Blackwell Reference Online

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Consider the sentence, ‘The cat is on the mat.’ It is constructed from six words, it has a subject and a predicate, two of its words are nouns, there is a preposition and two definite articles as well as the copula ‘is’. All these are remarks about the syntax of this sentence – its form. One could know all of them and still not know what the sentence expresses, what it means. The latter sort of knowledge is semantical. The syntax/semantics distinction seems straightforward, but there are deep issues in linguistics and the philosophy of language lying in wait to make things more complex. First of all, though syntax is a matter of form, there are many possible levels of such form. Thus, knowing that a sentence is of the subject-predicate sort is a fairly sophisticated level of formal description; one must know something about grammatical categories to appreciate it. Whereas saying of the original sentence that it contains 16 letters and 5 spaces, or that it is composed of certain kinds of black-on-white shapes are descriptively no less formal, though they can be appreciated without any background grammatical knowledge. However, the complications really multiply in respect of semantics. It is one thing to say that the semantics of a sentence is its meaning, it is another to say what meaning is, or even to say how one would go about describing the meaning of words or sentences. Is it ... log in or subscribe to read full text