1、Seven Types of MeaningLeech(1981)distinguishes seven types of meaning in language:conceptual meaning,connotative meaning,social meaning,affective meaning,reflected meaning,collocative meaning,and thematic meaning.Connotative meaning,reflected meaning,collocative meaning,affective meaning and social
2、meaning have the same open-ended,variable character and thus fall under the heading of associative meaning.Conceptual MeaningConceptual meaning,which is sometimes called denotative or cognitive meaning,refers to meanings as presented in a dictionary.It is widely assumed to be the central factor in l
3、inguistic communication.The conceptual meanings of a language can be studied in terms of contrastive features.For example,the meaning of the word woman could be specified as+HUMAN,-MALE,+ADULT,as distinct from boy,which could be defined as+HUMAN,+MALE,-ADULT.Connotative MeaningConnotative meaning is
4、 the communicative value an expression has by virtue of what it refers to,over and above its purely conceptual content.Connotative meaning is indeterminate and open-ended.Any characteristic of the referent may contribute to the connotative meaning of the expression which denotes it.Take the word wom
5、an for example.It is defined conceptually by three features(+HUMAN,-MALE,+ADULT),but there is a multitude of additional,non-criterial properties that we have learnt to expect a referent of woman to possess.They include not only physical characteristics,but also psychological and social properties,an
6、d may extend to features which are typical concomitants of womanhood(experienced in cookery,skirt-or-dress-wearing).Still further,connotative meaning can embrace the putative properties of the referent,due to the viewpoint adopted by an individual or a group of people or a whole society.So in the pa
7、st woman has been burdened with such attributes(frail,prone to tears,emotional,irrational,inconstant)as the dominant male has imposed on her,as well as with more becoming qualifies such as gentle,compassionate,hard-working.Connotations are the real world experience one associates with a word when on
8、e uses or hears it.They vary from age to age,from society to society,and from individual to individual within the same speech community.Social and Affective MeaningsSocial meaning refers to the kind of meaning a piece of language conveys about the social circumstances of its use.From the use of word
9、s we can recognize the geographical,social origin of the speaker,or the social relationship between the speaker and hearer.We can decode the social meaning of a text through our recognition of different dimensions and levels of style.For example,horse is a general word,steed is used in poetic langua
10、ge,nag is slang,but gee-gee is used in baby language.The term affective meaning can be used to cover the attitudinal and emotional factors expressed in a word.Affective meaning is often explicitly conveyed through the conceptual or connotative content of the words used.Reflected and Collocative Mean
11、ingsReflected meaning is the meaning which arises in cases of multiple conceptual meaning,when one sense of a word forms part of our response to another sense.Reflected meaning is most strikingly illustrated by words which have a taboo meaning.Since their popularization in senses connected with the
12、physiology of sex,it has become increasingly difficult to use words like intercourse in innocent senses without conjuring up its sexual associations.Collocative meaning consists of the associations a word acquires on account of the meanings of words which tend to occur in its environment.Pretty and
13、handsome share common ground in the meaning of good-looking,but may be distinguished by the range of nouns with which they are likely to co-occur or collocate.For example,pretty often co-occur with woman,flower,garden,color,village etc.while handsome often co-occur with man,car,vessel,overcoat,airli
14、ner,typewriter,etc.Thematic MeaningThematic meaning is what is communicated by the way in which a speaker or writer organizes the message,in terms of ordering,focus,and emphasis.According to Halliday(1994),a clause,as a message structure,consists of a Theme accompanied by Rheme.Whatever is chosen as
15、 the Theme is put in the first position in the clause.The Theme is the element which serves as the point of departure of the message.Thus,a word or phrase may occur in the first position,serving as the starting point of the message.For example,the following two sentences carry different thematic mea
16、ning,although in conceptual content they seem to be the same.(1)Mrs Bessie Smith donated the first prize.(2)The first prize was donated by Mrs Bessie Smith.The first sentence seems to say Ill tell you about Mrs Bessie Smith.while the second seems to say Ill tell you about the first prize.Root and St
17、emThe word to which affixes are added and which carries the basic meaning of the resulting complex word is known as the stem.A stem may consist of one or more morphemes.A stem consisting of a single morpheme is labeled as root.It is the part that is always present in the various realizations of a le
18、xeme.For example,walk is a root and it appears in the set of word-forms that instantiate the lexeme walk such as walk,walks,walking and walked.Many words contain a root standing on its own.Roots which are capable of standing independently are called free morphemes.Single words like man,book,tea,swee
19、t,cook are the smallest free morphemes capable of occurring in isolation.However,some roots are incapable of occurring in isolation.They always occur with some other word-building element attached to them.Such roots are called bound morphemes,like mit in permit,remit,commit,admit and-ceive in percei
20、ve,receive,conceive.The bound roots-mit and-ceive co-occur with forms like re-,de-which recur in numerous other words as prefixes or suffixes.None of these roots could occur as an independent word.Roots tend to have a core meaning which is in some way modified by the affix.But determining meaning is
21、 sometimes tricky.Perhaps you are able to recognize the meaning sit in sedan,sedate,sedent,sedentary,and sediment which contain sed-.The root sed-came into English from Latin.Unless you have studied Latin,you are unable to say that sed-means sit without looking up sed-in an etymological dictionary.T
22、he stem is that part of a word that is in existence before any inflectional affixes(i.e.those affixes whose presence is required by the syntax such as markers of singular and plural number in nouns,tense in verbs etc.)have been added.For example:Noun stem Plural desk -s reader -sIn the word-form des
23、ks,the plural inflectional suffix-s is attached to the simple stem desk,which is a bare root.In readers,the same inflectional-s suffix comes after a slightly more complex stem consisting of the root read plus the suffix-er which is used to form nouns from verbs.Here read is the root,but reader is th
24、e stem to which-s is attached.A base is any unit whatsoever to which affixes of any kind can be added.A root like boy can be a base since it can have attached to it inflectional affixes like-s to form the plural boys or derivational affixes like-ish to turn the noun boy into the adjective boyish.In
25、other words,all roots are bases.Bases are called stems only in the context of inflectional morphology.For example,-ed and s are inflectional affixes;un-,-ful,er and ness are derivational affixes;faith can be a root,a stem or a base.It is possible to form a complex word by adding affixes to a form co
26、ntaining more than one root.For instance,the independent words frog and march can be joined together to form the base(a stem,to be precise)frog-march to which the suffix-ed may be added to yield frog-march-ed.A root or stem can be attached with an affix.It is a morpheme which only occurs when attach
27、ed to some other morpheme or morphemes.By definition affixes are bound morphemes.No word may contain only an affix standing on its own,like*-s or*-ed or*-al or even a number of affixes strung together like*-al-s.There are three types of affixes:prefix,suffix and infix.A prefix is an affix attached b
28、efore a root(or stem or base)like re-,un-and in-,as in re-make,un-kind,in-decent.A suffix is an affix attached after a root(or stem or base)like-ly,-er,-ist,-ing and ed,as in kind-ly,wait-er,interest-ing,interest-ed.An infix is an affix inserted into the root itself.Infixing is somewhat rare in Engl
29、ish.Affixes can be divided into inflectional affixes and derivational affixes.Inflectional affixes are used for syntactic reasons to indicate number,tense,case,and so on while derivational affixes can alter the meaning or grammatical category of the base.PolysemyPolysemy refers to the situation wher
30、e the same word has two or more different meanings.For instance,the noun bank is said to be polysemous because it may mean:(l)a financial institution that people or businesses can keep their money in or borrow money from,(2)a raised area of land along the side of a river,(3)a large number of things
31、in a row,especially pieces of equipment.The concept of polysemy is complex and involves a certain number of problems.We cannot determine exactly how many meanings a polysemous word has,as a word may have both a literal meaning and one or more transferred meanings.It is difficult to distinguish betwe
32、en polysemy(i.e.one word with several meanings)and homonymy(i.e.several words with the same shape spelling and/or pronunciation).Assuming that we have a written form with two meanings,dictionaries have to decide whether a particular item is to be handled in terms of polysemy or homonymy,because a po
33、lysemous word will be treated as a single entry,while a homonymous one will have a separate entry for each of the homonyms.HomonymyHomonymy refers to a situation where we have two or more words with the same shape.Although they have the same shape,homonyms are considered distinct lexemes,mainly beca
34、use they have unrelated meanings and different etymologies.Homonyms can be divided into two types:homograph and homophone.Homograph refers to a word which is spelt the same as another word but has a different meaning and sometimes a different pronunciation.For example,lead(metal)and lead(dogs lead)a
35、re spelt the same but pronounced differently.Homophone refers to a word that sounds the same as another word but has its own spelling,meaning and origin.For example,right,rite and write are spelt differently but pronounced the same.In addition to the difference in meaning,homonyms may also be kept a
36、part by syntactic differences.For example,when homonyms belong to different word classes,as in the case of tender,which has different lexemes as adjective,verb and noun,each homonym has not only a distinct meaning,but also a different grammatical function.The same observation applies to pairs of wor
37、ds such as bear(noun)and bear(verb),grave(adjective)and grave(noun),hail(noun)and hail(verb),hoarse(adjective)and horse(noun).Because of the sameness of shape,there are cases in which two homonyms with totally different meanings may both make sense in the same utterance.For example,The route was ver
38、y long The root was very long;Helen didnt see the bat(animal)Helen didnt see the bat(wooden implement).Difference in grammatical class contributes to a substantial reduction in the number of effective homonyms in English.Consider the pairs of homophones knows(verb)and nose(noun),rights(noun)and writes(verb).
