30. Semasiology. Types of meaning. Meaning of a morpheme

Semasiology is the branch of lexicology which studies the meaning of lexical units. The term comes from the Greek word sēmasia - “signification”, which in turn is derived from “sēma” – “sign” and sēmantikos – “significant”).

Diachronically, semasiology studies the change in meaning which words undergo in the process of their historical development. Synchronically, semasiology approaches semantic structures typical of the given language instead of studying the meanings of individual words.

The objects of semasiological study in this course are: types of meaning, semantic development of words, causes and results of semantic change, polysemy, homonymy, and various kinds of semantic relations inside the English vocabulary system.

Types of meaning and the semantic structure of words

The word meaning is not homogeneous, but composed of several components. These constituent parts of meaning are usually called types of meaning, or semantic components.

There are two main types of meaning distinguished in English lexicology: lexical and grammatical, and one secondary type: functional or part-of-speech meaning.

Grammatical meaning is defined as the component of meaning recurrent in identical sets of individual forms of different words. E.g. asked, walked, and thought are different words with the same grammatical meaning of the simple past tense or girl’s, night’s, man’s are united by the common possessive case meaning.

The component that is, though, much more important for Lexicology and for human communication as a whole is the lexical meaning, which is usually defined as the realization of the notion by means of language.

Lexical meaning consists of two important parts: denotative meaning (also called referential or extensional) and connotative meaning (also referred to as emotional, intentional or expressive).

The denotative meaning expresses the notional content of the word, i.e. it gives a name to the actually existing object, and may be of two types according to the word’s function in speech: significative and identifying or demonstrative. If the word’s function in speech is to signify, i.e. to evoke general ideas we speak about realization of the word’s significative meaning. The examples of such speech situations can be all expressions that serve as signs of other concepts, e.g. aphorisms, proverbs, advertisements. When the word’s function is to identify the individual objects of reality, to name its exact referents, it realizes its demonstrative meaning.

The connotative or expressive counterpart of the denotative meaning, also referred to as connotations, is optional, i.e. it may be altogether absent in some words or it may exist in a wide range of proportions. The connotational component of meaning consists of a large variety of associations of which the speaker and the listener are aware. Among most affective connotations a word can contain there are: 1. connotation of emotion, e.g. daddy cf. father; 2. connotation of evaluation, e.g. crowd cf. group; 3. that of intensity, e.g. adore cf. love; 4. a stylistic colouring connotation, e.g. kid cf. child.

Thus, the semantic structure of a word is an organized whole comprised by recurrent meanings and shades of meaning a particular sound complex can assume in different contexts, together with emotional or stylistic colouring and other connotations, if any.

As has been pointed out, the semantic structure of the word is manifold. Besides the lexical and grammatical meanings it may also have the functional or part-of-speech meaning, which is a distinguishing semantic component shared by all words of the same word class. E.g. all nouns have the functional meaning of “substance or thingness”, i.e. in the nouns tables, love’s, sugar both the lexical and grammatical meanings are different, but they all have the meaning of “substance”.

Meaning in morphemes

It is generally assumed that morphemes do not possess any grammatical meaning. If we compare the word man and the corresponding morpheme in, let’s say, the word manly we can easily observe the grammatical meaning of case and number with the former and none of such with the latter.

Because all English words have lexical meaning and many of them consist of a root-morpheme only, it is natural to suppose that morphemes can have lexical meaning too. E.g. the word boy and the morpheme boy in the words boyhood, boyish.

Lexical meaning is a semantic component of many affix – morphemes too. E.g. the lexical meaning of the affix –less is “devoid of”, - ful - “full of”.

The lexical meaning in morphemes is also comprised of denotative and connotative elements. The connotative meaning is most commonly found in root-morphemes, but can also appear in affixational morphemes: e.g. the endearing – diminutive suffixes – ette (kitchenette), - ie (deraie, girlie), - ling (duckling), which clearly bear a heavy emotive charge. Such morphemes as – ine (chlorine [klorin] - хлор), - oid (rhomboid), - escence (effervescence) render a vivid stylistic bookish coloring.

The functional or part-of-speech meaning can be exposed in morphemes with different degrees of intensiveness. E.g. in affixes – er, - less the lexical meaning dominates over the part-of-speech meaning (“the action doer, agent”; “lack or absence of something”), whereas in affixes – ment or – ous the part-of-speech meaning is more vivid than the lexical one.

Unlike words, morphemes can have two more components of meaning: differential and distributional.

The differential meaning is the semantic component that serves to distinguish one word from all other words containing identical morphemes. In such words as e.g. bookshelf the morpheme – shelf serves to distinguish this word from other words that have this morpheme: bookcase, book-counter, etc.

The distributional meaning is the component regulating the order and arrangement of morphemes making up the word. Any disregard of this semantic component may result in destroying the lexical meaning of the whole word. E.g. sing + -er = singer; er + sing makes the word meaningless; ring-finger – the finger for the ring, a finger-ring – the ring that is worn on a finger.

31. Word meaning. Referential and functional approaches to meaning.

Word meaning is studied by the branch of lexicology called semasiology. Among the word’s various characteristics meaning is the most important. There are different theories of the nature of meaning. Usually meaning is defined as the realization of a notion (or concept, in other terms) by means of a definite language system. It is usually said that a word denotes objects, qualities, actions, phenomena, or expresses the corresponding notions. The complex relationships between referent (object, etc., denoted by the word), notion (concept, thought) and word (symbol, sound-form) are traditionally represented by the following triangle:

The dotted line suggests that there is no immediate relation between word and referent, it is established only through the concept.

Word meaning is made up of various components which are usually described as types of meaning. The two main types of meaning are grammatical and lexical meanings.

The problem of meaning is considered to be the most controversial one in the linguistic theory. There are two schools of thought in present –day linguistics representing contemporary thinking on the problem:

1. referential approach (founded by Ferdinand de Saussure) distinguishes between the three components connected with meaning: the sound form of the linguistic sign, the concept underlying this sound form and the actual referent, the aspect of reality to which the linguistic sign refers.

Establishing this relationship our approach to the problem of meaning is referential because we refer to the sound form, to the concept and to the referent and discuss their relationship.

This referential approach is criticized because the scholars in their theory use extra-linguistic terms such as concept, referent. Besides, approaching the problem of meaning the linguistic elements (words) are discussed in isolation from each other (from other words). So referential approach is paradigmatic. We discuss the meanings of words in a certain system. But in speech we use words in their environment and not in isolation. In this environment we define the meaning of words.

2. functional approach (L. Bloomfield) maintains that the meaning of a word may be studied only through its relation to other words.

These two approaches should not be set against each other. They should be used in peaceful combination. The examination of meaning must start by collecting an adequate number of samples of contexts. On examination of the samples the meaning will emerge from the contexts. Then it is logical to pass to the referential phase and try to formulate the meaning thus identified.