General Linguistics Unit IV

General Linguistics

Unit IV

 Structural Semantics is fundamentally linguistic semantics structuralist, which together with structuralist phonology and syntax. structuralist, the greatest field of study of the Language Sciences during the century XX. It means, that Structural Semantics uses the principles ofstructuralism, as a stream of thought, to study the meaning of,fundamentally, words. This allows us to assume that Structural Semantics is fundamentally the Lexical Semantics, that is, the study of the meaning of words through their relations of opposition and association. Structural Semantics occupied a place of privilege within the semantic study.

The semantic approach assumes that scientific theories are better understood as sets of models in the abstract mathematical sense than as set of statements. This observation does not, of course, prove that an adequate understanding of theories can not be obtained from the analysis of the linguistic formulations of the same, but indicates that such an approach is likely to produce a distorted picture of the nature of the theories scientific research. In this sense, it is evident that semantic approaches, not only syntactic, when analyzing theories constitute a valid alternative to that of the Inherited Conception and that of weltanschauungistic analyzes (such as those of Kuhn and Lakatos) that remain in the mere linguistic formulation.within the syntactic approach scientific theories are conceived as formal calculations or axiomatic formal systems partially interpreted by rules of correspondence that relate theoretical terms to observational terms. Structuralism establishes a synthesis of the formal apparatus of Suppes, of critical rationalism and logical positivism with the historicist current of science.

Theories of science are cultural constructions, but this does not imply that the philosophy of science is replaced by a sociology of science. For Moulines, structuralism is essentially a theory about scientific theories, about its identity, structure, mutual relations, and evolution. Two are the key works of structuralism: "An Architectonic for Science" by Balzer, and "Logical Structure of Mathematical Physics" The aim of this work is to provide a method of analysis of scientific theories alternative to the traditional view of the heirs of the Circle of Vienna and in a spirit common to the proponents of the semantic approach. The idea that Sneed's formalism constitutes the new frame of reference required to deal philosophically with the problem of the structure and change of scientific theories owes its diffusion to the insistence with which Stegmüller has developed it. Analyzing a scientific theory is to reveal its mathematical structure or structural core, as well as to locate the set of its applications. In this way the formal analysis and the historical-pragmatic task of locating the paradigmatic applications that constitute an essential component of the theory are combined in the theory of science. The normal development of a theory consists in the expansion of its nucleus through specific laws and the expansion of all applications; in this case one can speak of scientific progress within the same paradigm in the sense of Kuhn or of the same research program in the sense of Lakatos.

The Scientific Revolutions Thus we can speak of not absolute and cumulative progress of science but of progress relative to a certain line of development. To come up with a theory is to build a structure and propose a set of applications. Sneed has the clear merit, noted by all, of having provided powerful analytical tools to elucidate the logical aspects present in the history of scientific development, to the point that today the question of the debate between Kuhn and Popper may seem obsolete today.

Generative Semantics: Generative semantics is the name of a research program in the field of linguistics, initiated with the work of several students of Noam Chomsky of his early days: John R. Ross, Paul Postal and, later, James McCawley . This evolution led to a more abstract framework and, later, to abandon the notion of deep structure. Similarly, we could say that semantics is the component of grammar that interprets the meaning of statements generated by syntax and lexicon. Well, generative semantics is the linguistic theory that comes from generative grammar, and states that every sentence performed proceeds, by transformations, a semantic and non-syntactic structure.

Rules of generative semantics:

Try to delimit

1.- the derivation of the expressions of the particular languages, starting from a universal logical semantics,

2.- the determination of the contexts and presuppositions that implies a sentence.

3.- the distinction between well-formed and ill-formed expressions.

Purpose of generative semantics: its purpose is to do an analysis in:

Deep structure

Surface structure

It does not matter so much whether our words fit reality as the image we have of that reality. These images come to us through language.