The Dimensions of Meaning

1. The Dimensions of Meaning

2. Main Points • Reference and Denotation • Connotation • Sense Relation • Lexical and Grammatical Meanings • Morphemes • Homonymy and Polysemy • Lexical Ambiguity • Sentence and Meaning

3. 1. Reference and Denotation • … a language consists of a large number of words and each of these words has a direct correlation with something outside of language, which is its meaning. And since, if we communicate with one another through language, it must be that we all have the same ‘idea’ or ‘concept’ associated with each word…….. A mentalistic theory about meaning (Ogden and Richards (1923)

4. concept associationreference Word object meaning

5. Concept …… a mental picture of what the word represents. • Reference … the relation between a language expression and whatever the expression pertains to in a particular situation of language use including what a speaker may imagine or it is the way speakers and hearers use an expression successfully. • Denotation … the knowledge they have that makes their use successful.

6. Some considerations • Meaning is more than denotation. • People not only talk and write to describe things and events and characteristics; they also express their opinions, favorable and unfavorable……connotation and sense relations.

7. 2. Connotation • Connotation …. the affective or emotional associations elicited by a word, which clearly need to be the same for all people who know and use the word. • A denotation identifies the central aspect of word meaning which every body generally agrees about. • Connotation refers to the personal aspect of meaning, the emotional associations that the word arouses. • Connotation ….the degree of formality, the style or ‘flavor’.

8. 3. Sense Relations • The meaning that a lexeme has because of its relationships with other lexemes they are associated with in an utterance is the sense of that lexeme. • E.g : 1. A window broke. Tom broke window. 2. A happy child, a happy family…. Who enjoys A happy accident, a happy experience….. That produces A happy story, a happy report…. Containing a happy event

9. Sense Relation • Syntagmatic…the relation of the lexeme with other lexemes with which it occurs in the same phrases or sencences. • Syntagmatic---the mutual association of two or more words in a sequence so that the meanings contribute to the meaning of the larger unit, the phrase, or sentence. • Paradigmatic…. A relation of choice.

10. 4. Lexical and Grammatical Meanings • A referring Expression…. A piece of language that is used as if it is linked to something outside language, some living or dead entity or concept or group of entities or concepts. The entity is called referent. • Grammatical Meanings are expressed by bound morphemes, by function words, and by arrangement of forms in a sentence. • Referring expressions and predicates have lexical meaning while grammatical morphemes and function words express grammatical meaning.

11. 5. Morphemes • Morpheme …. A minimal meaningful part. • Free morphemes … which can occur by themselves. • Bound Morphemes… the ones which are always attached to something else. • The minimal form that can have reference or can predicate is a lexeme. A set of forms with grammatical affixes is a single lexeme. A non-minimal form with single meaning is a single lexeme, an idiom.

12. 6. Homonymy and Polysemy • Homonyms …two or more forms that are identical in speech (pronunciation and spelling) but have different meanings…. different lexeme. • Homographs …. forms identical in writing (spelling) but not in speech (different pronunciation) nor in meaning and also different lexemes. • A polysemouslexeme has several (apparently) related meanings.

13. 7. Lexical Ambiguity • When homonyms can occur in the same position in utterances, the results is lexical ambiguity. • E.g : I was on my way to the bank. • Ambiguity occurs also because a longer linguistic form has a literal sense an a figurative sense.

14. 8. Sentence Meaning • What sentence meaning is? • First, the meaning of a sentence derives from the meanings of its constituent lexemes and from the grammatical meanings it contains. • Second, at least if the sentence is a statement, if you know the meaning of the sentence, you know what conditions are necessary in the world for that sentence to be true.

15. In semantics, we are not interested in intuitions or hints but we are interested in the instances when the language of the message implicates some additional meaning that accounts for our inference. • Truth-conditional semantics is the study of meaning through a consideration of the conditions that must exist for a sentence to be true, and how the truth of one sentence relates to the truth or falsity of other sentences.