Semantics

30 BASIC SEMANTICS
Differences of quality can be found at all levels of specificity. This is why
different hierarchies of semantic domains or different ontological types
can be identified. A frequent set of ontological types at the highest level
of generality is the following:
THING , QUALITY, QUANTITY, PLACE, TIME, STATE, PROCESS, EVENT,
ACTION, RELATION, MANNER.
Cruce explains how these represent fundamental modes of conception
that the human mind is presumably innately predisposed to adopt. At
lower levels of generality there are also hierarchically arranged sets of
conceptual categories. For example:
Living things:
Animals:
Dogs:
humans, animals, fish, insects, reptiles..
dogs, cats, lions, …
collies, alsatians, spaniels…
In addition there are also non descriptive dimensions of meaning such
as expressive meaning and evoked meaning. For example, the differences
between
a) Gosh!
and
b) I am surprised
shows that a) is subjective, expresses an emotional state in much the same
way as a baby’s cry, and does not present a conceptual category to the
hearer whereas b) represents a proposition, which can be questioned or
denied and can be equally expressed by someone else or at a different
place or time. In a sense both “mean the same thing” but vary in the mode
of signifying. Words that possess, only expressive and nondescriptive
meaning and are called expletives. For instance in the following examples
a) It’s freezing; shut the bloody window!
b) Read your fucking paper!
the expletives in italics do not contribute to the propositional content.
Evoked meaning, on the other hand, refers to the difference in
meaning that results from using different dialects or different registers.
Cruce exemplifies the power of evoked meaning saying that it would be
almost unthinkable for publicity material for tourism in Scotland to
refer to the geographical features through which rivers run as valleys,
although that is precisely what they are: the Scottish dialect word glen
is de rigueur.