3 - Semantic explanation of unmarked order across the zones

Summary

Purpose and outline of the chapter

The purpose of the chapter is to explain English premodifier order semantically. Starting from the last chapter’s analysis of nominal phrase order as one of zones, it argues that the zone order is an order of ‘semantic structure’, as follows. The first words (those in the Reinforcer zone) are those with a purely ‘grammatical’ meaning. Those that come in the next zone (Epithets) are words with conceptual ‘descriptive’ meaning that is scalar. Words in the Descriptor zone have perceptual ‘descriptive’ meaning that is not scalar. Classifier words have ‘naming’ or ‘referential’ meaning. (The terms in quotation marks are explained in the next section.)

In this chapter, the terms ‘semantics’ and ‘meaning’ relate to the significance of words individually. They exclude the compositional significance of phrases (that is, the meaning of a phrase as a combination of words), which is treated in the following chapter, on syntax. They also exclude what might be called ‘sentence meaning’ and ‘discourse meaning’; the latter is treated in §9.3. ‘Semantic structure’ is the combination of types and dimensions of meaning that makes up the meaning of a word (such as ‘descriptive’ and ‘social’ meaning). The concept is crucial to the book. Those concepts will be developed in the next section, along with others.