北京语言大学2012考研资料--重要章节要点整理

Chapter 5 Semantics

1.The subject concerning the study of meaning is called semantics, more

specifically: semantics is the study of the meaning of linguistic units,

words, and sentences in particular.

2.G.Leech recognizes 7 types for meaning in his semantics

1.Conceptual meaning: logical, cognitive, or denotative content

2.Connotative meaning: what is communicated by virtue of what language

refers to.

3.Social meaning: what is communicated of the social circumstances of

language use.

4.Affective meaning: what is communicated of the feelings and attitudes of

the speaker/writer.

5.Reflected meaning: what is communicated through association with

another sense of the same expression.

6.Collocative meaning: what is communicated through association with

words which tend to occur in the environment of another word.

7.Thematic meaning: what is communicated by the way in which the

message is organized in terms of order and emphasis.

3.The referential theory: is the theory of meaning, which relates the

meaning of a word to the thing it refers to, or stands for. It is especially

true in the case of proper nouns and definite noun phrases. But it cannot

refer to the abstract concepts. According to the “semantic triangle”

theory, the relation between a word and a thing it refers to is not direct. It

is meditated by concept. Leech’s conceptual meaning has two sides:

sense and reference. The distinction between sense and reference is

similar to that between connotation and denotation. The former refers to

the abstract properties of an entity, while the latter refers to the concrete

entities having these properties. Every word has a sense, but not every

word has a reference.

4.Sense relations

1)Synonymy is the technical name for the sameness relation. English is

said to be rich in synonyms. Its vocabulary has two main sources: Anglo-Saxon and Latin. There are many pairs of words of these two sources which mean the same, e.g. buy and purchase , world and universe, brotherly and fraternal.

But total synonymy is rare. The so-called synonyms are all context dependent.

ⅰthey differ in style

ⅱthey may also differ in connotations.

ⅲthere are dialectal differences.

2)Antonymy is the name for oppositeness relation, there are 3 main

sub-types: gradable antonymy, complementary antonymy, and converse antonymy.

①Gradable antonymy: good-bad, long-short, big-small

They have three characteristics: firstly, they are gradable; the members

of a pair differ in terms of degree. The denial of one is not necessarily

the assertion of the other; the can be modified by “very” and they have

comparative and superlative degree. Secondly, antonyms of this kind are

graded against different norms. A big car is in fact smaller than a small

plane. Thirdly, one member of a pair, usually the term for the higher

degree, serves as the cover term.

②Complementary antonymy: alive-dead, male-female, present-absent,

boy-girl.

Firstly, not only the assertion of one means the denial of the other, the

denial of one also means the assertion of the other. The adjectives in this

type can not be modified by “very”, and don’t have comparative or

superlative degrees either.

Secondly, the norm in this type is absolute. It does not vary with the

thing a word is applied to.