The main body of this article is substantially the same as the contents of a public lecture delivered at the 44th meeting of the Linguistic Society of Japan, June 3, 1961, at the Kwansei Gakuin University. The author did not pretend to a high academic level for the paper, since he wished that the lecture should be accessible to a wider Japanese public than a limited circle of professional linguists.
Confining himself to the problem of word-meaning, he tried to show the extent to which one is misunderstood despite his intentions, the danger obviously resulting from the discrepancy between what one wanted to mean (by placing a word appropriately in its context) and what could virtually be meant or the meaning which might be expected from what has been expressed. To the extent that what is said often tends to imply more or other than what one really and sincerely intends to mean, the study of meaning may be a study of misunderstanding or rather “being misunderstood.” Hence the problem of emotive value, semantic range and the like. But if such a field of study would be explored solely and exclusively in terms of misunderstanding, it so far should belong outside the perspective of linguistic science, since whether the 19th century philology or the 20th century structural approach is meant by the term “linguistic science, ” it is nevertheless her prerequisite to take up language as her object in an abstract form as if the object-language existed independently of the homo loquens. If this line is followed in an ever increasingly self-conscious way, it may after all be quite natural that, however uncompromisingly Hjelmslevianism and Bloomfieldianism might start in contradistinction to each other, not only glossematics but other mathematics.(If a tard criticism is preferred to no criticism, it may be added here in this postscript that the discredit thrown once and again by prof. Tokieda, the avowed anti-Saussurean, upon the Western tradition of linguistic science seems now nothing but sterile simply because of his thorough negligence, if not his sheer ignorance, of post-Saussurean developments in linguistics, to say nothing of his poor knowledge of the pre-Saussurean background, without which knowledge de Saussure himself could hardly be appraised).
Be the climate in the realm of linguistics as it may, nobody would deny that semantics should be a most serious crux in linguistics. Now one might deliberatel shift from the question of “what is meaning” to a question of a more technical and accordingly less committing character: What is the object of linguistic semantics, if linguistic semantics can and will at all claim to be a legitimate science? By examining the felicitous terms put forward by de Saussure of “signifiant” and “signifie, ” the author pointed out that the problem involved should be how to abstract the notion of “signifie” in a more unequivocal way. He suggested that its form should be viewed against the background of the interlocking of the so-called “langue” and “parole” and that it should be depicted in terms of non-quantitative probability, and not in terms of determinism.
