Page 221 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

SEMANTICS

dead. Pre-suppositional relations are somewhat different. Basically,
whereas negation will alter a sentence’s entailments, it will leave
presuppositions in place. Consider the sentence: (i) ‘Sidney managed
to stop in time’. From this we may infer both that (ii) ‘Sidney stopped
in time’ and also that (iii) ‘Sidney tried to stop in time’. These inferred
sentences, however, do not behave in quite the same way. Sentence (ii)
‘Sidney stopped in time’ is a logical consequence of sentence (i) – an
entailment – and it does not survive under the negation of (i) – ’Sidney
did not manage to stop in time’. Sentence (iii), however, is a
presupposition, and whilst the original entailment now no longer
holds, the presupposition that (iii) ‘Sidney tried to stop in time’ still
survives intact.
These kinds of distinctions are important for the analysis of
meaning in all kinds of discourse. Ideological claims, for instance, are
often promoted implicitly rather than explicitly, covertly rather than
overtly; and they often need to be recovered from the presuppositions
or entailments of a discourse rather than from its surface assertions.
Thus, when a Ministry of Defence pamphlet urged that ‘Britain must
do everything in its power . . . to deter Russia from further acts of
aggression’, various unargued propositions were merely presupposed;
notably, for example: (i) ‘Britain has power’ and (ii) ‘Russia is
committing acts of aggression’.
Text versus context. The third major area of inquiry and debate is
addressed to issues such as howmuch of meaning is created and carried
by the linguistic system and howmuch and in what way it is
determined by crucial characteristics of the context in which any
utterance is grounded. Indeed, some aspects of meaning previously
considered to be semantic – i.e., part of the linguistic system itself – are
nowbeing treated as part of pragmatics.
The history of linguistics during the last sixty years can be read in
terms of a continual deferral of the study of meaning. Indeed, the
progression during this time has been very much from the smaller
units of linguistic organisation, such as the phoneme to the larger,
such as the sentence or text; it has also been a progression from
substance (phonology) to significance (semantics). Meaning, however,
has at last come centre stage, and the last ten years has seen an
immense burgeoning of work in both semantics and pragmatics.
Meaning, of course, cannot be other than the ultimate goal of
linguistic inquiry, and findings in this area undoubtedly have
important consequences for associated areas of scholarship such as
media studies, literary criticism, interpretive sociology or cognitive

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