TYPES OF MEANING

Grammatical Meaning

We notice, e.g., that word-forms, such as girls,

winters, joys, tables, etc. though denoting

widely different objects of reality have something in common. This

common element is the grammatical meaning of plurality which can be

found in all of them.

Thus grammatical meaning may be defined ,as the component of meaning

recurrent in identical sets of individual forms of different words, as, e.g.,

the tense meaning in the word-forms of verbs (asked, thought, walked,

etc.) or the case meaning in the word-forms of various nouns (girl’s,

boy’s, night’s, etc.).

Lexical Meaning

Thus, e.g. the word-forms go, goes, went, going, gone

possess different grammatical meanings of tense, person and so on, but in

each of these forms we find one and the same semantic component denoting

the process of movement. This is the lexical meaning of the word

which may be described as the component of meaning proper to the word

as a linguistic unit, i.e. recurrent in all the forms of this word.

The difference between the lexical and the grammatical components of

meaning is not to be sought in the difference of the concepts underlying

the two types of meaning, but rather in the way they are conveyed. The

concept of plurality, e.g., may be expressed by the lexical meaning of the

world plurality; it may also be expressed in the forms of various words

irrespective of their lexical meaning, e.g. boys, girls, joys, etc. The concept

of relation may be expressed by the lexical meaning of the word relation

and also by any of the prepositions, e.g. in, on, behind, etc. (cf. the

book is in/on, behind the table). “

Parf-of-Speech Meaning(lex-gram)

It is usual to classify lexical items into major

word-classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs)

and minor word-classes (articles, prepositions, conjunctions, etc.).

All members of a major word-class share a distinguishing semantic

component which though very abstract may be viewed as the lexical component

of part-of-speech meaning. For example, the meaning of ‘thingness’

or substantiality may be found in all the nouns e.g. table, love,

sugar, though they possess different grammatical meanings of number,

case, etc. It should be noted, however, that the grammatical aspect of the

part-of-speech meanings is conveyed as a rule by a set of forms. If we describe

the word as a noun we mean to say that it is bound to possess a set of forms expressing the grammatical meaning of number (cf. table— tables), case (cf. boy, boy’s) and so on. A verb is understood to possesssets of forms expressing, e.g., tense meaning (worked — works), mood meaning (work! — (I) work), etc.

The part-of-speech meaning of the words that possess only one form,

e.g. prepositions, some adverbs, etc., is observed only in their distribution

(cf. to come in (here, there) and in (on, under) the table).

Denotational

and Connotational Meaning

Proceeding with the semantic analysis we

observe that lexical meaning is not homogenous

either and may be analysed as including denotational and connotational

components.

As was mentioned above one of the functions of words is to denote

things, concepts and so on. Users of a language cannot have any knowledge

or thought of the objects or phenomena of the real world around them

unless this knowledge is ultimately embodied in words which have essentially

the same meaning for all speakers of that language. This is the d e -

n o t a t i o n a l m e a n i n g , i.e. that component of the lexical meaning

which makes communication possible. There is no doubt that a physicist

knows more about the atom than a singer does, or that an arctic explorer

possesses a much deeper knowledge of what arctic ice is like than a

man who has never been in the North. Nevertheless they use the words

atom, Arctic, etc. and understand each other.

The second component of the lexical meaning is the c o n n o t a -

t i o n a l c o m p o n e n t , i.e. the emotive charge and the stylistic

value of the word.

Emotive Charge

Words contain an element of emotive evaluation as part of the connotational

meaning; e.g. a hovel denotes ‘a small house or cottage’ and besides

implies that it is a miserable dwelling place, dirty, in bad repair and in

general unpleasant to live in. When examining synonyms large, big, tremendous

and like, love, worship or words such as girl, girlie; dear,

dearie we cannot fail to observe the difference in the emotive charge of

the members of these sets. The emotive charge of the words tremendous,

worship and girlie is heavier than that of the words large, like and girl.

This does not depend on the “feeling” of the individual speaker but is true

for all speakers of English. The emotive charge varies in different wordclasses.

In some of them, in interjections, e.g., the emotive element prevails,

whereas in conjunctions the emotive charge is as a rule practically

non-existent.

Sfylistic Reference

Words differ not only in their emotive charge but

also in their stylistic reference. Stylistically words

can be roughly subdivided into literary, neutral and colloquial layers.1

The greater part of the l i t e r а r у l a y e r of Modern English vocabulary

are words of general use, possessing no specific stylistic reference

and known as n e u t r a l w o r d s . Against the background of

neutral words we can distinguish two major subgroups — st a n d a r d

c o l l o q u i a l words and l i t e r a r y or b o o k i s h words.

This may be best illustrated by comparing words almost identical in their

denotational meaning, e. g., ‘parent — father — dad’.

etc. The colloquial words may be subdivided into:

1) Common colloquial words.

2) Slang, i.e. words which are often regarded as a violation of the

norms of Standard English, e.g. governor for ‘father’, missus for ‘wife’, a

gag for ‘a joke’, dotty for ‘insane’.

3) Professionalisms, i.e. words used in narrow groups bound by the

same occupation, such as, e.g., lab for ‘laboratory’, hypo for ‘hypodermic

syringe’, a buster for ‘a bomb’, etc.

4) Jargonisms, i.e. words marked by their use within a particular social

group and bearing a secret and cryptic character, e.g. a sucker — ‘a person

who is easily deceived’, a squiffer — ‘a concertina’.

5) Vulgarisms, i.e. coarse words that are not generally used in public,

e.g. bloody, hell, damn, shut up, etc.

6) Dialectical words, e.g. lass, kirk, etc.

7) Colloquial coinages, e.g. newspaperdom, allrightnik, etc.

Emotive Charge and

Stylistic Reference

Stylistic reference and emotive charge of

words are closely connected and to a certain

degree interdependent.1 As a rule stylistically

coloured words, i.e. words belonging to all stylistic layers except the neutral

style are observed to possess a considerable emotive charge. That can

be proved by comparing stylistically labelled words with their neutral

synonyms. The colloquial words daddy, mammy are more emotional than

the neutral father, mother; the slang words mum, bob are undoubtedly

more expressive than their neutral counterparts silent, shilling, the poetic

yon and steed carry a noticeably heavier emotive charge than their neutral

synonyms there and horse. Words of neutral style, however, may also

differ in the degree of emotive charge. We see, e.g., that the words large,

big, tremendous, though equally neutral as to their stylistic reference are

not identical as far as their emotive charge is concerned.