语境对语义的作用探析

语言学基础论文

语境对语义的作用探析

The Roles of Context in Linguistic

Meanings

The Roles of Context in Linguistic Meanings

Abstract

The role of context in the interpretation of a linguistic unit has long been considered, even if from different perspectives: from the view that regards context as an extra linguistic feature, to the position that meaning is only meaning in use and therefore, pragmatics and semantics are inseparable. Still, context, both linguistic and situational, is often considered as an a posteriori factor in linguistic analysis. However, when language is studied in use, context always comes first, directing the process of meaning construction from the very beginning.

Key words: Context, meaning construction, lexical meaning, pragmatics, cognitive semantics

摘要

即使从不同角度讲，语境对语言历来也是被认为非常重要的。作为一种语言以外的功能，在观念上认为，意义是唯一的意义。因此在使用中，语用和语义是分不开的。尽管如此，语言学的分析中，语境、语言学和情境性，往往被视为推溯的因素。然而，当语言使用时，语境总是第一位的，直接决定意义的构建。

关键词：背景，意义构建，词义，语用，认知语义

1 Introduction

In linguistics, semantic analysis is the process of relating syntactic structures, from the levels of phrases, clauses, sentences and paragraphs to the level of the writing as a whole, to their language-independent meanings, removing features specific to particular linguistic and cultural contexts, to the extent that such a project is possible. The elements of idiom and figurative speech, being cultural, must also be converted into relatively invariant meanings.

This paper is about context, particularly about the way in which context not only affects but directs construction meaning. From a Cognitive Linguistics approach, context is not some extra information we turn to when bare semantics is not enough. On the contrary, in real uses, context always comes first, that is, before the linguistics unit can be interpreted there is a big amount of information available to participants that direct the process of meaning construction and determine which sense, from all the possible ones, must be selected.

2 The scope of context in linguistics

Context is not a new object of study in linguistics. It has long been considered an essential factor for the interpretation of linguistic expression. As early as the 1930s, Firth had started to work on linguistic corpora, and already pointed out that “The complete meaning of a word is always contextual, and no study of meaning apart from a complete context can be taken seriously(firth 1935:37). But it was around the 1970s that context became the focus of most linguistic trends.”

Among the several contributions from this tine, there was Bransford and Johnson?s claims that the understanding of a sentence does not only

depend on our knowledge of the language, but also on our knowledge of the world. Fillnore?s theory of frames and Schank and Abelsoon?s scripts tried to introduce context and participants? knowledge of the world in the meaning of a linguistic unit.

3 Context in cognitive linguistics

It is a major claim in Cognitive Linguistics that words do not contain meanings. Instead, we use words as mere instructions to construct the meaning of a linguistic expression. Therefore, meaning is not compositional, so the meaning of an utterance cannot be reduced to the addition of the meaning of its parts, either words or morphemes.

Cognitive Linguistics does not separate linguistic from encyclopaedic knowledge, or even semantics from pragmatics. Instead, most of what is said about meaning in Cognitive Linguistics incorporates aspects that are often regarded as extra linguistic in other approaches.

4 Semantics of Architecture

What about the semantics of architecture now? I shall outline two approaches to the semantics of architecture which, to make it easier, could be related to the terms ?meaning? and ?context?. The terms correspond to the distinction between the classical and pragmatically (contextually) oriented semantics of verbal language.

4.1 Principal architectural expression

The first approach is concerned with the building as principal architectural expression, other expressions being defined via their roles in the determination of the meaning of building. The role of the building in the semantics of architecture is isomorphic to the role of the sentence in

the semantics of verbal language.

4.2 Contextual approach

In the second, contextual approach – as the term itself shows – the architectural meaning is understood as context-dependent, the term ?context? being understood not only as a spatial context of a greater architectural expression, but more widely.

4.3 Correlation

In the semantics of verbal language what an element is, is determined conventionally and to linguistic expressions correspond ontological elements that are defined on the basis of linguistic classifications. The correlation of ontological and verbal structure is ensured by the concept of truth value and the related concept of the semantic role of linguistic expressions.

5 Conclusions

When it comes to the study of a real language event, any account of the meaning construction of a linguistic unit isolated from a real context can only be hypothetical and will necessarily be forced to consider a number of different possibilities where context is the only answer to decide which is the most appropriate.

All we need to understand architecture can be seen in architecture itself, but to understand it there must be some prior process of learning. The criterion of understanding is what we say, how we speak of architecture and how we act on it, but the architectural meaning itself is not translatable into words.