Chapter 5 Word Meaning

The meanings of “Meaning”

Reference(所指):

It is the relationship between language and the word. It is the arbitrary and conventional. It is a kind of abstraction, yet with the help of context, it can refer to something specific.

Concept（概念）:It is beyond language is the result of human cognition(认识),reflecting the objective world in the human mind.

Sense（意义）:It denotes the relationship inside the language. ‘The sense of an expression is its place in a system of semantic relationships with other expressions in the language.’

Motivation(理据)：It accounts for the connection between the linguistic symbol and its meaning.

1) Onomatopoeic motivation（拟声理据）    2)Morphological motivation （形态理据）

3)Semantic motivation（词义理据）         4)Etymological motivation （词源理据）

Types of meaning

Grammatical Meaning（语法意义）:indicate the grammatical concept(become important only in actual context)

Lexical Meaning （词汇意义）

Lexical meaning and grammatical meaning make up the word-meaning

Lexical meaning has 2 components: Conceptual meaning(概念意义) and associative meaning(关联意义)

Conceptual meaning(概念意义): also known as denotative meaning(外延意义)

Associative meaning(关联意义):[connotative隐含意义,Stylistic风格意义,Affective感情意义, Collocative搭配意义]