The meaning of the word, types, its components

It is universally recognized that word meaning is not homogeneous, but it is made up of various components, which are described as types of meaning.

There are 2 types of meaning to be found in words and word forms:

1) the grammatical meaning;

2) the lexical meaning.

3) The part of speech meaning

Such word forms as “girls”, “writers”, “tables”, etc., though denoting different objects of reality have smth in common, namely the grammatical meaning of plurality, which can be found in all of them. Thus, the grammatical meaning is the component of meaning recurrent in identical sets of individual forms of different words. Eg tense meaning, case meaning. Gr. meaning is more abstract and more generalized than lexical meaning it unites words into big groups - parts of speech.

Lexical meaning

Besides the grammatical meaning, there is another component of meaning. Unlike the grammatical meaning this component is identical in all the forms of the word. Thus the word-forms “go”, “goes”, “went”, “going” possess different grammatical meanings of tense, person and so on, but in each of these forms we find one and the same semantic component denoting the process of movement. This is the lexical meaning of the word, which may be described as the component of meaning proper to the word as a linguistic unit.

Thus, by lexical meaning we designate the meaning proper to the given linguistic unit in all its forms and disrtibutions, while by grammatical meaning we designate the meaning proper to sets of word forms common to all words of a certain class.

The essence of the part-of-speech meaning of a word is revealed in the classification of lexical items into major word-classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) and minor word-classes (articles, prepositions, conjunctions, etc).

All members of a major word-class share a distinguishing semantic component which, though very abstract, may be viewed as the lexical component of part-of-speech meaning. For example, the meaning of thingness or substantiality may be found in all the nouns, e.g. table, love, sugar, though they possess different grammatical meaning of number and case.

The grammatical aspect of part-of-speech meaning is conveyed as a rule by a set of forms. If we describe the word as a noun we mean to say that it is bound to possess a set of forms expressing the grammatical meaning of number (table-tables) and case (boy-boy's).

The part-of-speech meaning of the words that possess only one form, e.g. prepositions, some adverbs, etc. is observed only in their distribution, e.g. to come in (here, there}; in (on, under) the table. The interconnection between the three types of meaning is shown in Diagram.

MEANING

Lexical- - - - - Part-of Speech - - - Grammatical

Aspects of lexical meaning In the general framework of lexical meaning several aspects can be singled out. They are:

a) The denotational aspect;

a) the connotational aspect;

b) the pragmatic aspect.

The Denotational aspect

The denotational aspect of lexical meaning is the part of lexical meaning that establishes correlation between the name and the object (thought), which is denoted by a given word. The term ‘denotational’ is derived from the English word to denote which means be a sign of, indicate. For ex. The denotational meaning of booklet is a small book that gives information about something. It is through the denotational aspect of meaning that the bulk of information is conveyed in the process of communication. The denotational aspect of lexical meaning expresses the notional content of a word.

Users of a language cannot have only knowledge or thought of the object or phenomena of the real world around them, unless this knowledge is ultimately embodied in words, which have essentially the same meaning for all speakers of the language. This is the denotational meaning, i.e. that component of which the lexical meaning makes the communication possible.

The Connotational aspect

The connotational meaning is the second component of lexical meaning, which reflects the attitude of the speaker towords wqhat he speaks about. Connotation conveys additional information in the process of communication. This component or the connotation includes:

1) Emotive charge is a part of the connotational meaning of a word; e.g. a hovel denotes “a small house or cottage” and besides implies that it is a miserable dwelling place, duty in bad repair and, in general, unpleasant place to live in.

When examing such groups of words as “large”, “big”, “tremendous” and “like”, “love”, “worship” and “girl”, “girlie” we observe the difference in the emotive charge of the words “tremendous”, “worship” and “girlie” is heavier than those of words “large”, “like” and “girl”.

The emotive charge does not depend on the “feeling” of the individual speaker, but is true for all speakers of English. The emotive charge is one of the objective semantic features of word as linguistic units and forms part of the connotational component of meaning

2)Evaluation, which may be positive or negative (clique a small group of people who seem unfriendly to other people) as compared to group (a set of people)

3) Intensity (or expressiveness) adore as compared to love

4) Imagery e.g.To wade –to walk with an effort (through mud, the word gives rise to another meaning which is based on the same image as the first to wade through a book

The pragmatic aspect

The pragmatic aspect of lexical meaning is the part of meaning that conveys information on the situation of communication. Like the conotational aspect, the pragmatic aspect falls into four closely linked together subsections:

1) information on the time and space relationship of the participants come and go can indicate the location of the speaker who is usually taken as the zero point in the description of the situation of communication.

2) Information on the participants and the given language community. 1.They chucked a stone at copes, and then did a bunk with the loot.2.after casting a stone at the police, they absconded with the money.

The 1st sentence could be said by two criminals, talking casually about the crime afterwards, the 2nd sentence might be said by the chief inspector in making his official report.

3) Information on the tenor of discourse. The tenors of discourse reflect how the addresser interacts with the adressee the listener or the reader0 tenors arte based on social or family roles of the participants of communication a mother will talk in a different way with her small child and about her children

4) information on the register of communication. The conditions of communication form another important group of factors. The register defines the general type of the situation of communication grading the situations in formality (variations ranging from extreme degrees of formality through norm to extreme non- formality). There are 3 main types of situations of communication: formal, neutral, and informal. Practically every word in the language is register- oriented. e.g. the pragmatic aspect of meaning refers words cordial, fraternal, anticipate, to the formal register, and the words cut it out, to be kidding, hi, stuff are to be used in the informal register.

Lexical meaning

Denotational aspect Connotational aspect Pragmatic aspect

Emotive charge

expressiveness

imagery

information on the time and space relationship of the participants

Information on the participants and the given language community

Information on the tenor of discourse

information on the register of communication

Paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations in the language.

The meaning of the word is studied on two levels: paradigmatic and syntagmatic. on a paradigmatic level the word is studied in its relationships with other words in a vocabulary system. it may be studied with comparisons of other words of similar meaning (to look – to stare), of opposite meaning (antonomy – to except – to reject, busy – idle). words of different stylistic characteristics (man-fellow-guy). the main problems of paradigmatic studies are synonymy, antonimy and different functional styles. On the syntagmatic level the semantic structure of the word is analyzed through its lineal relationships with neighboutring words in the utterance (предложение, высказывание).

the modern approach to semantics is based on an assumption that the ino-form of the words presents a structure which is termed denotative(обозначающий) structure (denotational component) – to glare – to look – to glance. connotational (смысловой) component of the word is a motive or evaluative (оценочный) (emotive it can also be a cause) . the denotational component makes communication possible, the connotational component comprises (вкл) the stylistic reference and emotive charge.