Grammar and semantics

A language consists of words and grammar. Grammar itself has two parts:

Morphology deals with the structure of words, e.g. the fact that un-friend-li-ness consists of four parts (called ‘morphemes’), each of which has a meaning, and laugh-ing of two morphemes.

If a morpheme is added to a word and yields a word of a different kind this is called a derivation, e.g. the formation of adjective beautiful from noun beauty, noun decision from verb decide, verb widen from adjective wide, and verb untie from verb tie.

If a morpheme just adds some extra element of meaning to a word which is required by the grammar of the language, then it is called an inflection, e.g. the verb kill inflects for past tense, becoming killed, and the noun horse inflects for plural number, becoming horses.

The second component of grammar, syntax, deals with the way in which words are combined together. In English an adjective must come before a noun and an article before the adjective—we can get the old lion, which is a noun phrase (or NP). A verb (or a verb phrase, such as was sleeping) must in English be preceded by a noun phrase—we get The old lion was sleeping, which is a clause.

A sentence may consist of just one clause (it is then called a simple sentence) or it can be a complex sentence, involving several clauses. There may be a main clause and a subordinate clause, joined to it by a conjunction, which can indicate reason (The old lion was sleeping because he was exhausted) or temporal sequence (The old lion was sleeping after eating the hunter) and so on.

Underlying both words and grammar there is semantics, the organization of meaning. A word can have two sorts of meaning. First, it may have ‘reference’ to the world: red describes the color of blood; chair refers to a piece of furniture, with legs and a back, on which a human being may comfortably sit. Secondly, a word has ‘sense’, which determines its semantic relation to other words, e.g. narrow is the opposite (more specifically: the antonym) of wide, and crimson refers to a color that is a special sort of red (we say that crimson is a hyponym of red).

Every morpheme has a meaning. The ending -er, added to a verb, may derive a noun which refers either to the agent (e.g. baker) or else to an instrument intended for the activity (e.g. mower). Some morphemes have different meanings with different kinds of word: un- indicates an opposite quality with an adjective (e.g. kind, unkind), but a reverse action with a verb (tie, untie).

Meaning is also associated with the way in which words are combined to make phrases, clauses and sentences. Compare The dog bit the postman and The postman bit the dog, which involve the same word meanings but quite different sentence meanings because of the different syntactic arrangements.

As language is used, meaning is both the beginning and the end point. A speaker has some message in mind, and then chooses words with suitable meanings and puts them together in appropriate grammatical constructions; all these have established phonetic forms, which motivate how one speaks. A listener will receive the sound waves, decode them, and—if the act of communication is successful—understand the speaker’s message.

The study of language must surely pay close attention to meaning. We consider the meanings of words, and their grammatical properties, and see how these interrelate. When a speaker of a language encounters a new word they may first of all learn its meaning, and will then have a fair idea of the morphological and syntactic possibilities. Or they may first of all learn something of how to use the word grammatically, and this will help them to work out its meaning.

If a child or adult learner hears the word boulder for the first time and discovers that it refers to a large rock, they will know (from analogy with pebble, rock, stone) that it must be able to take the plural ending -s, and that it will probably not take the ending -en (which occurs in widen, blacken).

Suppose that the verb begin is first encountered in a sentence like He’ll soon begin to understand grammar; that is, the verb is followed by a clause introduced by to. Other verbs have this grammatical property, e.g. He started to read my book, He hopes to finish it. But the meaning of begin is similar to that of start, which is why it is scarcely surprising that it can be followed by a clause whose verb ends in -ing (I began cooking dinner an hour ago) just as start can (I started writing my thesis yesterday). And the meaning of begin is different from that of hope, which is why it should not be surprising that begin cannot be followed by a clause introduced by that, in the way that hope can (e.g. He hopes that he will finish it).

There is, as we have said, a principled interaction between the meaning of a word and its grammatical properties. Once a learner knows the meaning and grammatical behavior of most of the words in a language, then from the meaning of a new word they can infer its likely grammatical possibilities; or, from observing the grammatical use of a new word, they may be able to infer a good deal about what it means.