This sentence makes syntactic and semantic sense if it ends with the first exclamation point. What do the appositives add to the meaning and effectiveness of the sentence?

"'If" '.u'

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11 Semantics

I once referred to a character in one of my cartoons as a "dork" (a popular

insult when I was growing up), but myeditor called me up and said that "dork"

couldn't be used because it meant "penis." I couldn't believe it. I ran to my

New Dictionary ofAmerican Slang and, sure enough, he was right. Allthose

years of saying or being called a "dork" and I had never really known what it

meant. What a nerd. Gary Larson (1989)

Semantics is the study of the meaning of words, phrases and sentences. In

semantic analysis, there is always an attempt to focus on what the words

conventionally mean, rather than on what a speaker might want the words

to mean on a particular occasion. This technical approach to meaning

emphasizes the objective and the general. It avoids the subjective and the

local. Linguistic semantics deals with the conventional meaning conveyed

by the use of words and sentences of a language.

Conceptual versus associative meaning

When linguists investigate the meaning of words in a language, they are

normally interested in characterizing the conceptual meaning and less con-

cerned with the associative or stylistic meaning of words. Conceptual mean-

ing covers those basic, essential components of meaning which are

conveyed by the literal use of a word. Some of the basic components of a

word like needle in English might include 'thin, sharp, steel, instrument'.

These components would be part of the conceptual meaning of needle.

However, you may have 'associations', or 'connotations', attached to a word

like needle which lead you to think of 'painful' whenever you encounter the

word. This 'association' is not treated as part of the conceptual meaning of

needle. In a similar way, you may associate the expression low-calorie, when

II4

Semantics 115

~' used to describe a product, with 'good for you', but we would not want to

., mclude this association within the basic conceptual meaning of the expres-

sion. Poets and advertisers are, of course, very interested in using terms in

such a way that their associative meanings are evoked, and some linguists do

lfivestigate this aspect of language use. However, in this chapter we shall be

more interested in characterizing what constitutes the conceptual meaning

vi terms.

,

Semantic features

j

So, how would a semantic approach help us to understand something about

Ihe nature of language? One way it might be helpful would be as a means of

accounting for the 'oddness' we experience when we read English sentences

such as the following:

The hamburgerate the man

My cat studiedlinguistics

A table was listening to some music

~otice that the oddness of these sentences does not derive from their syn-

tactic structure. According to some basic syntactic rules for forming English

sentences (such as those presented in Chapter 10), we have well-structured

sentences:

The hamburger ate the man

This sentence is syntactically good, but semantically odd. S

Explanation:

u can find an ANSWER in that.

answer: the three main types of third-person point of view are: white employ the third-person-omniscient point of view. third-person limited: a narrator reports the facts and interprets events from the perspective of a single character.

explanation:

o