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MEN, WOMEN and CHILDREN: the CONCEPTUAL SEMANTICS of BASIC SOCIAL CATEGORIES Cliff Goddard, University of New England Anna Wierzbicka, Australian National University

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MEN, WOMEN and CHILDREN: the CONCEPTUAL SEMANTICS of BASIC SOCIAL CATEGORIES Cliff Goddard, University of New England Anna Wierzbicka, Australian National University MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN: THE CONCEPTUAL SEMANTICS OF BASIC SOCIAL CATEGORIES Cliff Goddard, University of New England Anna Wierzbicka, Australian National University 1. The canonical example of lexical semantics? The great Danish linguist Louis Hjemslev produced the classic structuralist semantic analysis of men, women, boys, and girls, as part of his Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (1961[1943]: 69-75). Hjemslev’s program was to progressively reduce complex semantic entities to combinations of a smaller number of simpler semantic elements. If, for example, a mechanical inventorying at a given stage of the procedure leads to a registration of the entities of content ‘ram’, ‘ewe’, ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘boy’, ‘girl’, ‘stallion’, ‘mare’, ‘sheep’, ‘human being’, ‘child’, ‘horse’, ‘he’ and ‘she’—then ‘ram’, ‘ewe’, ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘boy’, ‘girl’, ‘stallion’, and ‘mare’ must be eliminated from the inventory of elements if they can be explained univocally as relational units that include only ‘he’ and ‘she’, on the one hand, and ‘sheep’, ‘human being’, ‘child’, ‘horse’, on the other. (Hjemslev 1961: 70) In other words, man implies ‘he-human being’, ram implies ‘he-sheep’, and stallion implies ‘he-horse’. Similarly, woman implies ‘she-human being’, ewe implies ‘she-sheep’, mare implies ‘she-horse’. The content of boy and girl can be captured by means of the element ‘child’: boy is ‘he-human being, child’ and girl is ‘she-human being, child’. Hjemslev urged that the process of reductive analysis be carried through as far as possible: “until all inventories have been restricted, and restricted as much as possible” (p.71). Subsequent to Hjemslev (1961), a similar style of structuralist analysis came to be known as componential analysis (CA). The set of words man, woman, boy, girl, and (sometimes) child, and apparently comparable sets from various farmyard animal species, was employed in influential linguistics texts, such as John Lyons’ (1968) An Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics, Adrienne Lehrer’s (1974) Semantic Fields and Lexical Structure, Geoffrey Leech’s (1974) Semantics, and Eugene Nida’s (1975) Componential Analysis of Meaning. The influence of structuralist anthropology was important too. Componential analysis of kinship systems had arisen independently in American anthropology in the works of Lounsbury (1956) and Goodenough (1956), and their analyses of complex kinship phenomena in native American languages commanded tremendous prestige. As D’Andrade (1995: 30) explains, in those days structuralist techniques of kinship analysis did not seem specialized and formalistic, as they do today. “Then such an analysis was experienced as a nearly magical process of discovery in which elegant patterns emerged from an initial jumble of kin terms and kin types”. Of course, the set of words man, woman, etc. is a very small and humble part of the anthropological picture, but just because it appears to yield so simply and transparently to structural analysis it came to function as canonical introductory material. When Lyons (1968: 470) said that “what is meant by componential analysis is best explained by means of a simple example”, and adduced for this purpose sets of words such as man – woman – child, bull – cow – calf, rooster – hen – chicken, and so on, he rightly noted that this example “has often been used for this purpose by linguists”. So it was then, and so it is today. Introductory linguistics textbooks, such as Fromkin, Rodman et al (2005) and O’Grady et al (1997), routinely adduce feature displays such as those in Figure 1 below, to illustrate what is variously described as componential analysis, lexical decomposition, or semantic feature analysis. To judge from Google searches, countless linguistics lecturers in USA, Europe and Australia include similar material in their introductory semantics handouts. man: [+HUMAN] woman: [+HUMAN] [+MALE] [-MALE] [+ADULT] [+ADULT] boy: [+HUMAN] girl: [+HUMAN] [+MALE] [-MALE] [-ADULT] [-ADULT] Fig 1: Standard feature analysis of man, woman, boy, girl. Less frequently, apparently parallel word sets for animal species are used without explicit comparison with the domain of ‘humans’. For example, Radford et al (1999) illustrate meaning decomposition into semantic features by considering “triples” of words such as ram, ewe, lamb; bull, cow, calf; and stallion, mare, foal. The analysis is essentially the same, but with features such as OVINE, BOVINE or EQUINE substituted in place of HUMAN. The choice of the “third feature” (i.e. the one in addition to +MALE and +HUMAN) varies somewhat. Sometimes it is +MATURE, sometimes +ADULT, sometimes +YOUNG. In some cases, the textbooks or handouts note analytical problems with the choice of features, such as the availability of functionally equivalent variants (MATURE, ADULT, YOUNG, etc.). Less 2 commonly, they express a tinge of doubt about characterising the “female” members of the sets as –MALE, or declare (like O’Grady et al 1997: 252) that: “Nothing depends on the choice of feature names here; the analysis would work just as well with the feature +FEMALE as +MALE”. The word child usually enters the picture in connection with the point that a particular semantic feature can remain unspecified or neutral. Thus, child is unspecified (or neutral) as to the feature +MALE, paralleling lamb, calf, and foal in this regard. If these componential-style analyses of men, woman and children are profoundly flawed (as we believe they are), their canonical status in the linguistics curriculum can hardly be a matter of indifference to linguists. Imagine the ruckus if it were discovered that introductory chemistry texts included incorrect formulas or described unworkable lab procedures. The twin tasks to be undertaken in the present study are to expose the inadequacies of the canonical analysis and to propose and justify a much more satisfactory analysis. Some of the results have broad-ranging ramifications for cognitive and social psychology and for cultural anthropology. Within linguistics, this case study in semantic analysis will raise issues of semantic methodology. In view of the general revival of interest in meaning and conceptualisation that has galvanized linguistics in recent years, it is timely to return to some foundational questions of semantic methodology, lest the future recapitulate the errors of the past. We will argue that fundamental questions for semantic analysis turn on the issue of semantic metalanguage, and that failure to heed and act on these issues has undermined, and continues to undermine, a great deal of semantic work. The outline of the remainder of the paper is as follows. Section 2 goes over the principal issues in semantic theory and methodology, and introduces the analytical method adopted in the present study, namely, the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) approach (Wierzbicka 1996, 2006a; Goddard 1998; Goddard and Wierzbicka eds, 2002; Goddard ed. 2008, and other works). Section 3 first deals with the English words men, women and children, proposing original semantic explications in each case and arguing for their superiority over the standard analyses. It then continues in the same vein with the English words babies, boys and girls. Section 4 reviews the results with respect to the treatment of category structures in mainstream cognitive linguistics, i.e. in terms of prototypes and extensions. In this connection, we examine “hedged” expressions such as a real man and a typical woman, and we touch on derivationally related words such as manly, boyish, childish and child-like, which seem to invoke or activate social stereotypes. In section 5 we provide a lexical typological perspective on the meanings we have covered, dealing first with cross-linguistic semantic differences. Drawing on comparisons with Russian, Japanese, and other languages, we show 3 can be said about the balance between universality and language-specificity in this semantic domain? Before moving to these cross-linguistic issues, however, we want to reflect on how the NSM approach to the semantics of men, women and children compares with some other influential trends in linguistic semantics, specifically with the view, widely accepted in cognitive and functional linguistics, that lexical categories have a prototype structure such that some members of a category are more central than others (Lakoff 1987; Taylor 1995). This will lead us to inquire into so-called hedged expressions such as a real man and a typical man, and derived words such as manly, boyish and childish. These have been argued in the literature to provide evidence for a gradient view of category structure, mainly because such expressions appear to highlight or bring into focus certain social expectations associated with the core categories. 4.1 The NSM view of “category structure”: classical or cognitive, or both? As in other ways, the NSM position resists being pigeonholed into the stock classifications one often finds in overview discussions of “category structure”. Clearly it is not a structuralist approach, and yet (as discussed in section 3.3; cf. Wierzbicka (1992b)), it is mindful of the need to capture and correctly characterize meaning relations, such as various kinds of antonymy and hyponymy, and to identify semantically coherent subdomains within the lexicon. As far as the standard opposition between “classical” and “prototypical” views of category structure is concerned, the NSM position seems to align with aspects of both approaches, while differing from both in other ways. The so-called classical or Aristotelian view is often characterized as the view that nominal categories (roughly, noun meanings) can be captured via a fixed set of necessary and sufficient conditions, thereby implying that category boundaries are fixed and that category membership is an “all-or-nothing” affair (Taylor 1995). Do NSM explications, such as those above, represent a set of “necessary and sufficient conditions”? In a sense, yes they do. Not that it is claimed that every single use of a word necessarily fully conforms to the set of semantic components in its explication, because words may be used in the service of irony, poetry, word-play, and/or other creative or rhetorical purposes.
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