Meaning аs an object of study

Lecture 6. Word meaning

Outline

Meaning аs an object of study

The referential theory of meaning

3. Grammatical and lexical meaning

4. Denotational and connotational meaning

Meaning аs an object of study

" Meaning", like " word", is one of the most controversial terms in linguistics. Although we often use it in teaching and translation (usually implying a synonym or a translation equivalent), the precise scientific definition of " meaning" presents a considerable difficulty. This is partly so because philosophers, psychologists, literary critics and others all take part in the study of meaning, each of them trying to adapt its definition to his own needs. So a logic may define meaning in terms of truth and falsehood; a psychologist, in terms of stimulus and reaction; a literary critic, in terms of the author’s intention and the reader’s response, etc. Ogden and Richards, the authors of the classical work on the subject, aptly titled " The Meaning of Meaning", were able to include no less than twenty-two various definitions of meaning into their book.

Even within linguistics itself, there are different schools and approaches. Ferdinand de Saussure and his followers treated meaning as the relation between something named and the name itself, and therefore part of the system of the language. On the other hand, the " descriptive" linguistics of the Bloomfield school defines meaning as the situation in which the word is uttered, and therefore part of the use to which language is put. Meaning, according to Bloomfield and his successors, is outside the structure of the language. Some of them went so far as to exclude semasiology from linguistics on the ground that " meaning could not be studied objectively". (Most linguists, however, do not share this extreme view. A prominent linguist Roman Jacobson summed it up in his joke: " Linguistics without meaning is meaningless").

As a result, there are two main approaches to the study of meaning in present-day linguistics. One is the referential approach, seeking to establish the interdependence between words and concepts. The other is the functional approach, which is less concerned with what meaning is than with how it works. All major works on semantic theory have so far been based on referential concepts of meaning, but this doesn’t mean that the functional approach should be fully ignored: it is often a useful starting point for a referential analysis, and is also widely used in various structure-oriented studies of language, such as semantic syntax and computer linguistics.