Linguistic Meaning

The following was adapted from Alan Huffman, "The Instrumental Nature of Linguistic Meaning and the Human Factor in Language", a talk delivered before the International Linguistic Association, New York University, in April 1996.

The exact role of meaning in linguistic analysis is viewed in a seemingly limitless variety of ways by the various schools of linguistic thought. Yet nearly all, from formalism to functionalism, from traditional grammar to logical semantics, in practice agree on one thing: that linguistic meaning is compositional. The assumption is that sentence or propositional meaning is the sum total of the discrete meanings of the lexical and grammatical morphemes and the syntactic structures that compose it. This requires a mapping between each fraction of sentence meaning and some lexical, morphological or syntactic feature of a sentence.

Columbia School theory embraces an alternative view of linguistic meaning, one aptly called an instrumental view. In this view, linguistically encoded speaker input is very sparse compared to communicative output. The term ‘meaning’ is reserved for the constant input of a signal, such a grammatical or lexical morpheme. Meanings are versatile tools that nudge output in one direction or another, but this much richer output, the message, is inferred by the hearer. Messages are context dependent, but not derivable algorithmically. Their inference is helped by the hint-like meanings plus contextual and extra-linguistic knowledge. In this view, the role of human intelligence, creativity, and inference is given explicit recognition in the communicative process, but not built into the communicative instrument.

The English word with provides a very simple illustration of this conception of linguistic meaning. With occurs in messages of ‘means’ or ‘instrument’ as in

Henry cut the cake with a knife.

But a slight change to

Henry cut the cake with the bride

changes the message radically. Now instrumentality is absent, and the message is one of cooperation. In retrospect, however, it is clear that the source of these messages can be traced to elements of context other than with itself. ‘Cutting’ requires an instrument; a ‘knife’ is a cutting instrument. A ‘bride’ is not a cutting instrument; rather, ‘bride’ and ‘cake’ conjure up images of harmony and cooperation. With another change, we get yet a third message:

Henry cut the cake with a smile

now a message of ‘manner’ or ‘accompaniment’. Yet ‘accompaniment’ is literally true also of the first two messages: if I cut the cake with a knife, or with a bride, I am in fact accompanied by the knife or bride. The meaning of with is something like ATTENDANT CIRCUMSTANCE. To be sure, this is a very sparse contribution, much less precise than the numerous messages for which it is used. Yet a sparse contribution is all that is required if speakers in fact rely largely on inference to derive messages. Moreover, this contribution seems to apply to all uses of with. If, for instance:

Henry had a fight with his bride,