Columbia School of Linguistics - Semantics

Semantics

One radical approach of CSL is in its treatment of meaning. Rather than assuming that there exist semantic universals -- much less that we know what they are -- CSL assumes that every linguistic sign has a meaning different from all other signs in any language. Although meanings may be similar, they are never exactly the same. And until it can be objectively shown that a particular sign has multiple meanings, the assumption is that it has only one meaning (elsewhere known as a Gesamtbedeutung), capable of carrying diverse messages. For example, many linguists believe that the word with has several meanings, such as instrumental: “cut with a knife,” adversarial: “struggle with your enemies”, and even partitive: “split with the organization,” among others. However, CSL linguists observe that what varies among these uses is not the meaning of with but the message of the phrase, due to the accompanying verbs and nouns. Struggle undoubtedly contributes to the adversarial message, but so does the word enemies; “struggle with your comrades” would likely eliminate the adversarial relationship. The little word with contributes the same weak meaning (something like: “at some time accompanied by”) throughout. Not only do words in the same sentence affect the message conveyed by with, but the surrounding context and the non-linguistic circumstances do so as well. In “don’t struggle with him,” the sense is radically affected by the antecedent of him, whether him was identified in the previous sentence or whether the speaker is pointing to someone likely to be the listener’s comrade or enemy.