User:Phlsph7/Semantics - History

History

Semantics was established as an independent field of inquiry in the 19th century but the study of semantic phenomena began as early as the ancient period as part of philosophy and logic. In ancient Greece, Plato (427–347 BCE) explored the relation between names and things in his dialogue Cratylus. It considers the positions of naturalism, which holds that things have their name by nature, and conventionalism, which states that names are related to their referents by customs and conventions among language users. The book On Interpretation by Aristotle (384–322 BCE) introduced various conceptual distinctions that greatly influenced subsequent works in semantics. He developed an early form of the semantic triangle by holding that spoken and written words evoke mental concepts, which refer to external things by resembling them. For him, mental concepts are the same for all humans, unlike the conventional words they associate with those concepts. The Stoics incorporated many of the insights of their predecessors to develop a complex theory of language through the perspective of logic. They discerned different kinds of words by their semantic and syntactic roles, such as the contrast between names, common nouns, and verbs. They also discussed the difference between statements, commands, and prohibitions.

Bhartṛhari developed and compared various semantic theories of the meaning of words.

In ancient India, the orthodox school of Nyaya held that all names refer to real objects. It explored how words lead to an understanding of the thing meant and what consequence this relation has to the creation of knowledge. Philosophers of the orthodox school of Mīmāṃsā discussed the relation between the meanings of individual words and full sentences while considering which one is more basic. The book Vākyapadīya by Bhartṛhari (4th–5th century CE) distinguished between different types of words and considered how they can carry different meanings depending on how they are used.

One of Peter Abelard's innovations was his focus on the meaning of full sentences rather than the meaning of individual words.

In the Middle Ages, Augustine of Hippo (354–430) developed a general conception of signs as entities that stand for other entities and convey them to the intellect. He was the first to introduce the distinction between natural and linguistic signs as different types belonging to a common genus. Boethius (480–528) wrote a translation of and various comments on Aristotle's book On Interpretation, which popularized its main ideas and inspired reflections on semantic phenomena in the scholastic tradition. An innovation in the semantics of Peter Abelard (1079–1142) was his interest in propositions or the meaning of sentences in contrast to the focus on the meaning of individual words by many of his predecessors. He further explored the nature of universals, which he understood as mere semantic phenomena of common names caused by mental abstractions that do not refer to any entities. In the Arabic tradition, Ibn Faris (920–1004) identified meaning with the intention of the speaker while Abu Mansur al-Azhari (895–980) held that meaning resides directly in speech and needs to be extracted through interpretation.

An important topic towards the end of the Middle Ages was the distinction between categorematic and syncategorematic terms. Categorematic terms have an independent meaning and refer to some part of reality, like horse and Socrates. Syncategorematic terms lack independent meaning and fulfill other semantic functions, such as modifying or quantifying the meaning of other expressions, like the words some, not, and necessarily. An early version of the causal theory of meaning was proposed by Roger Bacon (c. 1219/20 – c. 1292), who held that things get names similar to how people get names through some kind of initial baptism. His ideas inspired the tradition of the speculative grammarians, who proposed that there are certain universal structures found in all languages. They arrived at this conclusion by drawing an analogy between the modes of signification on the level of language, the modes of understanding on the level of mind, and the modes of being on the level of reality.

In the early modern period, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) distinguished between marks, which people use privately to recall their own thoughts, and signs, which are used publically to communicate their ideas to others. In their Port-Royal Logic, Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694) and Pierre Nicole (1625–1695) developed an early precursor of the distinction between intension and extension. The Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke (1632–1704) presented an influential version of the ideational theory of meaning, according to which words stand for ideas and help people communicate by transferring ideas from one mind to another. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) understood language as the mirror of thought and tried to conceive the outlines of a universal formal language to express scientific and philosophical truths. This attempt inspired theorists Christian Wolff (1679–1754), Georg Bernhard Bilfinger (1693–1750), and Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–1777) to develop the idea of a general science of sign systems. Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715–1780) accepted and further developed Leibniz's idea of the linguistic nature of thought. Against Locke, he held that language is involved in the creation of ideas and is not merely a medium to communicate them.

Michel Bréal coined the French term semantique and conceptualized the scope of this field of inquiry.

In the 19th century, semantics emerged and solidified as an independent field of inquiry. Christian Karl Reisig (1792–1829) is sometimes credited as the father of semantics since he clarified its concept and scope while also making various contributions to its key ideas. Michel Bréal (1832–1915) followed him in providing a broad conception of the field, for which he coined the French term semantique. John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) gave great importance to the role of names to refer to things. He distinguished between the connotation and denotation of names and held that propositions are formed by combining names. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) conceived semiotics as a general theory of signs with several subdisciplines, which were later identified by Charles W. Morris (1901–1979) as syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. In his pragmatist approach to semantics, Peirce held that the meaning of conceptions consists in the entirety of their practical consequences. The philosophy of Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) contributed to semantics on many different levels. Frege first introduced the distinction between sense and reference, and his development of predicate logic and the principle of compositionality formed the foundation of many subsequent developments in formal semantics. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) explored meaning from a phenomenological perspective by considering the mental acts that endow expressions with meaning. He held that meaning always implies reference to an object and expressions that lack it, like "green is or", are meaningless.

In the 20th century, Alfred Tarski (1901–1983) defined truth in formal languages through his semantic theory of truth, which was influential in the development of truth-conditional semantics by Donald Davidson (1917–2003). Tarski's student Richard Montague (1930–1971) formulated a complex formal framework of the semantics of the English language, which was responsible for establishing formal semantics as a major area of research. The contributions of George Lakoff (1941–present) and Ronald Langacker (1942–present) provided the foundation of cognitive semantics. Charles J. Fillmore (1929–2014) developed frame semantics as a major approach in this area. The closely related field of conceptual semantics was inaugurated by Ray Jackendoff (1945–present).

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