This theoretical perspective also provides the framework for much of
American anthropology in the past several decades. Greenberg formulated this
framework in an influential paper in 1964. He began with two sets of
distinctions made by the semioticist Charles Morris: that between syntactics,
semantics, and pragmatics; and that between the user of the sign, the sign itself,
and the designatum (Greenberg 1964:27). Combining these, he suggested the
bounds of anthropological and linguistic investigation.
If we include reference to the users of the language we are in the field of pragmatics. If we
abstract from the user of language and consider only expressions and their designata, we
have an investigation in semantics. If we abstract also from the designata and study only the
relations between the expressions themselves, we have syntax.
Greenberg 1964:27
This formulation, as the empiricist theory of language, defines semantics as the
study of the relationship between signs or linguistic categories and their
designata. Semantic analysis is thus set off from the study of linguistic actors,
the contexts of verbal behavior, and the pragmatics of communications, all of
which belong to the domain of sociolinguists and the ethnography of
communications. Ethnosemantics, including the ethnoscientific study of medical
language, makes precisely these assumptions.
Several fine ethnosemantic analyses of disease categories, including those by
Frake (1961) and Fabrega and Silver (1973), illustrate the cultural variability of
the distinctive features used in disease categorization. They assume, however,
that the association of symptoms with each other in a category should reflect
simply their association in the objective world. Unexpected configurations are
thus inexplicable (e.g., Fabrega and Silver 1973:101). Further, disease categories