18. Word meaning. Types of meaning.

The brunch of linguistic concerned with the meaning of words and word equivalence is called – semaseology/semantics. Semasia (Greek) – signification. The meaning is the realization of concept or emotion by means of a definite language system. There are 2 traditional approaches: referential approach and functional approach. Referential approach establishes the interdependence between words or the things/concepts they denote. Functional approach studies the functions of a word in speech and is less concerned with what ‘meaning’ is than with ‘how it works’. The referential approach distinguishes between the 3 components closely connected with the meaning. (треугольник. Нижняя сторона начерчена прерывистой линией. Слева – ‘word’; справа – ‘referent/object of reality’; сверху – concept/thought/the actual meaning of the word). it was first introduced by Oyden and Richards – ‘The semantic triangle’ (1923). Work ‘The meaning of meanings’. Word: a sound form, a symbol, a sign. Concept: the thought, reference, meaning, designator. Referent: the thing meant, denotator. The criticism of the referential theory: 1) the meaning comprises the interrelation of linguistic sciences with categories and phenomenon, which are outside the scope of linguistic. 2) it operates with subjective mental process. The result of semantic investigations depend to a certain extent on linguistic intuition cannot be verified by other researcher dealing with the same linguistic dater. The functional approach maintains that the meaning of a linguistic unit may be studied only through its relation to other linguistic units, mostly it is done through the structural linguistic. There is a definite difference between the meaning and the sense. The meaning (sometimes the set of meanings) – the sense is how this meaning is actualized in the flow of speech. The present day linguistic gives us alternative approaches which come from psycholinguistic. Эндре Лендваи in his book “Лексическая семантика языка” (1992) he discusses an alternative geometric interpretation of meaning. in his trapezium of meaning he gives us the relation between (Трапеция. Нижняя линия начерчена прерывисто. Слева внизу – sign; справа внизу – referent; слева сверху – meaning; справа сверху – idea). The process of conceptualization/acquiring of meaning: the conventional order of sounds or letters which is the ‘sign’ evokes a mental shape of the referent with a set of discriminate features of the class of similar objects in the speaker’s mind (which is the idea) and the correlated meaning (denotational significant; pragmatic meanings). Types of meaning. The word ‘meaning’ is not homogeneous. It is made up of various components. The combination and interrelation of which determines the inner structure of the word. These components are usually described as types of meaning: grammatical; lexical. The grammatical meaning is defined as an expression in speech of relationships between words based on contrastive features of arrangements in which they occur. The grammatical meaning is more abstract and generalized than the lexical meaning. It unites words into big groups: part of speech, lexico-grammatical classes. The lexico-grammatical meaning is the common denominator of all the meanings of words belonging to a lexico-grammatical class of words. The lexical meaning is the meaning the word has on its own. Both meanings comprise the word meaning and neither can exist without the each other.