Chapter Five: Meaning
Semantics: the study of meaning of linguistic units, words and sentence in particular. Leech’s 7 type of meaning: 1. conceptual meaning: (denotative/ cognitive meaning) the definition given in the dictionary. Two features: stability and instability Associative meaning: (the next 5 types) 2. connotative meaning: the communicative value attributed to an expression over and above its purely conceptual meaning
(additional, emotive meaning) politician/statesman, women (unstable, vary…)
connotation and denotation
3. social meaning: what is communicated of the social circumstances of language use, including variations like dialect, time, topic and style. (horse/steed, home/residence, cops/police)
4. affective meaning: what is communicated of the feelings and the attitudes of the
speaker/writer.
Mary is an angel of a girl. That fellow is an ass.
5. reflected meaning: associate one sense of an expression with another (dear) 6. collocative meaning: what is communicated through association with words that tend to occur in the environment of another word. (pretty/handsome gee-gee/steed)
7. thematic meaning: what is communicated by the way in which the message is organized in terms of order and emphasis.
Referential theory: the theory of meaning which relates the meaning of a word to the thing it refers to or stands for, is known as referential meaning. Problems: is just one of them; imagined things
Sense relations: words are in different sense relations with each other. 1. Synonym: technical name for the sameness relation. different in origin/ shade of meaning/ socio-expressive meaning/ stylistic meaning/ collocation and distribution
2. Antonymy: the name for oppositeness relation a. gradable antonymy: the members of a pair differ in terms of degree. The denial of one isn’t
necessarily the assertion of the other/ graded against different norms/ the term for the higher degree serves as the cover term.
b. Complimentary antonymy: abosolute,no cover terrm c. Converse antonymy 3. hyponymy: inclusiveness, superordinate: class name hyponym: members co-hyponyms A superordinate usually have several hyponyms.
A superordinate may be a superordinate to itself: animal A superordinate may be missing: color Hyponyms may be missing: uncle
Componential analysis: the word meaning that is smaller than the word meaning. Explain sense relations
Sentence meaning: word meaning/ sentence structure Utterance meaning: 语境
Sentence relations: 1. entailment: there are fixed truth relations between sentences that hold regardless of the empirical truth of the sentences. A: the woman assassinated the king.
B: the king died. (A蕴含B，A对B对，B错A错)
2. presupposition: in ordinary language, to presuppose something means to assume it. A: her husband is a fool.
B: she has a husband. (A对B对，A错B错)