词汇与意义

补充材料：“词汇与意义”Everybody knows that words represent meaning. The problem is that they may represent several types of meaning simultaneously. Geoffery Leech, a world famous British linguist, categorizes seven types of meaning which will be presented in relation to words in the following sections.1．Conceptual meaning （概念意义）2．Connotative meaning（内涵意义）3．Social meaning（社会意义）4．Affective meaning（情感意义）5．Reflected meaning（反映意义）6．Collocative meaning（搭配意义）7．Thematic meaning（主题意义）1．Conceptual meaning （概念意义）Conceptual meaning is the basic meaning presented by meaningful linguistic units, including words and it is often, though not always, the central factor in linguistic communication. It refers to logical, cognitive, referential or denotative content. Words may refer to objects in the real world (e.g. dog, book, river, etc.) or abstract concepts (e.g. life, friendship, hatred, etc.) in our mind. The relationship between a word and an object in the real world or a concept in our mind to which the word refers is the conceptual meaning of the word.2．Connotative meaning（内涵意义）Connotative meaning is the communicative value that an expression has in addition to the purely conceptual meaning（内涵意义是一个词语在纯概念意义之外的交际值）.The word “woman” can be defined conceptually as an adult female. And we know that several other psychological and social features can be attributed to her, such as “gregarious”（爱交际）, “subject to instinct”（易受直觉影响）, “capable of speech”（语言能力强）, “experienced in cookery”（精于烹调）, “skirt or dress wearing”（穿裙子）and “long hair wearing”（留长发）.These additional features are its connotative meaning, which may further include such features as “frail”（脆弱）, “prone to tears”（爱哭）, “emotional”（感情用事）, “inconstant”（轻率易变）, etc. as some males tend to impose on her and such good qualities as “gentle”, “compassionate”（富有同情心）, “sensitive”, “hardworking” and so on.. “Statesman”（政治家）and “politician”（政客）are mainly distinguished by their connotative meaning. They can both be used to refer to a high government official. While “politician” conveys a derogative（贬义的）connotative meaning “engaging in politics for personal gain”, “statesman” does not.3．Social meaning（社会意义）Social meaning or stylistic meaning is what a piece of language conveys about the social circumstances of its use（社会意义又称文体意义，指一种语言所使用的社会环境）. The social circumstance of language use may include at least users (who are using language), setting (where is language used), topics (what are the language users talking or writing about). For example, “domicile”, “residence”, “adobe” and “home” are synonymous to each other, that is, conceptually they refer to the same thing in the real world. However, “domicile” is normally used in official or legal documents or between people who are involved in official or legal affairs. “Residence” is normally used in formal or administrative circumstances. “Adobe” is apoetic word, normally used in the creation and appreciation of poems. “Home” is the only word that is often used in everyday speech between classmates, colleagues, friends or family members. An expression can tell us, in addition to the intended information, the social circumstances in which it is used. This is what social meaning is about.4．Affective meaning（情感意义）Affective meaning is communicated when the feelings or attitudes are expressed in language. Such interjections as “aha”, “my God”, “oh”, “dear”are chiefly used to convey affective meaning. In other cases, affective meaning is conveyed through the mediation conceptual, connotative, or stylistic meaning. The utterance “You’re a liar. I hate you for that” directly conveys the speaker’s attitudes towards the hearer, while the utterance “There were flashes of silence that made his conversation perfectly delightful”（连续的沉默无语使他的谈话变得十分精彩）conveys indirectly the speaker’s attitudinal meaning（对某人乏味谈话的不满）.5．Reflected meaning（反映意义）Reflected meaning arises in words of multiple conceptual meaning, when one sense of a word forms part of our response to another sense. For example, while “the Comforter” and “the Holy Ghost”both refer to God in religious English, the former sounds warm and “comforting” and the latter sounds awesome because these are the reflected meaning of these two terms.6．Collocative meaning（搭配意义）Collocative meaning consists of associations a word gets from those words that are often used together with it（搭配意义由一个词从经常与它连用的词语身上引起的联想组成）. For example, both “pretty”and “handsome”mean nice looking. But “pretty”is often used together with “girl”, “woman”, “flower”, “garden”, “color”, or “village”; while “handsome”frequently appears together with “boy”, “man”, “car”, “vessel”, “overcoat”, “airliner”, or “typewriter”. While “handsome woman”（健美的女人）and “pretty woman”（秀美的女人）are both acceptable, they suggest different kinds of attractiveness because of the collocative associations of these two adjectives.7．Thematic meaning（主题意义）Thematic meaning is what is communicated by the way in which a speaker or writer organizes a message, in terms of ordering, focus, or emphasis（主题意义是说话人或写作人在语言交际时组织安排信息的不同形式：顺序、中心或重点）. For example, although the active sentence “Mrs. Bessie Smith donated the first prize” and its passive equivalent “The first prize was donated by Mrs. Bessie Smith”convey the same conceptual content, there is difference in their overall meaning. The active sentence seems to be an answer to the question “What did Mrs. Bessie Smith donate?”, whereas the passive sentence appears to be an reply to the question “Who was the first prize donated by?” or “Who donated the first prize?” The active sentence suggests that we know who Mrs. Bessie Smith is while the passive sentence does not. In short, these two sentences convey different thematic meaning.。