语言学教程胡壮麟(第四版) 第5章

Chapter 5 Meaning

第一部分Meanings of “meaning”

一、The Study of Meaning：

1. Meaning:refers to what a language expresses about the world we live in or any possible or imaginary world.

2. Connotation: opposite to denotation, means the properties of the entity a word denotes. For example, the connotation of human is "biped", "featherless", and "rational", etc.

3. Denotation: involves the relationship between a linguistic unit and the non-linguistic entity it refers to. So it is equivalent to referential meaning. For example, the denotation of human is any person such as John and Mary.

二、Seven types of meaning (Recognized by Leech) 三大类七种论述

1.Conceptual meaning:

Logical, cognitive, or denotative content of language. It is the essential part of language and similar to literal meaning.

E.g. What's this? It's a … (desk, boy, dog…). When you answer this question, you are expressing the conceptual meaning of language.

Associative meaning: same in conceptual meaning but different in implication.

2.Connotative meaning:

What is communicated by virtue of what language refers to.

E.g. “mother” implies love, “blue” implies depressed.

3.Social meaning:

What is communicated of the social circumstances of language use. It mainly involves dialect and status.

E.g. Different style of words like horse and pony imply different social circumstances of language use.

4.Affective meaning:

What is communicated of the feelings and attitudes of the speaker/ writer. It involves the choice of commendatory or derogatory meanings of words.

E.g. The difference between statesman and politician is connotative because the former is commendatory and the latter is derogatory .

5.Reflected meaning:

What is communicated through association with another sense of the same expression.

E.g. Click the mouse twice. (Mouse may remind you of either the part of a computer or a kind of animal who is clicked twice by Tom in the cartoon Tom and Jerry.)

6.Collocative meaning:

What is communicated through association with words which tend to occur in the environment of another word.

E.g. Different meanings of paper are expressed in its collocation with "exam, white and daily"

7.Thematic meaning:

What is communicated by the way in which the message is organized in terms of order and emphasis.

E.g. I hit a dog. A dog was hit by me.

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第二部分Referential theory

1.The 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 the referential theory. We explain the meaning of a word by pointing to the thing it refers to.

E.g. proper nouns and definite noun phrases.

Problem with this theory: the meaning of desk:

When we explain the meaning of desk by pointing to the thing it refers to, we don’t mean a desk must be of the particular size, shape, color and material as the desk we are pointing to at the moment of speaking. We are using this particular desk as an example of something more general.

2.Semantic triangle:

A theory which employs the notion “concept”. Ogden and Richards presented the classic “Semantic Triangle”. They argue that the relation between a word and a thing it refers to is not direct. It is mediated by the concept. In a diagram form, the relation can be showed as follows:

concept

word thing

And something is abstract, which has no existence in the material world and can only be sensed in our minds. This abstract thing is usually called concept.

3.Sense and reference

Sense and reference are two sides of meaning. Although they are different, they are closely to each other.

1. Sense is concerned with the inherent meaning of the linguistic form. It is the collection of all the features of the linguistic form; it is abstract and de-contextualized. Sense refers to the main features, the defining properties an entity has.

2. Reference means what a linguistic form refers to in the real, physical world; it deals with the relationship between the linguistic element and the non-linguistic world of experience.

E.g. The sense of desk: a piece of furniture with a flap top and four legs, at which one reads and writes. Sense is equivalent to concept. The concept of desk may also be called the sense of desk. The concrete entities a particular desk in the world is reference.

3. The distinction between sense and reference:

① It is comparable 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.

① Every word has a sense, or we will not be able to use it or understand it. But not every word has a reference. Grammatical words like but, if, and don’t refer to anything. Words like God, ghost, and dragon refer to imaginary things, which don’t exist in reality. Abstract words like love don’t have a concrete entities in the world.

① Words are in different sense relations with each other. Sense may be defined as the semantic relations between one word and another, or more generally between one linguistic unit and another. In contrast, reference is concerned with the relation between a word and the thing it refers to, or more generally between a linguistic unit and a non-linguistic entity it refers to.

第三部分sense Relations