Types of Meanings Explored in Linguistics
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•
Logical, cognitive, denotative
• Central factor in linguistic communication, and integral to the essential functioning of
language
•
Classification of sounds in phonology Sentence
Positively negatively
S. pred.
/b/: +
bilabial , + voice ,
-
nasal
Detr. N. v. comp.
Detr. n.
No man is
An island
It is the communicative value an expression has by virtue of what it refers to,
over and above its purely conceptual content.
Referent Woman
Criterial properties Non-Criterial properties
adult , human, female Psychological Social Typical Putative
Facts
1.
Connotation is talking about real world experience .
2.
Connotative meaning is not specified to language, but is shared by
other communicative system.
3.
Connotative meaning is peripheral compared with conceptual
meaning (relatively unstable ).
4.
Connotative meaning is indeterminate and open - ended .
•
The meaning a piece of language conveys about the social circumstances
of its use.
Example:
-
They chucked the stone at the cops, and then did a bunk with the loot.
- After casting stone at the police, they absconded with the money.
Illocutionary force
-request -assertion - apology- threat, etc.
-
I haven't got a knife
assertion -request.
The meaning that reflects the personal feelings of the speaker,
including his attitude to the listener, or his attitude to something he is
talking about.
-
you're a vicious tyrant villainous reprobate and I hate you for it !
-
I'm terribly sorry to interrupt, but I wonder if you would be so king
as to lower your voices a little.
(Playful remark)
- Will you belt up. (Sarcasm)
[Intonation / tone of voice]
The meaning which arises in cases of multiple conceptual meaning, when
one sense of a word forms parts of our response to another sense.
One sense of a word seems to
rub off
on another sense through
relative
frequency and familiarity
or through the
strength of its associations.
Consists of the associations a word acquires on account of the meanings of words which
tend to occur in its environment.
Pretty / Handsome
Woman good looking man
Quasi - synonymous verbs.
•
Not all differences in potential Co-occurrence need to be explained.
(collecative meaning is an idiosyncratic property of individual words).
Reflected , collocative , affective , social meaning , all have more in
conceptual meaning , why .
The same open – ended, variable character.
Lend themselves to analysis.
Contrast with conceptual meaning ( requires the postulation of
intricate mental structures)
Associative meaning can be studied systematically only by
approximative statistical techniques.
{Devised a technique for plotting meaning in terms of a multidimensional semantic space}using data Speakers judgments recorded – seven – point scales.
Good ………: ………: ………: ………: ………: ………: … bad
Hard ………: ………: ………: ………: ………: ………: … soft
Passive ………: ………: ………: ………: ………: ………: … active
3 2 1 0 1 2 3
1- Evaluation ( good / bad )
2- Potency ( hard / soft )
3- Activity ( active / passive )
It is the meaning which is communicated by the way in which a speaker or writer
organizes the message in terms of
ordering
,
focus
, and
emphasis
.
Mrs. Bessie smith donated the first prize (active)
The first prize was donated by mrs. bessie smith (passive).
1-
Have different communicative values (different contexts)
2-
The active sentence answers what did mrs. bessie smith donate ?
3-
The passive sentence answers who was the first prize donated by ?
4-
Have the same truth conditions
Thematic meaning is either:
-
a matter of choice between alternative grammatical construction
A man is waiting in the hall
there is a man waiting in the hall
-
can be contrived by lexical means (
Substitute Belong
to for
Owns
)
my brother owns the largest shop in the town
the largest shop in the town belongs to my brother
-
It is stress and intonation
Bill uses an electric razor
The Kind of razor that bill uses is an electric one.
Problems Of Separating Conceptual Meaning From The More Peripheral
Categories.
The Difficulty Of Delimiting Conceptual From Connotative Meaning:
He Stuck The Key In His Pocket.
He Put The Key In His Pocked.
But
-
The solution is to conclude that quasi _synonyms differ on at least
two planes of meaning.
Ideational ---- Halliday
Descriptive ---- Lyons
Referential ---- others
Logical
1- Determines whether or not any proposition it express is true or false (logical and proposition).
2- Constrains what the expression can be used to refer to. (referential)
3- It is objective in the sense that it interposes a kind of distance between the Speaker and what
he says. (displaced)
4- It is fully conceptualized.
5- Descriptive aspects of the meaning are exposed in the sense that they can be negated or
questioned.
1-
Intrinsic dimensions
Quality (red / green / walk / run )
That is not my father, that is my dad
Intensity (large / huge )
it wasn’t just large, it was huge
Specificity
it’s a dog unilaterally entails it is an animal
it is not an animal unilaterally entails its not a dog.
(type – specificity / part – specificity- intensity – specificity).
Vagueness
generality
A- I saw a reptile
B- I saw a snake
abstractness
the nation of entailment is abstract and therefore not vague.
1-
Ill- defindeness (middle-aged)
2-
laxness(vs. strictness)
the mourners stood in a circle round grave
Basicness
Cold
1- can be directly
2- concrete
3- observabl
4- basic
5- has spatio - temporal location
A little/bet/slightly…..cold
1-can't be directly experienced
2-abstract
3-spexific
4-not observable
5-has no spatio-temporal location
Viewpoint
'some linguistic expression are clamed to encode the
viewpoint of the speaker at the moment of utterance.
●
the village is on the north side of the hill.
● the village is on the other side of the hill.
● the village is over the hill.
● the village is round the other side of the hill.
Expressive meaning
Gosh !
1- subjective
2- does not present a conceptual category to heaver
3- express an emotional state
4- Its validity is restricted to current state of the speaker
5- can not be put into past tense.
6- No proposition is expressed
7- prosodically gradable
I am surprised
Expressive meaning does not contribute to propositional content
-
Its freezing , shut the bloody (window some words have both descriptive and
expressive meaning )
-
It was damn cold (extremely only) ( descriptive )
-
It wasn't all that cold (deny)
-
(horse/steed) expressive
-
(horse/nag) descriptive
Dialect and register allegiance
Dialectal variation is variation in language use according to speaker .
Register variation is variation within the speech of a single community
according to situation.
Evoked meaning
1- has no propositional content
2- powerful
Dialect (
geographical/temporal/social
)
register (
field/mode /style
)
field: (area of discourse )
mode: (different between language characteristic _ spoken , written )
style
:
(formality/informality)
1- Descriptive meaning :
It is a universally acknowledged fact languages can be used to
make descriptive statements which are
true
or
false
according to
whether the propositions that they express are
true
or
false
.
2- Non_decriptive meaning :
-
It is the kind of meaning by virtue of which speakers express
(rather than describe)
their beliefs , attitudes and feelings .
-
It is often held to fall within the scope of stylistics or pragmatics .
-
some kinds of expressive meaning are a part of sentence meaning .
If a distinction is drawn between semantics and pragmatics , expressive
meaning falls within semantics .
Natural language vary in degree to which they grammaticalize expressive
meaning .
Expressive meaning is lexicalized in combination with descriptive meaning
in many ordinary nouns , verbs and adjectives .
It merges with what many authors have referred to as
interpersonal
,
instrumental
,
social
or
connative
meaning .
Various types of meanings in linguistic communication are discussed, including conceptual, connotative, affective, and illocutionary meanings. These meanings play a crucial role in language structure and communication, helping us understand the complexity of language semantics and expression.
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Presentation Transcript
Types of meanings Presented by : Amna Hussein Ali Amna Hussein Ali MA Student MA Student 2018 2018 . . 2019 2019
conceptual meaning conceptual meaning Logical, cognitive, denotative Central factor in linguistic communication, and integral to the essential functioning of language structure principle Contrastiveness principle Classification of sounds in phonology Sentence Positively negatively S. pred. /b/: + bilabial , + voice , - nasal Detr. N. v. comp. Detr. n. An island No man is
The aim of conceptual semantics is to provide a configuration of abstract symbols which is its semantic representation, to shows exactly what we need to know if we are to distinguish that meaning from all other possible sentence meanings in the language and to match that meaning with right syntactic and phonological expression
Connotative Connotative meaning meaning It is the communicative value an expression has by virtue of what it refers to, over and above its purely conceptual content. Referent Woman Criterial properties Non-Criterial properties adult , human, female Psychological Social Typical Putative
Facts 1. Connotation is talking about real world experience . 2. Connotative meaning is not specified to language, but is shared by other communicative system. 3. Connotative meaning is peripheral compared with conceptual meaning (relatively unstable ). 4. Connotative meaning is indeterminate and open - ended .
Affective Meaning Affective Meaning The meaning a piece of language conveys about the social circumstances of its use. .Crystal and Davy dimensions 1- Dialect 2- Time 3- Province 4- Status 5- Modality 6- Singularity . Synonyms do not exist Steed (poetic ) Horse (General) Nag ( stang ) Gee-gee (baby language )
Example: - -They chucked the stone at the cops, and then did a bunk with the loot. - -After casting stone at the police, they absconded with the money. Illocutionary force - -request - I haven't got a knife assertion Example: They chucked the stone at the cops, and then did a bunk with the loot. After casting stone at the police, they absconded with the money. Illocutionary force request - -assertion I haven't got a knife assertion - -request. assertion - -apology apology- -threat, etc. threat, etc. request.
Social Meaning Social Meaning The meaning that reflects the personal feelings of the speaker, including his attitude to the listener, or his attitude to something he is talking about. - you're a vicious tyrant villainous reprobate and I hate you for it ! - I'm terribly sorry to interrupt, but I wonder if you would be so king as to lower your voices a little. (Playful remark) [Intonation / tone of voice] - Will you belt up. (Sarcasm)
Reflected Meaning Reflected Meaning The meaning which arises in cases of multiple conceptual meaning, when one sense of a word forms parts of our response to another sense. The comforter and the Holy Ghost. (Trinity). Comforter / warm and comforting. Holy Ghost / awesome. One sense of a word seems to rub off on another sense through relative frequency and familiarity or through the strength of its associations.
Collecative Meaning Collecative Meaning Consists of the associations a word acquires on account of the meanings of words which tend to occur in its environment. Pretty / Handsome Woman good looking man Quasi - synonymous verbs. Wonder / stroll Tremble / quiver Not all differences in potential Co-occurrence need to be explained. Stylistic differences. Conceptual differences. (collecative meaning is an idiosyncratic property of individual words).
Associative Meaning Associative Meaning Reflected , collocative , affective , social meaning , all have more in conceptual meaning , why . The same open ended, variable character. Lend themselves to analysis. Contrast with conceptual meaning ( requires the postulation of intricate mental structures) Associative meaning can be studied systematically only by approximative statistical techniques.
Osgood and Sulci Proposal Osgood and Sulci Proposal {Devised a technique for plotting meaning in terms of a multidimensional semantic space} using data Speakers judgments recorded seven point scales. Bagpipe Good : : : : : : bad Hard : : : : : : soft Passive : : : : : : active 3 2 1 0 1 2 3 Three Dimensions: 1- Evaluation ( good / bad ) 2- Potency ( hard / soft ) 3- Activity ( active / passive )
Thematic Meaning Thematic Meaning It Itis isthe themeaning organizes Mrs The 11- -Have 2 2- -The 3 3- -The 4 4- -Have meaningwhich messagein interms Mrs..Bessie Thefirst Havedifferent Theactive Thepassive Havethe thesame whichis iscommunicated termsof ofordering smithdonated firstprize differentcommunicative activesentence passivesentence sametruth communicatedby bythe theway ordering,,focus donatedthe thefirst prizewas communicativevalues sentenceanswers sentenceanswers truthconditions wayin inwhich focus,,and prize(active) mrs..bessie values(different answerswhat answerswho conditions whicha aspeaker andemphasis speakeror orwriter writer organizesthe themessage Bessiesmith emphasis.. firstprize (active) smith(passive) (differentcontexts) whatdid didmrs whowas wasdonated donatedby bymrs bessiesmith (passive).. contexts) bessiesmith firstprize mrs..bessie wasthe thefirst smithdonate prizedonated donate? ? donatedby by? ?
Thematic meaning is either: - a matter of choice between alternative grammatical construction A man is waiting in the hall there is a man waiting in the hall - can be contrived by lexical means (Substitute Belong to for Owns) my brother owns the largest shop in the town the largest shop in the town belongs to my brother - It is stress and intonation Bill uses an electric razor The Kind of razor that bill uses is an electric one. Thematic meaning is either:
Demarcation Problems Demarcation Problems Problems Of Separating Conceptual Meaning From The More Peripheral Categories. The Difficulty Of Delimiting Conceptual From Connotative Meaning: Conceptual And Socio-stylistic Meaning He Stuck The Key In His Pocket. He Put The Key In His Pocked. Conceptually Synonymous Stylistically Different But - The solution is to conclude that quasi _synonyms differ on at least two planes of meaning.
Descriptive Meaning Descriptive Meaning Ideational ---- Halliday Descriptive ---- Lyons Referential ---- others Logical Characteristics. 1- Determines whether or not any proposition it express is true or false (logical and proposition). 2- Constrains what the expression can be used to refer to. (referential) 3- It is objective in the sense that it interposes a kind of distance between the Speaker and what he says. (displaced) 4- It is fully conceptualized. 5- Descriptive aspects of the meaning are exposed in the sense that they can be negated or questioned.
Dimensions of Descriptive Meaning Dimensions of Descriptive Meaning 1- Intrinsic dimensions Quality (red / green / walk / run ) That is not my father, that is my dad Intensity (large / huge ) it wasn t just large, it was huge Specificity it s a dog unilaterally entails it is an animal it is not an animal unilaterally entails its not a dog. (type specificity / part specificity- intensity specificity).
Vagueness generality A A- -I saw a reptile B B- -I saw a snake abstractness the nation of entailment is abstract and therefore not vague. 11- - Ill Ill- -defindeness (middle 2 2- -laxness(vs. strictness) the mourners stood in a circle round grave generality I saw a reptile I saw a snake abstractness the nation of entailment is abstract and therefore not vague. defindeness (middle- -aged) laxness(vs. strictness) the mourners stood in a circle round grave aged)
Basicness Cold 1- can be directly 2- concrete 3- observabl 4- basic 5- has spatio - temporal location A little/bet/slightly ..cold 1-can't be directly experienced 2-abstract 3-spexific 4-not observable 5-has no spatio-temporal location
Viewpoint 'some linguistic expression are clamed to encode the viewpoint of the speaker at the moment of utterance. the village is on the north side of the hill. the village is on the other side of the hill. the village is over the hill. the village is round the other side of the hill.
Non Non - - descriptive dimensions descriptive dimensions Expressive meaning Gosh ! 1- subjective 2- does not present a conceptual category to heaver 3- express an emotional state 4- Its validity is restricted to current state of the speaker 5- can not be put into past tense. 6- No proposition is expressed 7- prosodically gradable I am surprised
Expressive meaning does not contribute to propositional content Expletive Expressive meaning does not contribute to propositional content Expletive - Its freezing , shut the bloody (window some words have both descriptive and expressive meaning ) - It was damn cold (extremely only) ( descriptive ) - It wasn't all that cold (deny) Evaluative Its freezing , shut the bloody (window some words have both descriptive and expressive meaning ) It was damn cold (extremely only) ( descriptive ) It wasn't all that cold (deny) Evaluative - (horse/steed) expressive - (horse/nag) descriptive (horse/steed) expressive (horse/nag) descriptive
Evoked meaning Evoked meaning Dialect and register allegiance Dialectal variation is variation in language use according to speaker . Register variation is variation within the speech of a single community according to situation. Evoked meaning 1- has no propositional content 2- powerful Dialect ( geographical/temporal/social ) register ( field/mode /style ) field: (area of discourse ) mode: (different between language characteristic _ spoken , written ) style: (formality/informality)
Descriptive / Non Descriptive / Non Descriptive meaning Descriptive meaning 1- Descriptive meaning : It is a universally acknowledged fact languages can be used to make descriptive statements which are true or false according to whether the propositions that they express are true or false . Propositional Cognitive Referential
2- Non_decriptive meaning : non_ propositional Attitudinal expressive Affective emotive -It is the kind of meaning by virtue of which speakers express (rather than describe) -It is often held to fall within the scope of stylistics or pragmatics . -some kinds of expressive meaning are a part of sentence meaning . It is the kind of meaning by virtue of which speakers express (rather than describe)their beliefs , attitudes and feelings . It is often held to fall within the scope of stylistics or pragmatics . some kinds of expressive meaning are a part of sentence meaning . their beliefs , attitudes and feelings .
If a distinction is drawn between semantics and pragmatics , expressive meaning falls within semantics . Natural language vary in degree to which they grammaticalize expressive meaning . Expressive meaning is lexicalized in combination with descriptive meaning in many ordinary nouns , verbs and adjectives . It merges with what many authors have referred to as instrumental If a distinction is drawn between semantics and pragmatics , expressive meaning falls within semantics . Natural language vary in degree to which they grammaticalize expressive meaning . Expressive meaning is lexicalized in combination with descriptive meaning in many ordinary nouns , verbs and adjectives . It merges with what many authors have referred to as interpersonal instrumental, , social interpersonal, , social or or connative connativemeaning . meaning .
