Language

Emblem of the Soviet Union saying "Workers of the world, unite!" in 16 languages

Language is a structured system of communication consisting of vocabulary and grammar. It is not part of the superstructure and develops over many centuries without relation to a specific mode of production. Language benefits all members of a society, not just the ruling class, and has existed since before class society. The vocabulary of living languages is constantly in a state of change as the productive forces develop.

A common language is one of the defining characteristics of a nation. In class societies, all classes of the same nation share one language, although there may be minor differences in vocabulary between classes.

Language needs rules to function and those sets of rules are decided by the native speakers of a particular language, dialect, or accent. This is called conventionality. Of course, those rules, that any language needs to abide by, are ever-evolving through the dialectical process. Rules deemed less fit than others will change or fade away gradually as new vocabulary and grammatical structures emerge constantly to serve new uses.

Semantics

Semantics is the subfield of linguistics that studies the meaning of linguistic expressions. This meaning is decided upon by the native speakers of a language or dialect through a process called conventionality. Language would not be possible unless speakers agreed on certain rules, structures and conventions. These conventions are arbitrary, which means that there is no objective reason why a group of speakers collectively agreed to use specific sounds and to define specific concepts the same way.

There are different dimensions by which one can analyze semantics: the word level, the sentence level and semantic change.

Lexical semantics

Words are what most people would consider to be the main conveyer of meaning in any utterance. The study of the meaning of words and fixed phrases like idioms is called lexical semantics. The meaning of a word or idiom is a definition that is born out of conventionality and it is also known as the word’s sense. A word’s sense and its definition may act as partial synonyms but there are differences. Mainly, a word’s sense is a collective quality determined by the speakers, whereas a word’s definition may be determined at certain points by individual actors. For the sake of a debate for example, one party can define terms in a way that is advantageous for them and not for the opposition. This individual redefining of terms does not affect a word’s sense, however.

Nouns, verbs and some other words can all be used to refer to entities or situations in the world and sense is only one of three important factors that make up word meaning. The other two are the referent and the form. The referent is a specific entity that is described by a word’s sense. The set of all possible referents is called the denotation. The form is just the spoken or written way in which we refer to the referent. As an example, the proper noun Marx is the written and/or spoken form in which speakers refer to the singular referent Karl Marx. The form Marx would in this case symbolize the sense of the word Marx, which would be an economist, philosopher and socialist revolutionary. In another example, if the form Marx symbolizes the sense a person who bears the surname Marx, the set of all referents is determined by the new sense and would be every person with the surname Marx instead of only Karl Marx himself.

Lexical semantics needs to be understood mainly through a word’s sense but also through its connotations. This means that a certain word is predominantly used by young people for example, or that it is chiefly used by a certain regional group of speakers. Every word comes with a plethora of different connotations that can reveal information about that word or the speaker in regards to age, gender, region, style or register.

Semantic relations

Semantic relation describes how the senses and connotations of any words interact with each other. There are two axes to consider: the syntagmatic axis and the paradigmatic axis. While the former describes semantic relation in regard to words and their co-occurrence in a sentence, the latter describes semantic relations focusing purely on a word-by-word basis.

Syntagmatic semantic relations are also called collocations. Collocations are based purely on perceived frequency: if one were to ask a native English speaker what follows after the phrase it bears a, chances are they would answer with something along the lines of striking resemblance, according to the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Striking resemblance is, in this case, one of the frequent collocations of it bears a.

Paradigmatic semantic relations can be further divided into hyponymy, meronymy, opposition and synonymy. Hyponymy is a semantic relation by which speakers categorize terms. There is a hypernym that refers to a certain category, revolutionaries, for example, and then there are many co-hyponyms, like Lenin, Mao, Luxemburg, who all share this common hypernym. Secondly, meronymy is similar to hyponymy but instead of being inside of a broader category, meronyms like trunk, leaves and branches all add together to form a holonym (tree in this case). Opposition is a semantic relation that is described by associative pairs like big and small. That specific example would be antonymy, which is opposition that occurs on a spectrum. If the opposition occurs in a dichotomy like dead and alive, it is called a complementary opposition. Lastly, if the two opposites are complementary but involved in the same event as two distinct roles, like teacher and student, it is a converse relation. The last semantic relationship is synonymy. Synonyms share the same sense but not necessarily the same connotations (because if they did, one of them would be redundant). Job and occupation would be partial synonyms because they are synonymous only in some senses. They can both mean the same thing in some contexts, but you cannot talk about the Israeli job of Palestine and expect to be understood.

See also

• International auxiliary language

Further Reading

• Joseph Stalin (1950). Marxism and Problems of Linguistics: 'Concerning Marxism in Linguistics'. Moscow: Pravda. [MIA]
• Alessandro Carlucci; Antonio Gramsci (2013). Gramsci and languages: Unification, Diversity, Hegemony. Historical materialism. Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-25639-2 [LG]

References