1. 9 Meaning and morphosyntax I: the semantics of grammatical categories
1.1. The semantics of parts of speech
1.1.1. Analysing a language grammatically involves analysing it into a variety of elements and structures: phonemes, morphemes and words, and, within the words, syntactic categories of various sorts
1.2. The semantics of tense and aspect
1.2.1. Exploration of semantic aspects of grammar has not come to an end once we have a satisfactory theory of the parts of speech: we still have to understand the meanings o
2. Connection between semantics and syntax
2.1. Syntax and semantics are two of the basic components of linguistics, and they are closely related and affect one another.
2.1.1. syntax is the relation between semantics. If the relation gives new semantics, then syntax is semantics by syllogism. The reverse also holds: Semantics describes the syntax of objects.
2.2. Syntax and semantics both work at sentence level. Syntax has to do with the form and order of words within the sentence. Semantics has to do with the meaning.
2.3. Syntax is language dependent, whereas the semantics remains the same if the same sentence were expressed in another language. (I hope the generalizations that I have made, and the short-cuts I have taken, are forgiveable.)
2.3.1. Syntax is inherently tree-structured; that's presumably uncontroversial.
3. 1 Meaning in the empirical study of language
3.1. What is semantics?
3.1.1. Any attempt to understand the nature of language must try to describe and explain the ways in which linguistic expressions have meaning
3.2. Meaning, communication and significance
3.2.1. Is the heart of language. Meaning, we might say, is what language is for: to have a language without meaning would be like having lungs without air.
3.3. Talking about meaning in English and other languages
3.3.1. Is the study of meaning. But what actually is meaning? In Section 1.6 we will discuss some specifi c answers to this question.
3.4. The semiotic triangle: language, mind, world and meaning
3.4.1. In their standard vocabularies between language and the world of inner conscious processes like volition, perception and intention.
3.5. Object language and metalanguage
3.5.1. But for semantics the immediate objects of study are not these words, phrases and sentences themselves, in the sense of the sounds, sequences of letters or handsigns which we utter or perform and can then write down or record.
3.6. Meaning and explanation
3.6.1. We’ve now considered four proposals about the nature of meaning: meaning as reference/denotation, meaning as concepts, meaning as brain states and meaning as use.
4. 4 The scope of meaning II: interpersonal context
4.1. Interpersonal context: illocutionary force and speech acts
4.1.1. The relations between language and context are not limited to those in which a linguistic expression simply names or describes an already existing referent or state of affairs
4.2. Interpersonal context: speaker’s intention and hearer’s inference
4.2.1. As we have seen, Austin did not believe that illocutionary acts were accompanied by any predictable grammatical or lexical markers.
4.3. Interpersonal context: implicature
4.3.1. That one of the crucial tasks of a semantic theory must be to characterize the scope of an expression’s meaning.
4.4. Gricean maxims and the Cooperative Principle
4.4.1. Arise as the result of the infringement of certain principles or ‘maxims’ of rational conversational behaviour which, he claimed, govern speech exchanges.
4.5. Are the maxims universal?
4.5.1. If it is accepted that maxims like those formulated by Grice underlie many types of conversation in English, it is obviously an important question whether the same is true for other languages.
4.6. Semantics and pragmatics
4.6.1. The study of pragmatics has only arisen fairly recently in linguistics. Investigation of meaning, by contrast, without which the study of grammar is impossible
4.6.1.1. H