6.3 Types of Meaning

Word-meaning is made up of various components, and their combination and the interrelation determine the inner facet of the word. These components represent types of meaning. The main types of meanings are grammatical, differential, distributional, and lexical meanings of words and word-forms.

6.3.1 Grammatical Meaning

Grammatical meaning may be defined as “the component of meaning recurrent in identical sets of individual forms of different words” (Ginzburg, Khidekel, Knyazeva, & Sankin, 1979, p. 18). The following words such as radios, babies, formulae, and studies have the grammatical meaning of plurality. The grammatical meaning of tense may be observed in verbs such as bought, traded, slept, delivered, and understood. The words newspaper’s (report), sons’ (letters), country’s (debt), and children’s (toys) share the grammatical meaning of case (possessive case).

6.3.2 Lexical Meaning

Lexical meaning has been defined by scholars in accordance with the main principles of different linguistic schools. Ferdinand de Saussure believes meaning is the relation between the object, or notion named, and the name itself. Leonard Bloomfield defines the meaning of a word as the situation in which the speaker utters it and the response it calls forth in the hearer (1935, p. 139). Arnold criticizes Bloomfield’s and Saussure’s approaches for incompleteness and proposes that “lexical meaning is the realisation of concept or emotion by means of a definite language system” (p. 38). This definition is broader because it takes into consideration not only uttered words but also human consciousness, which comprises not only mental activity but also emotions, volition, and pragmatic functions of language: communicative, emotive, evaluative, and aesthetic.

6.3.3 Denotative Meaning

The English lexicon is so vast and varied that clear categories of meaning are, at times, elusive. Words may have denotative and connotative meanings. Denotation is the “objective (dictionary) relationship between a lexeme and the reality to which it refers to” (Crystal, 2005, p. 170). The denotation of the lexeme spring corresponds to the season between winter and summer, regardless whether it is sunny, pleasant, or rainy. The denotation of the word cat corresponds to the set of felines. Further, we need to clarify the distinction between denotation and reference. Lyons defines the denotation of a lexeme as “the relationship that holds between that lexeme and persons, things, places, properties, processes and activities external to the language system” (1977, p.207). It is practically impossible to give the examples of denotation because denotation “holds independently of particular occasions of utterance” (p.208). If we say book, there is no particular reference to that book. It is something general. Reference is used to indicate the actual persons, things, places, properties, processes, and activities being referred to in a particular situation. By means of reference, a speaker or writer indicates which things, phenomena, and persons are being talked about. Reference depends on concrete utterances, not on abstract notions. It is a property only of expressions. It cannot relate single lexemes (book) to extra-linguistic objects since it is an utterance-dependent notion. Reference is not generally applicable to single word forms, and it is never applicable to single lexemes (p.197). As mentioned earlier, the expressions Mary’s book, great books, and on the book may be used to establish a relationship of reference with specific items as referents. In these examples, the reference of these expressions containing book is partly determined by the denotation of the lexeme book in the overall system of the English language. So, the difference between denotation and reference is that “reference is an utterance-bound relation and does not hold of lexemes as such, but of expressions in the context” (Lyons, 1977, p.208). Denotation, on the other hand, is “a relation that applies in the first instance to lexemes and holds independently of particular occasions of utterance” (p.208).