The meaning of words

Facts like these have sometimes led linguists to undervalue the significance of the lexical meaning of words. It is common prac­tice to expose the semantic indeterminacy of words in juxtaposi­tion by citing ambiguous newspaper headlines like:

Squad help dog bite victim.

Asians settle in well.

The words alone will not do, it is argued: only grammar can sort out the ambiguity by identifying different constituent structures (‘settle in / well’ vs ‘settle / in well’, for example). And the argument is often further illustrated by quoting from Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ to show the superior semantic signalling of grammar. For example:

‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.

The words, it’s claimed, are nonsense and so all we can do is identify the form classes on grammatical evidence: adjectives brillig and slithy, verbs gyre and gimble, nouns toves and wabe. So it is that whatever meaning can be gleaned from these lines must depend entirely on the grammar. But this does not seem tо be so. Although these words are not part of the normal vocabulary of English, they resemble words that are, and so we treat them as lexical items and assign them meaning accordingly. Thus, brillig can be said to suggest ‘brilliant / bright’, slithy, ‘slimy / lithe’, and wabe, ‘wave’. So for me, at least, these lines project some meaning roughly on the lines of: ‘It was a bright day, and reptilian creatures were frolicking in the waves’. Other people will no doubt read the lines differently, but they will do so by assigning some meaning or other to the lexical items. They will not just ignore them. Meaning may not be fully determined by lexis, but given a collection of words […], we can always infer some figment of a proposition. Grammar actually provides much less to go on. Nobody, I imagine, would make much sense of:

‘Twas adjective and the adjective nouns

did verb and verb in the noun.

So although meaning is indeed signalled, as we have seen, by the morphological and syntactic processes of word adaptation and assembly, this is far from the whole story. Obviously enough these processes need words to work on, and it is the words which provide the main semantic content which is to be selected from and shaped. The grammatical processes we have discussed can be seen as playing a supportive role whereby existing units of lexical meaning are organized, modified, and tailored to requirements. They do not initiate meaning; they act upon meaning already lex­ically provided.