9 - Structural semantics II: sense relations

Summary

Opposition and contrast

The notion of sense* (as distinct from denotation* and reference*) has already been introduced (chapter 7). Our purpose in this chapter is to develop and reformulate what seem to be the basic principles of the theory of semantic fields in terms of sense-relations* (i.e. relations of sense holding within sets of lexemes) without postulating any underlying conceptual or perceptual substance (cf. 8.4). The treatment will be relatively informal and at times somewhat speculative. We begin by discussing the notion of paradigmatic opposition.

From its very beginnings structural semantics (and indeed structural linguistics in general) has emphasized the importance of relations of paradigmatic opposition*. Trier himself opens his major work (1931) with the challenging statement, that every word that is pronounced calls forth its opposite (seinen Gegenteil) in the consciousness of the speaker and hearer; and this statement can be matched with similar assertions by other structural semanticists. Trier, it will be noted, claims, as others have done, that the opposite is in some way present in the mind of the speaker and hearer during an act of utterance. Whether this is true or not is a psychological question, and one that is more relevant to the construction of a theory of language-behaviour than it is to the analysis of a language-system (cf. 1.6). In what follows we make no assumptions about what goes on in the mind of the speaker and hearer during an utterance.