Seminar 2. Semasiology.

Meaning – one of the most important characteristics of a word as a unit of communication. It is one of the most controversial terms in the theory of language.

Referential approachtries to formulate the essence of meaning through establishing the interdependence between words and things or concepts they denote, or between the language and reality.

Functional approach studies the functions of a word in speech and is less concerned with what the meaning is, with how it works.

Conception approach – studies the word meaning as a concept.

Concept - a category of human cognition, the tough of an object that singles out its essential features.

Grammatical meaning – the recurrent in identical sets of individual forms of different forms of different words as the tense meaning or case meaning.

Lexical meaning – is identical in all the forms of the word, where there is the same semantic component, denoting one or another meaning.

Lexico-grammatical meaning – a common denominator of all the meanings of a word, belonging to a lexico-grammatical class of words; it is the feature according to which they are grouped together.

Denotative component – one which express the conceptual or notional content of a word, that is it enables the word to reflect reality or thought in its content.

Significant denotation – one which awakes a general idea.

Demonstrative denotation – one which identify an actual referent.

Connotative component – one which embraces emotive and stylistic value of a word. It does not describe the word fully, it only nominates the concept.

Connotation – the emotional component of a word, which enables the speaker to express emotions.

Motivation – a relationship existing between the morphemic or phonemic composition of a word and its meaning.

Phonetic motivation – a direct connection between the meaning and the sound form.

Morphological motivation – a direct connection between the structural pattern of a word and its meaning.

Semantic motivation – is based on the coexistence of two meanings of the same word (direct and figural).

Seminar 3. Polysemy and Homonymy.

Polysemy – plurality of meanings, a semantic universal which it exists only in the language, not in speech.

Radiation– a process of the semantic development of a word, where the primary meaning stands in the centre and the secondary meanings proceed out of it like rays.

Concatenation– a process of the semantic development of a word, where secondary meanings of a word develop like a chain.

Perfect homonyms – the words, identical in sound and spelling.

Full homonyms – words which represent the same category of parts of speech and have the same paradigm.

Partial homonyms: 1) simple lexico-grammatical – the words which belong to the same category of parts of speech; their paradigms have only one identical form, but it is never the same form.

2) complex lexico-grammatical – the words of different categories of parts of speech which have identical forms in their paradigms.

3) partial lexical homonyms – the words of the same category of parts of speech which are only identical in their corresponding forms.

Homographs– the words with the same spelling but are pronounced differently.

Homophones – the words, pronounced identically but spelled differently.

Lexical method – is concluded in revealing the synonymic connection of Polysemy and homonymy. In Polysemy we deal with the different meanings of the same word. In homonymy we have different words, which have their own meanings.

Semantic method – implies that the difference between Polysemy and homonymy is actually reduced to the differentiation between related and unrelated meanings.

Morphological method – means that Polysemy and homonymy are characterized by the various word-building.

Capitonyms– the words which change their meaning when written with the capital letter.