periodicity" - get explicit, i.e. explicit expression in a phrase periodical). Such signs as part of the meaning of a word are called integral semanticsigns. Now we need to find all the words denoting other types of periodicals, and, mentally comparing the objects denoted by the word magazine, with the objects designated by each of them, to identify those features by which journals differ from other types of periodicals. Such signs as part of the meaning of a word are called differential semantic features. Apart from magazines periodicals are newspapers, bulletins And directories. Magazines differ from newspapers in that they are bound. If a printed edition is not bound, it cannot be called a journal. Journals differ from bulletins and catalogs in another way, related not to the form of publication, but to its content: if the journals publish mainly texts related to journalism, as well as to scientific or fiction literature (articles, essays, news reports, feuilletons, interviews , stories and even chapters of novels), then bulletins are created primarily for the publication of official documents (laws, decrees, instructions, etc.) created by organizations publishing bulletins, as well as reference information supplied by these organizations, and catalogs - for the publication of data about the goods or services offered by a particular firm. Thus, in the interpretation of the word magazine two components should be included, corresponding to two differential features of the designated class of objects, characterizing them from the side of appearance and from the side of content.

One of the directions within the framework of the component analysis of meanings, developed in the works of A. Vezhbitskaya and her followers, proceeds from the fact that the meanings of all words in all languages ​​can be described using the same limited set of several dozen elements that are indecomposable like atoms in physics, semantic primitives corresponding to the meanings of words, presumably found in any language and constituting its conceptual basis. Semantic primitives include "I", "you", "someone", "something", "people", "think", "say", "know", "feel", "want", "this ", "same", "other", "one", "two", "many", "all", "do", "happen", "no", "if", "may", "like ", "because", "very", "when", "where", "after", "before", "below", "above", "have parts", "kind of (smth.)", "good", "bad", "big", "small" and possibly some others. This direction develops the ideas of the philosophers of the Enlightenment (Descartes, Newton, Leibniz), who tried to develop a special language of thought (lingua mentalis), through which one could interpret the meanings of all the words of ordinary language.

Component analysis of the meanings of words contributed to the penetration into the semantics of experimental research methods.

An experiment in semantics.

As in the old days, the main method of revealing the meaning of a word in lexical semantics remains introspection, i.e. the linguist's observation of those ideal entities that are associated with a given word in his own mind. Naturally, if the native language is the object of semantic research, then the linguist, being its native speaker, can rely on his own knowledge of the language and draw conclusions about the meaning of the word, relying on his own intuition, on how he himself uses and understands the word. In the case of studying the semantics of a non-native language, semantic analysis must necessarily rely on a certain corpus of uses of the studied words with their contexts, extracted from various texts of oral and written speech, recognized as authoritative examples of the corresponding literary language or any of its sublanguages. Both those correct uses of the word that the linguist himself generates, and those that he extracts from texts, form, so to speak, “positive” linguistic material, comprehending which the linguist formulates for himself a hypothesis about the meaning of the studied expressions.

An experiment in semantics serves to confirm or refute semantic hypotheses based on observations of the uses of words that are recognized as correct. A linguist can experiment with his own linguistic consciousness, if he studies his native language, and with the consciousness of other native speakers (which is necessary when studying a non-native language).

The most important type of experiment in semantics (in Russian linguistics, first proposed by academician L.V. Shcherba in 1931 in the article On the triple aspect of linguistic phenomena and on the experiment in linguistics) is that the researcher, in order to check the correctness of his assumptions about the meaning of a particular word, must try to use this word in contexts other than those in which it has already been encountered. The linguistic material obtained as a result of such an experiment will contain, along with correct, possible phrases with a given word, also incorrect ones that deviate from the norm and, for this reason, never occur in texts that embody the linguistic norm. These incorrect phrases form the so-called "negative language material", the role of which in semantic research is enormous, since on its basis it is possible to identify those elements of the word's meaning that prevent its use in a given context. (Negative language material is found in the texts of works of art, the authors of which use the violation of the language norm as an artistic device, cf., for example, the following semantically anomalous - which is usually marked with an asterisk before the corresponding language expression - phrases from the works of Andrei Platonov: *They were present at this meeting well in advance; * Umrishchev took the next book from under the table and became interested in it; an asterisk in front of a linguistic expression shows its incorrectness from the point of view of the linguistic norm.) In other words, in the course of an experiment of the described type, the linguist generates semantically anomalous phrases with a given word and checks whether, based on his assumption about the meaning of a certain word, it is possible to explain the anomalous use of it in a given context . If possible, then this confirms the hypothesis; if not, then the original hypothesis should be clarified.

For example, if we assumed that in the meaning of the verb suggest (X offers Y to P) has a component "X thinks Y might be interested in P", as indicated by typical usages like He invited me to play chess / (drink)tea / interesting work etc., then we will substitute this word in contexts in which X cannot in any way consider that the proposed action is in the interests of Y, for example, in the context in which X rudely induces Y to leave the premises, believing that Y will not do it of her own free will. Phrase * He told me to get out is clearly anomalous, which is naturally explained by the original hypothesis and thus confirms it. Similarly, the anomalous phrase * The prisoner broke the bars on the cell window at night and fled confirms the assumption that the object of action split must be of fragile material, since it is precisely the absence of this property in iron prison bars that naturally explains the incorrect use of the verb in this context.

Another type of experiment involves the use of the objects themselves or physical phenomena included in the denotation of the word. However, in many cases, the objects themselves can be replaced by their images. Typically, such experiments are carried out with the involvement of native speaker informants and are aimed at establishing which parameter of an object or phenomenon determines the possibility of using a specific word to designate it. A typical example of such an experiment is described in the work of the American linguist W. Labov Structure of denotative meanings(1978, Russian translation 1983), devoted to the study of the meanings of words denoting vessels in different languages. The experiment consists in the fact that the informant is shown various images of vessels in a random order and asked to name the next vessel. The following parameters vary in the images: the ratio of the width of the vessel to the height; shape (cup-shaped, cylindrical, truncated cone, prism); presence / absence of a handle; presence/absence of a foot. In addition to the images themselves, the “context” in which the object appears also varies: 1) “neutral”, i.e. out of the situation; 2) "coffee" - name a vessel in a situation where someone, stirring sugar with a spoon, drinks coffee from this vessel; 3) "food" - the vessel is on the dining table and is filled with mashed potatoes; 4) "soup"; 5) "flowers" - a vessel with flowers is depicted standing on a shelf. The material that informants were told about orally also varies. An analysis of the answers of the informants makes it possible to reveal the dependence of the use of each word on certain properties of the denotation. These properties, as well as their reflection in the minds of native speakers, will be candidates for differential semantic components that make up the meaning of a given word. Among them, categorical components are distinguished, which form the necessary conditions for the use of this word. For example, English. goblet"glass" as a categorical feature has "the presence of a leg": if the vessel does not have a leg, then the word goblet is never used to denote it. Another kind of components are probabilistic: they display properties that usually, but not always, have the denotations denoted by a given word. For example, the vessel denoted by the English word cup"cup", usually has a handle, but, as the experiment showed, for naming a vessel by this name, the presence of this feature is not necessary.

Within the framework of component analysis, a number of semantic tests of various types were developed, which are used both to identify certain semantic characteristics of a word and to test semantic hypotheses. A great contribution to their development was made by E. Bendix and J. Leach. For example, the essence of the “test for free interpretation” is to ask the informant to interpret (explicate, explain) this or that expression or the difference between two expressions. The linguist addresses the informant with questions like: “What does this mean?” or "If you heard someone say that, what do you think they mean?"

If we want to find out the semantic difference between two words, then we build test expressions as minimal pairs, that is, they must match in everything but one word. So, if we are interested in what is the difference between the meanings of the words ask And order, we turn to the informant with the question: “What is the difference in meaning between He asked me to do it And He ordered me to do it"? This test can be used at the stage of forming a semantic hypothesis.

Once we have a hypothesis, we can test its correctness with more stringent multiple-choice tests, such as the "implicative test" in which the informant is asked to rate whether P is true when Q is true. Q contains the word being studied, and the statement P expresses the intended component of the word's meaning. So, if we assume that in the meaning of the verb order(X orders Y Z) includes the component "X believes that Y must do Z", we ask the informant: "Provided that the statement He ordered me to stay true, is the following statement true: He considers,that i should stay? If at least 80% of the informants give a positive answer to this question, then this is considered evidence that the semantic component being checked is indeed present in the meaning of the verb under study.

complicating factors.

In the light of the foregoing, it may seem that each word has one clear and definite denotative meaning, which can be given by a strict designative rule that tells us exactly under what conditions the word should be used. But in reality, things are not so simple at all.

Ambiguity.

Many words (perhaps even most words) are used in more than one sense. Word onion can be used both to designate a garden plant with an edible bulb and edible tubular leaves, and to designate an ancient weapon for throwing arrows. English word saw used to refer to both some tool (saw), and as a past tense form of the verb see"see". The same sequence of sounds in such cases turns out to be correlated with completely different meanings, and the absence of any connection between these meanings gives reason to see in these and similar cases not one word with different meanings, but several different words that accidentally coincide in form. (perhaps from some point; for example, in the word onion 2 "weapon" historically had a nasal sound, which later coincided with the usual [u] in the word onion 1 "plant"). Such words are called homonyms, and the corresponding type of ambiguity is called homonymy. With another type of ambiguity, called polysemy or polysemy, the meanings of a certain word, although different, are interconnected, or, in other words, have an essential common part. For example, Russian Creation and English. creation can denote both the process of "creation" and its result - "what is created". Word movie can mean either "film", or "a theater in which films are shown", or "an art form of which films are works". Polysemy does not destroy the identity of the word, which is considered as an integral, but multi-valued unit of the language. Homonymy and polysemy, as a rule, do not create confusion; due to the sufficient difference in meaning, the context usually indicates the intended meaning of the word. But in other cases, the meanings are so close to each other that the speaker, knowing these meanings, can easily “slip” from one to the other. Thus, a person who has thousands of physically different books on the shelves, which are identical unsold copies of the publication of his manuscript, can be said to have one book or that he has a thousand books, depending on whether the word is used book in the meaning of a type (an edition of a book embodied in multiple copies) or in the meaning of an instance (the implied physical object itself; this opposition, well-known from semiotics, is sometimes rendered without translation: type - token). It's the same bus,which goes from the subway past the park? Some will say yes, some will say no. But this argument will be purely verbal: if "the same bus" means physically the same vehicle, then the exact answer is likely to be negative; if a bus of the same route is meant, then the answer has every right to be positive. When such cases of ambiguity occur, it is important to understand that they can be resolved by carefully distinguishing between the different meanings attached to the word or phrase used. Verbal disputes arise when people think they disagree about facts, when in reality their disagreement stems only from the fact that certain keywords have different meanings for the disputants. Of course, to absolutize the semantic causes of disputes and conflicts, as did representatives of the school of “general semantics” popular in the USA in the 1930s–1960s (its founder was A. Kozhibsky, and the most significant representatives were S. Hayakawa and A. Rapoport), it is not worth it, but it is almost always useful to figure out whether the use of linguistic expressions in significantly different meanings is hidden behind misunderstanding.

The most common type of ambiguity occurs when a word is used figuratively. sharp knife- this is a knife that cuts well, spicy cheese does not really cut the tongue, but there is such a feeling as if he did it. Word fox in literal usage denotes a species of mammal, but in figurative usage ( He is a sly fox) This word denotes an insidious person. Thus, there are pairs like English. dining-room table"dinner table" - table of statistics"statistical table"; your shadow"your shadow" - he is a mere shadow of his former self"only a shadow remained of him"; cool evening"cold evening" a cool reception"cold reception"; higher in the sky"higher in the sky" higher ideals"higher ideals," etc. In most of these cases, the context clearly determines whether the usage is literal or figurative.

Metaphor.

Although a figurative word acquires at least one additional meaning and becomes ambiguous in this sense, figurative expressions often allow us to talk about things for which we would otherwise not be able to find suitable words. In addition, they tend to be more lively and powerful than literal expressions. This is especially true for metaphor. In this case, a word that is related in a dictionary to one subject of thought is used to refer to another subject of thought. Speaking of gossiping flames(English) the gossip of flames,letters."gossip of the flame"; in the Russian translation there are two metaphors, but one of them, “tongues of flame”, is familiar and poorly realized, such metaphors are also called conventional or “dead” - they are discussed in the next paragraph), Walt Whitman uses a word that refers to chatter that spreads rumors, to denote the lively crackle of fire. In the case of a metaphorical use of a word, its figurative meaning is determined by the preservation of some similarity with the literal meaning of this word and cannot be understood in isolation from the literal meaning. The figurative meaning of Whitman's metaphor, describing the noise with which the flames rush about, would pass us by if we did not know or could not think of the literal meaning of the word gossip"talk, rumor, gossip." The paraphrases proposed here do not exhaust the complex relationships between the literal and figurative meanings of words, and certainly cannot reproduce the psychological effect of seeing a word used in such a way that it confronts us with our prior knowledge of its literal meaning. This is the multiplication of semantic potential, which is so characteristic of metaphor.

Metaphors that are used again and again in everyday speech tend to lose their literal meanings; we get so used to them that we go straight to their figurative meanings. Most people, having heard English. blockhead"blockhead, chump" (lit. "chump head"), think directly of someone stupid, not at all correlating this word with any stupidity of any real wooden block. Yes, the word blockhead lost its creative, image-forming function, characteristic of metaphors, and turned into a "dead metaphor". Many words are so imbued with their metaphorical uses that dictionaries describe as literal meanings what were once figurative meanings. That's English. hood"hood, cowl, crew top, bird's tuft, cover, cover, cap, engine hood", which turned into a designation of a metal surface covering the car mechanism from above. The old meaning of the word hood"cap" is retained, and its many figurative meanings make the word "semantically complex". Of course the word hood also has a figurative use, as, for example, in the compound word hoodwink"to mislead, deceive, deceive." In the 17th century word explain"explain, interpret" still retained remnants of its literal meaning in Latin (from which it was borrowed) - "to reveal, unfold", so that it could be used in a sentence like The left hand explained into the palm"The left hand unclenched into a palm." Today the original literal meaning of the word explain completely gave way to the meaning that arose as a figurative expansional use. The histories of many words vividly demonstrate the significant role metaphor plays in semantic change.

Vagueness.

The most annoying problems for semantics are created by such a complicating factor as vagueness. "Fuzzy" is the opposite of "precise". Vague words are inaccurate in relation to the world they are meant to describe. But they can be inaccurate in several different respects.

The simplest type of vagueness is created by the absence of a clear boundary between the applicability and inapplicability of a word. One item is distinctly colored in yellow color, the other is just as distinctly colored in orange; but where to draw a clear dividing line between them? Yellow or orange should be called what lies in the middle? Or maybe we should introduce a new concept of yellow-orange? But this will not solve the indicated difficulty, because the question will arise where to draw the line between orange and yellow-orange, and so on. When nature itself gives us a continuity within which we want to draw some distinction, then any point at which we try to make this distinction will be somewhat arbitrary. The use of "this" rather than "that" word seems to imply a clear transition point, although there is no such in nature. Scalar (corresponding to some scale) words - such as slow And fast, easy And difficult, solid And soft, illustrate this type of vagueness.

It happens that the conditions for the use of a word are described by multiple criteria. This is not the same as ambiguity, in which the word is used in several different senses. But this also does not mean that a certain set of conditions must be satisfied for the use of the word, since in the normal case this takes place without any vagueness. We have already mentioned three conditions for the use of the word triangle but the word triangle is not vague, but precise. By "multiple criteria" is meant the fact that there is no single set of conditions that govern its use in the same sense that the three conditions mentioned above govern the use of the word triangle; moreover, it may turn out that there is no such condition at all that must be satisfied in order for the use of the word to be possible. The creatures we call dogs, as a rule, they are covered with hair, able to bark, wag their tails, run on all fours, etc. But a dog with three legs is still a dog; a dog that does not know how to bark can also remain a dog (such is the African breed of basenji), etc. Feature A may be absent as long as features B, C, and D are present; feature B may be absent as long as features A, C, and D are present, and so on. None of these are necessary; a combination of others is sufficient. Here the very distinction between distinguishing and accompanying features collapses; instead, we have a certain set, a kind of quorum (required number) of characteristics, the presence of which is necessary in order for a given word to be applicable to a given subject. A quorum of senators is required to declare a session of the Senate open, but there is no such senator whose presence would be necessary given the minimum required number of other senators. This is the quorum requirement.

The picture is further complicated by the following circumstances. (1) Sometimes there is no definite number of features that make up this quorum set: all we can say is that the more features of a given item have the "X-ness" property, the more we tend to use word "X". (2) Nor can it be said that all these signs have the same weight. Saying that someone smart(intelligent), we give the ability to solve new problems more weight than memory. (3) Some attributes may be present to varying degrees: for example, almost everyone is able to somehow cope with solving problems, but the higher the degree of this ability, the higher mind(intelligence). The more pronounced the sign of "X-ness", the more confident we are about the applicability of the word "X".

Not only the word we are trying to define can be vague; the words by which we give this definition can also be vague. English word murder means "deliberate killing" ("deliberate murder"), as opposed to manslaughter"bloodshed", in which the killing is unintentional or accidental; But is it enough for an action to be recognized as arbitrary that it be intentional, or is it also necessary that it be thought out (planned in advance)? And when, in general, can something be called murder? If someone allows the death of another through negligence or does not save another in a situation where he could have saved, then did he kill him? Does the wife kill her husband, driving him to suicide? The impression of precision that arises in the construction of a strictly formulated definition may be illusory, for the vagueness that characterized the interpreted word may again manifest itself in the meanings of the words with which we are trying to construct a definition, so that no vagueness really get rid of.

Sometimes we, in practical terms, do not need to strive for greater accuracy. When someone says: The corridor goes into the depths of the building, then the incompatibility of the verb leave with the designation of a stationary object does not interfere with understanding at all. Sometimes we really need to be more precise, but the state of our knowledge does not allow us to clarify anything. However, vague descriptions are in most cases still better than no description at all; the Austrian philosopher L. Wittgenstein, who once claimed the opposite (the thesis of his Logico-Philosophical Treatise says: “What is impossible to speak about, about which one must be silent”), towards the end of his life, he abandoned his radical position.

The value of the proposals.

Words and phrases are connected to each other, forming sentences - semantic units that we most often use in everyday speech. Words in a sentence must be combined according to certain grammatical rules, which are different for each language. For example, in an English sentence there must be a grammatical minimum, consisting of a subject and a predicate. chain of words Walking eat sat quiet(possible lit. translation “Walking, eating, sitting calm”) consists of words, but does not form an English sentence, if only because it does not have a subject. In addition to these minimum requirements, it is the sentences as whole units that must matter, and not just the words that form them. Saturday is in bed"Saturday is in bed" is made up of words, and these words form a grammatically correct sentence, but this sentence is likely to be perceived as meaningless.

Just as words name things (things in a broad sense, including qualities, relations, actions, etc.), so also sentences name what might be called states of things. The cat lies on the rug names one state of affairs, and The dog lies on the mat names a different state of affairs. Of course, there are sentences that do not describe any state of affairs: we know what The cat barked, although this sentence does not describe any existing (and, to the best of our knowledge, no previously existing) state of affairs. Sentences designate not only real states of things, but also possible ones (or, avoiding the ambiguous term "possible", one can say "imaginable states of things", although the term "imaginable" brings with it new difficulties). A sentence is not required to name any present or past state of affairs, but when we use a sentence we must know what state of affairs our sentence would have to name if such a state of affairs existed. We believe that the proposal Saturday is in bed meaningless, because there is no conceivable state of affairs that could in principle be described by this sentence. Unable to think of such a state of affairs, we say, "This doesn't make any sense", "This is absurd", or "This is meaningless".

Self-contradictory sentences are meaningless because there is no possible state of affairs that they could describe. Offer He drew a square circle internally contradictory because the definitions of words square And circle incompatible with each other. I'm going to change the past internally contradictory because past refers to what has already happened, but what a person going do refers to the future.

Sentences containing so-called category errors are meaningless, although they may not contain any direct contradiction. Red belongs to the color category, round to the shape category. Thunderclaps belong to the category of physical phenomena, thoughts to the category of mental events. All this belongs to the category of temporal things or essences, while numbers and philosophical universals belong to the category of non-temporal essences. Any attempt to attribute a property belonging to one category to an object belonging to another category leads to nonsense. If we say Saturday is not in bed, then it would be a category error. It is not that it is more common for the Sabbath to be out of bed than to be in bed; it lies in the fact that the concept of being in bed does not apply to the days of the week at all. Likewise, the sentence is meaningless Number 7 - green because the adjective green applies only to physical objects, not to numbers. Equally meaningless, thanks to the presence of category errors, are sentences such as Quadratic inequalities will go to horse racing, Theories eat acidity, Green ideas sleep furiously, She heard a color, Blue is a prime number.

Literature:

Shmelev D.N. Problems of semantic analysis of vocabulary. M., 1973
Novikov L.A. Semantics of the Russian language. M., 1982
Bendix E. Empirical base of the semantic description
Naida Yu.A. Procedures for analyzing the component structure of a reference value. - In the book: New in foreign linguistics. Issue. XIV. M., 1983
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