Mearning and concept in according with semantic approach

The above-described macrocomponents of meaning testify that the terms meaning and concept are not identical: besides its conceptual basis, the meaning also includes other kinds of information, i.e. has a broader scope than the concept. At the same time, the very term of concept may be understood in two different ways: as a reflection of the most essential features of a real object – the so-called everyday (common) concept, and as a reflection of all the object’s features, constituting its essence – the scientific concept. It is obvious that the scientific concept is broader than the common one. But how does it interrelate with the meaning? The meaning of the word pine-tree is “a coniferous tree with long needles”. It is wider than the everyday concept, because it includes information about associations related to the said tree (the New Year holiday, pine forest), as well as about its compatibility (fluffy pine-tree, tall pine-tree). However, it is also narrower than the scientific concept, because the latter represents information as to where the pine-trees grow, what kind of bark they have, and what varieties of pine-trees exist in nature. Within such a sentence as “The first stars appeared in the sky”, scientific (astronomical) information about the real object called “star” is inessential and superfluous, since the perceiver of this text will clearly understand what exactly appeared in the sky. Scientifically meaningful information remains “in the background”, whereas the scientific concept is broader than its everyday counterpart and the word’s meaning. The volumes of concept and meaning are believed to coincide only in purely term-like words, which possess no everyday concept at all. Let us, though, take into account two following peculiarities. Firstly, not all of the information represented in a term’s meaning is always actualized. It would suffice to simply compare the scope of information offered to describe the same term in school-books, on the one hand, and in scientific literature, on the other. Secondly, associative components inherent to the meaning are absent within a concept. The meanings of terms, in contrast, are not devoid of associative semes. Thus, a term like subject (part of a sentence) calls forth associations with linguistics, syntactic levels and sentences. It appears that concepts and meanings of pure terms are not identical either.

In addition to the denotative-significative and connotative macrocomponents, a word’s meaning also reflects information of properly linguistic nature – i.e. information not on the real object, but on the word itself: its grammatical features and peculiarities of usage, according to which the grammatical macrocomponent of meaning is singled out, representing information about the word’s grammatical meaning, as well as the sociolinguistic one, imparting information as to the word’s belonging to the active or passive vocabulary, its sphere of usage and stylistic marking. Not all the scientists include the above-mentioned types of information into the semantic structure of a word, although nobody denies the presence of a word’s grammatical configuration and grammatical meaning. A controversial question is whether the grammatical meaning pertains to the word’s semantic structure. The research of recent years has convincingly proved that the grammatical meaning is directly linked to the lexical one and conditioned by the latter. These are two inseparable essences of the meaning, one of them being turned towards the reality (denotative-significative macrocomponent), and the other – derived from the former – towards the language (grammatical macrocomponent). A change of generally categorical seme in the significative component (for instance, “object” – “feature”: fog – foggy) causes a shift of categorical-grammatical seme within the meaning (noun – adjective).

Grammatical meaning

Grammatical meaning is an additional abstract meaning expressed by formal typified means, imparting information as to the word’s belonging to a certain lexical-grammatical class (part of speech), possibilities of its declension in combination with other words, as well as denotative features specifying the meanings of wordforms. For example, grammatical meaning of the Ukrainian word будинок (house) is as follows: a noun of masculine gender in the form of Nominative case singular. Formal typified means expressing the above aspects of grammatical meaning in this case are the word’s zero inflexion with a hard final consonant of the stem. In a Ukrainian sentence like “За останній рік побудовано багато будинків” (Lots of new houses were built last year), the inflexion -ів conveys the meaning of Genitive case plural and specifies such denotative features of the wordform’s meaning as “multitude”, “object”.

Some scientists share the opinion that grammatical meaning is present in all the words, whereas the lexical one – in the independent parts of speech only (except pronouns). Do you consider it possible to agree with this view?

It is worth mentioning that the theory of component-wise formation of a lexical meaning has not been acknowledged by all the scientists. The primary counter-argument of this theory’s opponents is the absence of accurate methods, principles and criteria for the distinction of semes, which accounts for the subjectivity of the very procedure of component analysis. Pointing out the appropriateness of this criticism, A. M. Kuznetsov has proposed a method for verifying the truthfulness of component analysis – a component synthesis, whose essence could be briefly formulated in the following words. If the succession of semes makes it possible to recognize the word, one may believe the component analysis to have been conducted quite impartially. Thus, a cluster of semes like “tree”, “conifer”, “long-needled” allows to recognize the word spruce. We can assert that the basic denotative-significative semes are distinguished clearly enough.