Just over eighty years ago, a new term was introduced into linguistic studies. In 1883 the French philologist Michel Breal published an article on what he called the intellectual laws of language. In this he argued that, alongside of phonetics and morphology, the study of the formal elements of human speech, there ought also to be a science of meaning, which he proposed to call la semantique, by a word derived from the Greek sign (cf. semaphore). The branch of study advocated in this article was not entirely new; yet it was mainly Breals generation, and in the first place Breal himself, who established semantics as a discipline in its own right. In 1897 he published his Essai de semantique which saw many subsequent editions and is still widely read. [...] Three years after its publication, Breals Essai was translated into English under the title Semantics: Studies in the Science of Meaning, and although the term had been used in English a few years earlier, this translation played a decisive role in the diffusion of the new science and its name.
Semantics ought to set an example to other sciences in the avoidance of ambiguity, and somewhat paradoxical that the term itself has become highly ambiguous in recent years. Since the 1920s the philosophers have acquired their own brand, or brands, of semantics, which have very little in common with the homonymous science practised by philologists. Philosophical semantics in the more esoteric sense of the term is a branch of the theory of signs, dealing with relations between signs and what they stand for. In its more popular sense, philosophical semantics is a study of the misuse of abstractions, and of other shortcomings of language. [...]
At the time when semantics appeared on the scene, the science of language was on exclusively historical discipline. Semantics wholeheartedly accepted this orientation, and for the first half-century of its existence it remained a purely historical study. Its prime purpose was the classification of changes of meaning according to logical, psychological or sociological criteria, and the discovery of any abiding tendencies misleadingly called semantic laws which governed these changes. This phase found its crowning achievement in Gustaf Sterns Meaning and Change of Meaning, with Special Reference to the English Language, which was published in 1931 and contained the first scheme of classification based on an extensive collection of concrete data. Meanwhile, however, far-reaching changes had taken place in general linguistics, as a result of which semanticists were soon faced with a dilemma which remains unresolved to this very day.
In the early years of the present century, linguistics underwent what has been rightly described as a Copernican revolution. This revolution, which was ushered in by the posthumous publication, in 1916, of Ferdinand de Saussures Cours de linguistique generale, showed itself in two main ways. Firstly, the historical bias of nineteenth century philology gave way to a broader view which admitted the existence of two approaches to language, one descriptive or synchronic, the other historical or diachronic, and boldly proclaimed the primacy of the descriptive method because it is more akin to the attitude of the ordinary speaker. The second great change concerned the way in which the tasks of descriptive linguistics were conceived. Language came to be viewed, not as an aggregate of discrete elements but as an organized totality, a Gestalt, which has a pattern of its own and whose components are interdependent and derive their significance from the system as a whole. In Saussures famous simile, language is like a game of chess: you cannot add, remove or displace any element without affecting the entire field of force. In the United States, thinking about the fundamental structure of language developed on similar lines; the new approach was codified with remarkable precision an rigour in Leonard Bloomfields book Language (1933), which, second only to Saussures Cours, is easily the most influential work on linguistics published so far on this century.
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The new conception of language, which has come to be known by the name of structuralism, has sometimes been carried to unreasonable lengths. To assert, as has been often done, that language is a system where everything hangs together un systeme ou tout se tient is obviously unrealistic. The late Professor Entwistle was nearer the mark when he wrote: I do not find language either systematic or wholly unsystematic, but impressed with patterns, generally incomplete, by ore pattern-making minds. Be that as it may, the idea of an underlying pattern has proved an extremely fruitful working hypothesis. It has been applied with conspicuous success to the phonological side of language where it has yielded the invaluable concept of phoneme or distinctive sound. From phonology, there has been a gradual shift of interest to morphological structure where the theory has produced another useful though more controversial concept: that of the morpheme or minimum significant unit of language a diverse category which comprises simple words, prefixes and suffixes, inflexions, non-independent roots and other elements, including even the intonation of the sentence. The structuralist theory has also made an impact on syntax where it has given rise, during the last few years, to an entirely new and promising technique known as transformational grammar. Even the reconstruction of extinct languages has benefited by the advent of the structural approach. Semantics, too, has felt the need to align itself with the rest of linguistics by adopting structuralist viewpoints, but these attempts have so far met with less success than in other branches of language study.
The reasons for this discrepancy are not far to seek: they lie in the very nature of the subject. Whereas the phonological and even the grammatical resources of a language are closely organized an limited in number, the vocabulary is a loose assemblage of a vast multitude of elements. The numerical contrast is striking a recent authority states that there are forty-four or forty-five phonemes in English while on the other hand the Oxford Dictionary is said to contain over 400,000 words: a ratio of nearly 1 to 10,000! But there is an equally sharp contrast in cohesion and stability. The phonological and grammatical system, though subject to long-term changes, is relatively stable at a given moment, whereas the vocabulary is in a perpetual state of flux. New words are continuously formed or borrowed from outside sources to fill a genuine gap or to suit the whims of the speaker; new meanings are attached to old words... [...]
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It is clear, then, that the vast, unstable and loosely organized congeries of words which we call vocabulary cannot be analysed with the same scientific rigour and precision as the phonological and grammatical system of a language. This does not mean, however, that words are not amenable to any kind of structural treatment. It is here rather than in other sectors of language that we are likely to find the incomplete patterns envisaged in Entwistles formula. In the search for such patterns, some linguists and other scholars have evolved, since the early thirties, a number of different techniques from which a new, structurally oriented semantics has begun to emerge. These experiments fall into three main groups: those which aim at a statistical analysis of word-frequency and other lexical features; those which seek to identify the characteristic tendencies of a language; lastly, those which are concerned with the way the vocabulary is built up, with the principles and the hierarchy of values which underlie its structure.
PROBLEMS OF STYLE
