3.8 Semantic Impairments

This does not mean, of course, that the meaningfulness of a statement is a purely syntactic characteristic associated with the construction of complex expressions from simple ones.

The concept of "meaningfulness", like the concept of "meaning", refers to the semantics of the language, describing the attitude of what was said to reality. Meaningless as not meaningful is also a semantic characteristic.

A meaningful sequence of words always means something that describes or assesses a situation. Senseless sequences mean nothing , they do not describe or evaluate anything.

This criterion for distinguishing meaningful and meaningless is successfully applied in most situations. The sentence “It is raining” describes a specific event, but the statement “If it rains, the head” is not applicable to anything in the world and is meaningless. The expression “Khlestakov is a man” indicates a certain fact, but “Khlestakov is a man is a man” cannot be connected with anything. The statement "The laws of logic are blue" is also meaningless, since it claims to be a description, but it is not. Denial of the meaningless - “The laws of logic are not blue” is also meaningless, since affirmation and denial together either mean something or mean nothing.

None of the existing grammars of natural languages ​​— there are as many as there are languages ​​— does not have a clear and universal definition of which sentences should be considered meaningful and which ones should not. There are scattered rules of meaningfulness concerning the proposals of individual species. These rules do not cover - and do not try to do it - all possible sentences, all conceivable combinations of words. Each of the particular rules is accompanied by numerous exceptions and cautions regarding the flexible, consistent with the situation of its application.

The absence of a definition or a series of definitions that clearly distinguish between meaningful and meaningless, is not the result of bad faith compilers of grammars. This is an objective reflection of the fundamental features of natural language in science. There is no definiteness and unambiguity in it regarding the meaningful and senseless. And if the grammar correctly describes such a language, and not some kind of ideal construction, this certainty and unambiguity cannot appear in it.

In logically perfect languages, meaningful statements are clearly separated from meaningless ones. The possibility of such a division is one of the important sources of interest in these languages.

Natural languages ​​are imperfect in this respect, which is traditionally considered to be an important disadvantage of them. This is really a flaw. Meaningless statements, i.e. statements that supposedly signify something, but in fact do not signify anything, lead to paradoxes and, ultimately, to a mixture of truth and falsehood. Theories containing such statements are flawed and unreliable.

However, the criticism of natural language for the lack of syntactic and semantic rigidity must take into account many circumstances and be adequately differentiated. The foggy area between meaningful and meaningless is diversely and interestingly used in language communication. Social life, in which an ordinary language is always immersed, is largely fluid, ambiguous and uncertain. Indefinite, like life itself, natural language is therefore often able to express and convey that which is not expressible and not transferable to any perfect syntax in its semantics artificial language. As is often the case, a feature that appears to be a weakness and a disadvantage in one respect turns into an undoubted advantage in another.