Экзаменационный билет № 3

1. Types of meaning

The word "meaning" is not homogeneous. Its components are described as "types of meaning". The two main types of meaning are grammatical and lexical meaning.

The grammatical meaning is the component of meaning, recurrent in identical sets of individual forms of words (e.g. reads, draws, writes – 3d person, singular; books, boys – plurality; boy’s, father’s – possessive case).

The lexical meaning is the meaning proper to the linguistic unit in all its forms and distribution (e.g. boy, boys, boy’s, boys’ – grammatical meaning and case are different but in all of them we find the semantic component "male child").

Both grammatical meaning and lexical meaning make up the word meaning and neither of them can exist without the other.

There’s also the 3d type: lexico-grammatical (part of speech) meaning. Third type of meaning is called lexico-grammatical meaning (or part-of-speech meaning). It is a common denominator of all the meanings of words belonging to a lexical-grammatical class (nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. – all nouns have common meaning oа thingness, while all verbs express process or state).

Denotational meaning – component of the lexical meaning which makes communication possible. The second component of the lexical meaning is the connotational component – the emotive charge and the stylistic value of the word.

2. Syntactic structure and pattern of word-groups

The meaning of word groups can be defined as the combined lexical meaning of the component words but it is not a mere additive result of all the lexical meanings of components. The meaning of the word group itself dominates the meaning of the component members (Ex. an easy rule, an easy person).

The meaning of the word group is further complicated by the pattern of arrangement of its constituents (Ex. school grammar- grammar school).

That's why we should bear in mind the existence of lexical and structural components of meaning in word groups, since these components are independent and inseparable. The syntactic structure (formula) implies the description of the order and arrangement of member-words as parts of speech ("to write novels" - verb + noun; "clever at mathematics"- adjective + preposition + noun).

As a rule, the difference in the meaning of the head word is presupposed by the difference in the pattern of the word group in which the word is used (to get + noun = to get letters / presents; to get + to + noun = to get to town). If there are different patterns, there are different meanings. BUT: identity of patterns doesn't imply identity of meanings.

Semanticallv. English word groups are analyzed into motivated word groups and non-motivated word groups. Word groups are lexically motivated if their meanings are deducible from the meanings of components. The degree of motivation may be different.

A blind man - completely motivated

A blind print - the degree of motivation is lower

A blind alley (= the deadlock) - the degree of motivation is still less.

Non-motivated word-groups are usually described as phraseological units.