A natural way to think about the meaning of a word is to break it down into its parts, something technically different from breaking a word itself into its parts. The latter case is, for example, the breakdown of a word like “unrecyclable” into the listemes un-, re-, cycl(e), and –able. Listemes, in turn, can be dissected according to their semantic contents. Take for instance, the listeme “girl.” The semantic parts that comprise this listeme include the notion of femaleness, humanness, and youth. Linguists have tried to formalize these semantic parts, not without some considerable controversy. One proposal is that all semantic parts come from a limited set of semantic features that we have stored in the mind, and that are part of our genetic endowment. These semantic features are posited to be the basic, binary stuff out of which all complex meaning is created.

Returning to our example of ‘girl’ above, we might formalize its semantic parts as features consisting of at least the following: ([-male], [+human], [-mature]). We would interpret this formalization as follows: the listeme ‘girl’ is comprised of three binary semantic features: it is negatively specified for the semantic features [male] and [mature], meaning that ‘girl’ is not a male and not someone who has reached the age of full maturity; conversely, it is positively specified for the semantic feature [human], meaning that ‘girl’ is a person and not another kind of animal.

Maybe this formalization process looks a little ugly to you, but there are many exciting dimensions of thought that it opens up. Ultimately, a test of its value is its usefulness in explaining things. One thing that any semantic theory should be able to explain is the idea of synonymy. With our formalization, we could suggest that words like ‘girl’ and ‘miss’ are synonyms in that they are each comprised of the same semantic features, that is both are ([-male], [+human], and [-mature]). Antonymy would arise whenever two words are alike in all there semantic features except one: so ‘girl’ would be an antonym with ‘boy’ because ‘boy’ would have all the semantic features of ‘girl,’ except that it would be positively specified for the feature [male]. On a different dimension ‘miss’ differentiates itself as an antonym to “Mrs” in a specification that we might call [mate]; thus, ‘miss’ and “Mrs” are alike in all features except that “miss” is [-mated] while “Mrs” is [+mated].

Exploring further relationships, we could say that one word is a “hyponym” of another word if it contains all the semantic features of the other word, and then some. So, for example, “girl” is a hyponym of “youngster” because in order to specify “girl” you need all the semantic features ([+human], [-mature]) that are needed to specify “youngster.” Conversely, we could call “youngster” a “superordinate” of “girl.” Hyponymy can be differentiated from concepts like overlap in ways that I will let you explore on your own.

There are some exciting philosophical implications of this model for understanding lexical semantics: words are formed from connecting already present semantic features; one result is that very complex results can be established in next to no time: Consider a word like “persuade,” used by children of any language at early ages without specific instruction. Its meaning is actually wonderfully complex, as it can be broken down into something like . . .

‘to cause someone by means of the process of disputation to do something which is successfully accomplished, and accomplished voluntarily and not through any act of coercion.’

Because these semantic features can be quite complex, humans learning a human language will learn something like the concept “rabbit” long before fathoming the ostensibly identical “undetached rabbit parts.” That is, words will come in the form of well-defined “parts,” not any old conceivable piece of a word will be able to make up a part.

Conversely, just as we are designed by our genetic endowment to package the world in certain ways, it follows that there will be a whole universe of possible intellectual conceptions that are in principle impossible for human beings to conceive. Of course, these impossible conceptions are difficult to fathom because they are by definition unfathomable. Perhaps certain mathematical concepts point us in the direction to look. Here we have concepts that we are led to posit by a logical process, even if the concepts themselves are unfathomable . . . I’m thinking of notions like “instantaneous change” (fundamental to Calculus), “imaginary numbers” (like the square root of negative one), and “quant” (a physical unit that is neither mass nor energy).

Lately, we have been considering different dimensions of meaning. So, for example, when we were looking at the English pronoun “it” in the following expression:

(1) “Look, I’ve got an apple, and I want you to hold it”

We can describe its grammatical meaning as ‘third person, singular.” Another way of looking at it; whatever “it” is, it cannot be the speaker, or the person spoken to, and it cannot be more than one. We know, furthermore, that ‘it’ may refer to ‘an apple’ in our example sentence, it can refer to something else besides an apple (perhaps the speaker is a beautiful but troubled blonde woman and she would like you to hold her pet snake, while she inspects an apple). Finally, ‘it’ may not refer to anything at all. That is, the expression ‘hold it’ can be interpreted, under the right circumstances, as the message ‘halt’!

Now I would like to dedicate this week’s blog entry to an aspect of this last dimension of meaning mentioned in the paragraph above. We have called “it” in the expression “hold it” (meaning ‘halt’) an expletive. In this case, ‘it’ has nothing to refer to. Note that “hold it” in this sense cannot be paraphrased by *“hold your body” or “hold your motion.” We have considered that the presence of ‘it’ is mandated by the fact that ‘hold’ is a so-called transitive verb, a word that requires both a subject and an object. Hence the impossibility of (3) below in comparison with (2):

(2) I want you to hold it!
(3) *I want you to hold!

In the terminology of Heidi Harley (English Words: A Linguistic Introduction), content listemes have an argument structure as part of their meaning. That is, part of the meaning of the listeme “hold” is that it establishes a relationship between two arguments: there must be a holder and a holdee . . . at least in the grammatical sense. (Can you tell me what term Harley would use for each of these arguments?). This is the case, even if the logic of the expression does not require them. Just as for the more contentful dimensions of words, we must also learn their argument structure, something that cannot always be predicted by semantic content. Consider the following sentences:

(4) Adam ate voraciously.
(5)*Adam devoured.

Why is (4) a grammatical sentence of English but not (5)? Note that we cannot appeal to meaning, as these two sentences mean essentially the same thing!

Lexical listemes may be associated with a range of different arguments. Consider the case of “like” below:

(6) Adam likes Eve.
(7) Adam likes going to school.
(8) Adam likes to go to school.

In (6) we see that like takes a so-called simple argument—a noun phrase. In (7) and (8), by contrast, like takes a propositional argument, a gerund in the case of (7) and an infinitive phrase in the case of (8). Again, to stress the distinction between structure and meaning, let’s look at the superficially antonymous set of sentences below:

(9) Adam dislikes Eve.
(10) Adam dislikes going to school.
(11) *Adam dislikes to go to school.

Note that there is no way to predict from the meaning of ‘dislikes’ that sentence (11) is ungrammatical. Its paraphrase is perfectly legal:

(12) Adam hates to go to school.

Hence we can see that argument structure is quite a separate thing from the lexical content of a listeme.

We have seen situations in this essay where meaning and structure clash. Harley points out, towards the end of our reading for this week, that when this happens, structure always ‘wins.’ Thus she points out that although ‘coffee’, for instance, is a mass noun (notice we quantify it with ‘much’ and not ‘many’), we may force a ‘count’ interpretation of this mass noun:

(13) I’ve had three coffees today. (‘coffees’ now means ‘cups of coffee’)

Adjectives have the structural diagnostic of permitting comparison. That is why a sentence like (14) below could be heard, even though the semantics seem to prohibit it:

(14) Today was the most perfect day I’ve had in a long time.

Here’s Noam Chomsky’s famous sentence:

(15) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

As a testament to the priority of structure over content, note just how well (15) works compared to the more meaningful but structurally impossible (16)

(16) *John sleep bed nights.

Can you think of some examples in your native language which illustrate the showdown between structure and meaning?

One intention with last week’s “mílujem ťa” was to show how the notion of “listeme” can be rather more helpful in explaining language than the notion “word”: As I pointed out, the Slovak expression has two words, while the English expression has three, yet they mean the same thing. Thanks to Eva S, we can highlight further the problem with the notion “word,” she writes:

“But let`s complicate the task with a Hungarian word “Szeretlek” which means “I love you”. It is just one word in which everything is included as in “I love you”. In “szeretlek” there is included both the object and the subject.”

So whether we have one, two, or three words we nevertheless have the same meaning in each case, crucially because each of these expressions contains exactly the same three listemes: the content listeme {love}, and the two function listemes {first person, singular, subject} and {second person, singular, informal, object). I leave it to my students with a knowledge of Hungarian to show exactly how “Szeretlek” expresses these three listemes.

I think most readers could see the distinction between word and listeme involved in analyzing “mílujem ťa.” However, how to separate out the boundaries between the three listemes turned out to be considerably more contentious. Zdenka K thought that the scope of the content listeme should be a bit more expansive:

“As far as concerning the word MILUJEM TA, in my opinion the base of the verb is MILU and the person who wrote it is JEM.”

And Michaela L argued to push the boundary of the content listeme “to love” even farther rightward into the sentence:

“But in the word “Milujem”, I think that this ending “m” means that “I” love somebody. If there will be “miluješ” – it means that not “I” but “you” love somebody (ja milujem, ty miluješ, on miluje, my milujeme, vy milujete, oni milujú). I think that the root of the verb “milujem” is “miluje”. Because, “mil” is not a verb, we do not know from which word, verb it is derived.”

So we have as possible candidates for the content listeme we associate with the meaning love: “mil-“, “milu-“, or “miluje.” One of Michaela’s problems with the first two possibilities is that they do not stand for something on their own; that is, they cannot be used as separate phonological words in a sentence. This, however, should not rule out their status as listemes, which are defined as he smallest units of meaning in a language, and not as something that must stand alone. When it cannot possibly stand alone, we have the terminology “bound listeme” for describing it. Note that we would have a problem in considering “miluje” to be a listeme in that there are not one but two meaningful units, the contentful notion involving love, and the functional notion involving a third person singular subject: “miluje” means ‘he or she loves”.

Deciding on a content listeme between “mil-“ and “milu-“ is a bit trickier, although a beautiful posting by Lenka V helps point the way. Notice that all the words in Lenka’s list share two things: in terms of meaning, a positive, affective denotation; in terms of form, the sounds constituting “mil-“:

“In the classroom last week you asked about the meaning of ‘mil-‘, and then about what the love is. That discussion motivated me to do a little research: Immediately after the lesson I went to the library and took an old Slovak dictionary (Slovník slovenského jazyka II. Vydavateľstvo SAV. Bratislava 1960). I found all the words beginning with ‘mil-‘, meaning something positive. I came to a list of 30 items as following:
miláčik
milec
milenec, milenecký
milenka
milený
milerád
milkovať sa, miliskovať sa
milký, milkovný
milodar
milohlasný, milohlasý
milokrásny
milosrdenstvo
milosť
milostiplný
Milostenka
milostivý
milostnica
milostnosť
milostný
milošialený
milota
milosťpán, milosťpani, milosťslečna
milovanie
milovaný
milovať
milovážne
milovník
milovonný
milozvučný
milý

All these words have a listeme indicating positive feelings (or love) of somebody towards another person or thing, or pleasant, agreeable perceptions. The underlined items are strange to my computer and probably to a modern Slovak reader too, because they were created by some Slovak writers like Andrej Sládkovič (milokrásny, milovonný, milošialený) or P. O. Hviezdoslav (milký, milkovný, milohlasný). I did not understand the words put in italics. Just to make it clear: the term ‘milostnica’, introduced by Margita Figuli (also a Slovak writer), was used to denote a beloved woman or a courtesan; and Milostenka is the name of a goddess of attractiveness, Grace (according to Sládkovič). Another surprise for me was the fact that I have never heard about ‘milota’ denoting a genus of gramineous plants (milota veľkoklásková, milota chlpatá). No idea what it is, however, interrresssting… Some proper nouns should belong to the list above too: Milada, Milan, Milena, Milica, Miloslav, Miloslava, Miloš, Milota (again!). I am sure that they were created through the application of our “positive listeme” as well as all the mentioned nouns.”

To capture the overlap in meaning in the list that Lenka V provides, we must narrow down to the listeme “mil-,“ the only surface phonological part that all the words share. Lenka’s posting is an excellent model of the way we can circumstantially detect bound listemes, those that cannot stand alone as a phonological word.

Now Mirka O’s question can be sorted out:

“I just wonder about how did you came up with the idea that the first part “MIL” of the word MILUJEM means something laden ‘love’. When I think about “MIL-“, I rather connect it with another Slovak word “mily” (kind).”

We can trace the difference between “mil-” and “mily” not to the meaning of “mil-“, but rather to the contribution made by the functional listeme “-y,” which may have the role of somewhat softening the intensity of “mil-“.

But this last claim points to another “boundary issue” regarding in particular content listemes: their meaning tends to be a little slippery. As Petronela L observed . . .

“I would like to add my personal experience with the expression ´milujem ťa´, or, more precisely, with its french equivalent ´je t´aime´. When I was in France, I met a boy and after some time, we became really good friends. As the time went on, the expression ´je t´aime´started to appear in his messages and e-mails and I became confused about what it could mean, so, after some hesitations, I simply asked him. Much to my surprise, it turned out to be just a casual way to finish one´s message or e-mail! I made a fool of myself, but the idea of saying ´milujem ťa´to any of my friends appears really strange to me! This proves that even such a simple expression like ´milujem ťa´ doesn´t necessarily have to have one clear content and clear meaning. In one language, it is used to express feeling of love, whereas in another, you can use it when adressing even to your neighbor!”

That fluidity of meaning in content lexemes is not just across languages, but occurs language internally, as Alena B observed . . .

“Many words and expressions are becoming less and less intensive. Even their true and original meaning is sometimes arguable. They are being used so often and in so many different situations that they start to lack the power they once had. They are more and more often being taken for grounded. Milujem ta, for example. It used to be a verbal proof of one’s strong and true affection, emotional warmth towards some other person (your “definition” is nice as well); a testimony of profound feeling that one could rely on, believe in, consider to be of great importance…
Today, Ja milujem otca, matku, brata, sestru;
Also Ja milujem priatela, manzela, milenca; – boyfriend, husband, lover
But I also milujem vychadzky do parku – walking in the park
A ja proste milujem taliansku kuchinu – Italian kitchen
A ja ozaj milujem Channel 5…
Ja milujem on every step I make, in every situation, what ever comes into my way.
I am rather disappointed and sad to see/hear that even the expressions such is this are becoming usual, universal and worn out.”

Thus boundaries, both in terms of phonological form and semantic content prove to be continual points of interest. It nevertheless becomes quite clear when borders are illegitimately crossed, as Renata M shows us in this final anecdote:

“I add a special kind of explanation of the utterance “Milujem”: it has nothing to do with love… just I was playing with the verb milujem and I create a sentence Milu(as a slovak biscuit)jem (eat)=I eat Milu:-)”

Like many places in Slovakia, Nitra has its share of ‘public art,’ expressed in all the advertisements, instructions, graffiti, and ubiquitous tagging of buildings, trains, bridges, fences, in short, anything that represents a potential canvas, something that can be seen by the random passers-by. So I wasn’t so surprised when a sidewalk in our fine city’s Stare Mesto neighborhood greeted me last week with the banner “Milujem ťa.” Of course, its full meaning is as inscrutable to me as the tags surrounding me as I walk through any underpass.

I look closely at the brownish paint—or is it dried blood—rather boldly spread out in front of my feet under the broad afternoon babie leto sunshine. Sidewalks rarely communicate so engagingly. A pleasant collection of lexical content and functional instructions which I can unpack as follows:

“Milujem t’a,” that is to say: ‘I have a certain feeling for you, an awareness amounting to approval, appreciation, and approbation, something stronger than mere liking, more kindred in intensity to hate, yet with positive polarity.’

Let’s investigate: there’s “t’a” . . . the single solitary walker, reader, familiar to the writer, or so the writer indicates, functioning as object of the writer’s love? Could it be me? If not, then who?

Continuing to decode, next there’s “-ujem” . . . . the single, solitary writer, agent, lover? Functioning as the speaker subject of the expression. Definitions so far are hard to come by: I’m left with the circularity of “I” and “you,” but I don’t know who.

But, aah, there’s that first part: “Mil-” from “milovat’” the content laden ‘love’ with all its entailments and entanglements. With ‘Mil’ we know that the speaker is human, has feelings, and knows what it is like to experience these feelings deeply, their presence and absence. “Mil-“ concept or atom, that which is composed of basic parts, or that which stands on its own, yet is connected with so much else? . . . such are the questions that run through the linguist’s mind . . .

Let’s think about what it means for a word to “mean” something. Learning Slovak, I’ve had some surprises with the word “no.” Part of the problem is that we have the word in English, too, where it means the opposite of “yes,” signifying something I might summarize as ‘refusal’ or ‘denial’; in Slovak, however, I struggle with the fact that “no” can perversely mean “yes,” (agreement, acceptance, approbation) even though there is a very similar word—“nie”—which means, well, ‘no.’ So, after climbing for several hours up above Strbske Pleso in the High Tatras with one of my ‘uncles’ (husband of my grandmother’s sister’s great-grandaughter) I ask:

i) Mozeme ist dolu?

And, to my consternation, he answers:

ii) No . . . . paci sa.

Only after much subsequent conversation do I recognize that he is not insisting that we climb to the very top of Mount Krivan, but that he is actually agreeable to whatever maniac idea I may suggest.

I’m told that such a “no” derives from “ano”—a shortened form of ‘yes,’ most commonly used in informal settings.

So you see that word meaning can consist of what we generally call a ‘definition,’ (in this sense “no” and “ano” mean the same thing) but, in addition, there is an associated contextual requirement. That is, part of a word’s meaning appears to include a requirement on exactly what context in which it may be used. “Ano” (almost) always means ‘yes’; though “no” only means ‘yes’ in certain circumstances.

So far, we are in the normal everyday territory of ‘denotation’ and ‘connotation.’ But words commonly have many denotations. My Kratky Slovnik Slovenskeho Jazyka says that “no” can also mean ‘but’:

iii) skromne, no dobre jedlo.
iv) Vykloni sa, no pre hmlu nevidi.
v) Usiluje sa, no nestaci.

It also appears to have a signification similar to English ‘well’, indicating heightened intensity:

vi) Zda sa, ze maju radi zmrzlinu Slovaci. No, pravdaze!

Or lack of intensity, communicating resignation:

vii) Musim ist do Rusku. No, zbohom.

These examples show that we can fine-tune the notion of ‘context’: there are social contexts in which language is used, and in informal contexts “no” can mean ‘yes’, but there are also grammatical, or more specifically, syntactic contexts that serve to tease out further dimensions of meaning. So in (iii-v) above ‘no’ occurs in situations where it is clearly connecting neighboring words or phrases. Its ‘meaning’ clearly makes a functional contribution: here it indicates that neighboring syntactic elements are related by means of contrast. Under the circumstances, ‘no’ seems to have the same meaning as ‘ale’.

Perhaps ‘no’ owes the lion’s share of its popularity to its function as an indicator of speakers’ disposition towards the comments they are making. People always have some attitude regarding what they are hearing and saying. And ‘no’ can be used to communicate that what you have just said is very obvious (e.g. vi), or conversely completely surprising:

viii) No, tu ho mas!

It can communicate resignation verging on defeat (e.g. vii), or conversely hearty exuberance:

ix) No! suri ho otec!

And the affective dimension of ‘no’ can combine with the denotative dimension:

x) Si spokojny? No!

And in the case of (x) we get a convergence of denotative, affective, and contextual cues clustering on “no”, here indicating hearty agreement underscoring an informal context.

One of the maddening—or fascinating—features of language is that words can often indicate themselves . . . or their opposites, a point repeatedly illustrated in the examples above. An adequate ‘theory’ of lexical meaning needs to explain the frequency of this apparently surprising phenomenon, and might suggest that a word’s meaning is constructed by bringing together more primary units of meaning . After all, for something to be something else’s opposite, the pair must be alike in every respect except for one, with regard to which there is a binary opposition: ‘no’ can be the opposite of ‘yes’ because they are alike in every way . . . . except one (consider ‘boy’ and its opposite ‘girl’ both human, non-adult, living creatures—alike in every way, except one). So the meaning of a word taps into ‘denotation,’ ‘connotation,’ social context, grammatical function, and the nexus of other words which make up the dictionary of the language in which the word occurs. . . at which point you may ask:

xi) ‘Uz sme skoncili?’

To which the only appropriate answer right here and now could only be . . . ‘no!”