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Reflected and Collocative Meaning






Two further, though less important types of meaning involve an interconnection on the lexical level of language.

First, reflected 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. On hearing, in a church service, the synonymous expressions The Comforter and The Holy Ghost, both referring to The Third Person of the Trinity, I find my reactions to these terms conditioned by the everyday non-religious meanings of comfort and ghost. The Comforter sounds warm and comforting (although in the religious context, it means ‘the strengthener or supporter’), while The Holy Ghost sounds awesome.

One sense of a word seems to ‘rub off’ on another sense in this way only when it has a dominant suggestive power either through relative frequency and familiarity (as in the case of the Holy Ghost) or through the strength of its associations. Only in poetry, which invites a heightened sensitivity to language in all respects, do we find reflected meaning operating in less obviously favourable circumstances:

 

Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides

Full-nervedstill warmtoo hard to stir?

 

In these lines from Futility, a poem on a dead soldier, Wilfred Owen overtly uses the word dear in the sense ‘expensive(ly)’, but also alludes, one feels in the context of the poem, to the sense ‘beloved’.

The case where reflected meaning intrudes through the sheer strength of emotive suggestion is most strikingly illustrated by words which have a taboo meaning. Since their popularization in senses connected with the physiology of sex, it has become increasingly difficult to use terms like intercourse, ejaculation and erection in innocent senses without conjuring up their sexual associations. This process of taboo contamination has accounted in the past for the dying-out of the non-taboo sense of a word: Bloomfield explained the replacement of cock in its farmyard sense by rooster as due to the influence of the taboo use of the former word, and one wonders if intercourse is now following a similar path.

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 handsome share common ground in the meaning ‘good-looking’, but may be distinguished by the range of nouns with which they are likely to occur or (to use the linguist’s term) collocate:

 

  girl   boy
  boy   man
  woman   car
pretty flower handsome vessel
  garden   overcoat
  colour   airliner
  village, etc.   typewriter, etc.

 

The ranges may well, overlap: handsome woman and pretty woman are both acceptable, although they suggest a different kind of attractiveness because of the collocative associations of the two adjectives. Further examples are quasi-synonymous verbs such as wander and stroll (cows may wander, but may not stroll)or tremble and quiver (one trembles with fear, but quivers with excitement). Not all differences in potential co-occurrence need to be explained as collocative meaning: some may be due to stylistic differences, others to conceptual differences. It is the incongruity of combining unlike styles that makes He mounted his gee-gee or He got on his steed an improbable combination. On the other hand, the acceptability of The donkey ate hay, is opposed to The donkey ate silence, is a matter of compatibility on the level of conceptual semantics. Only when explanation in terms of other categories of meaning does not apply do we need to invoke the special category of collocative meaning: on the other levels, generalizations can be made, while collocative meaning is simply an idiosyncratic property of individual words.






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