The Handbook of Discourse Analysis

Discourse and Semantics 77
of Compositionality. The role of the sentence in larger units received scant attention,
as did figurative meaning and idiomaticity, which ran foul of this principle (but see
Katz 1964; Chafe 1968).
In their influential monograph The Meaning of Meaning (1923), Ogden and Richards
drew a fundamental distinction between symbolic and emotive meaning. Their
symbolic meaning corresponds to what other authors call ideational, descriptive,
propositional, or referential meaning, while their emotional meaning corresponds to
interpersonal, expressive, nonpropositional, affective, and stylistic aspects of meaning.
The assumption was that ideational meaning could be studied as a part of competence
independent of context, while interpersonal meaning was a performance (or discourse)
phenomenon unsuitable for systematic investigation.
In a very different vein, around this same time, Sapir (1921, 1929, 1949) and
Whorf (1956) were raising questions about the relationship between language, meaning,
culture, and personality which remain central concerns of semantic theory. The
degree to which our language determines our perception, often discussed under the
heading of the “Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis,” has become an issue again especially in
the cognitive semantics of G. Lakoff and his associates (G. Lakoff 1987; G. Lakoff and
Johnson 1980; G. Lakoff and Turner 1989; Kövecses 1986). This research direction has
revitalized the synchronic study of metaphor as well. Metaphor was already a staple
concern of traditional diachronic semantics due to its concern with figurative meaning
extensions as a factor in meaning change. The study of metaphor also received
fresh input from semantic feature theory in the 1960s, a development to which we
now turn.
With roots both in anthropological linguistics and in the phonological feature theory
developed by Trubetzkoy (1939) and the Prague School, semantic feature theory (also
called componential analysis, markerese, and lexical decomposition) was integrated
into the so-called Standard Theory of generative transformational grammar by Katz
and Fodor (1963) and Katz and Postal (1964). Katz (1966, 1972) continued to develop
feature theory to describe such semantic notions as meaningfulness, anomaly, contradiction,
tautology, synonymy, antonymy, paraphrase, and so on. The extension
of componential analysis in the direction of logical notation, especially by McCawley
(1968a, 1968b, 1968c, 1970) and G. Lakoff (1970, 1971), was a major tenet of the
Generative Semantics movement. Proposals for the representation of sentence meanings
in predicate logical notation, particularly in the intensional logic developed by
Montague (1968, 1970, 1974), have continued to flourish as an area of semantic theory.
Montague’s position, deriving from formal logic, equates meaning with truth conditions
in a model or a possible world. This research follows traditional practice in
associating truth-functionality with ideational sentence meaning and competence,
leaving interpersonal meaning as a nontruth-functional performance (read: discourse)
phenomenon.
By contrast with most other work in semantics, the functional-systemic linguistics
of Halliday (1967, 1977, 1978) recognizes not only ideational and interpersonal meaning,
but also textual meaning. It associates various sorts of meaning with choices
made all along the way in the production of a sentence in a text. This sort of analysis
reflects the proposals Firth made about semantic analysis as early as 1935 (see Firth
1957). Thus, systemic linguistics has operated with the goal of describing discourse
meaning all along.