There are two sorts of theories of semantics. By one sort of theory, if you find yourself at an international event or an airport lounge sharing a coffee, you your fellow traveler come from opposite sides of the world, have no language in common, there are no interpreters around, and the other person’s language is not included in Google Translate. You want to say that you are committed to diversity and sustainability, you don’t need to make sure that your fellow traveller’s language has the basis for such ideas because semantics are essentially universal. They are based in a universal system of human reasoning and respect for life. They can always be translated somehow, even if this is difficult, because they are universal ideas. By the other sort of theory, with a very deep history in human culture, semantics is relative, influenced or even determined by ways of life and accidents of what a language happens to include in its lexicon. A strong version of the second theory is known as ‘the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’. The framework here is strongly committed to the first sort of theory.

By universalist theories, semantics falls outside the ‘Learnability space’ and thus does not need to be learnt. So children do not normally have to be told that some things can be painful, that there is such a thing as possibility, and that this is different from permanence.  There are difficult ideas, like the fact that quantity and quality can vary by infinite degrees.

One universal is the sense of touch and the consquential notion of a surface. Noam Chomsky (1995b) exampled the apparent universality of the notion of ‘nearness’. Obviously ‘near London’ and ‘near the cat’s nose’, involve different distances. But the notion of nearness excludes other frames of reference. If some bird or insect is flying a certain distance from the surface of a mountain, it might be said to be flying ‘near the mountain’. But if it flies into a cave on the mountain, it could no longer be said to be ‘near the mountain’, but only ‘in the cave’ because there is a nearer surface. Nearness denotes a degree of proximity to some relevant surface.

In, on, and under do not refer to absolute and invariant directions, but to the notion of surfaces. On is widely supposed to involve a notion of verticality, where one entity is above another, closer to the sky, further from the ground. But a barnacle makes its home ‘on the bottom of a ship’, a fly stops ‘on the ceiling’, reversing the polarity. Rather than denoting verticality, on denotes contact with some surface. Similarly, under is widely thought to involve the polar opposite of on. But a submarine travels ‘under water’, meaning that it travels under the surface of the water. Dishes ‘in the sink’ or someone ‘in the bath’ are not said to be ‘under water’, but ‘in the water’ because there is a more immediate enclosure, as in the case of the bird who has flown into a cave. A duck swimming on the surface of a pond is said to be ‘in the water’ as long as it is on the surface, but ‘under water’ as soon as it dives. In thus denotes some degree of enclosure. What appears to be universal here is the frame of reference rather than a spatial relation.

It is sometimes suggested that meaning is essentially categorial, that living things can be caregoristed as animate or inanimate, and so on, until one gets to particular species or social groups. But this breaks down at the point when the meaning denotes an attitude in the mind of the speaker, sometimes positive, but more often negative. Describing a man as a bloke or a geezer, or what he is doing as ambling or wittering, suggests a lack of respect. Attitude cuts across categorisation.

By the Sapir Whorf hypothesis, meanings understood by people in Stone Age cultures are likely to be different from those of people born in modern capital cities. Some things, like string theory and biolinguistics, are hard to explain. But defeatism here is specious. The fact that explanation can be hard does not make it impossible

Semantics is the dark matter of linguistics. It has to be assumed. But the way it works is up for grabs.

Perversely, the notion of a universal semantics was taken for granted by those who assumed that slaves could be ‘taught a lesson’ without a single word of explanation in a commonly shared language, as it is still thought that ‘human animals’ deserve to be punished. If they are not fully human, how can they understand or learn?