Semantic Theory: Naturalists vs. Conventionalists

The Naturalists' View on Meaning

Ancient Greek philosophers who advocated this position viewed naming as a natural relationship between the signs and what these signs signified. They thought that the form of words was thus related to their meaning. This relationship was said to emanate from rigidly fixed inviolable principles on which man had no control.

The existence of a number of onomatopoeic words in natural languages, that is, words whose phonetic form is an imitation of the original sound they refer to such as cuckoo, splash, crush, and hoot in English, backed up the view held by the naturalist school.

The Conventionalists' View on Meaning

Greek philosophers who argued for the conventionalist explanation viewed the relationship of naming as a matter of pure convention; in other words, the meaning of a word was not related or relatable to its form but rather was thought to derive from man-made decisions which were imposed by a given community.

As such, these decisions were considered as norms not to be violated. The rather limited number onomatopoeic words gave support to the view held by the conventionalists.

Characteristics of Semantic Theory

1. A semantic theory should be maximally constrained, that is, subject to theory-internal conditions and principle.
2. Semantic rules should aim at distinguishing meaningful sentences from meaningless ones.
3. It should represent the meanings of meaningful sentences in a clear and systematic way.
4. It must also provide principled explanations for various semantic facts, for example, it must explain why certain constructions are semantically well-formed while others are not.
5. It should be able to account for the various aspects of meaning in a language

The Compositionality Principle

The principle of compositionality is the principle that the meaning of an expression is a function of, and only of, the semantic the meanings of its parts together with the method by which those parts are combined. The compositionality principle refers to the notion that the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meaning of its parts.

However, not all expressions of a language conform to this principle. Those that do are described as ‘compositional’; those that do not are described as ‘noncompositional’ or ‘semantically opaque’. Semantic opacity (which is a matter of degree) is a prototypical characteristic of idioms.

Connotative Meaning

Connotative meaning is the emotive or social meaning that a speaker assigns to a certain expression. A speaker sometimes makes a word mean the exact opposite of its literal meaning. For example, the word ‘beautiful’ in ‘what a beautiful year!’ said to talk about the year 2020 will only mean awful. The connotative meaning of words is context-dependent and often used to achieve irony, sarcasm, metaphor, figurative speech, that is, aspects of meaning which fall outside the scope of denotative meaning.

Denotative Meaning

Denotation etymologically derives from the post classical Latin compound verb de-noto which conveys the idea of singling out an entity by way of distinctive features. Denotative meaning is a real meaning based on dictionary. It means, it interprets directly a word, phrase, or sentence according dictionary.