THE DIMENTION OF MEANING

By :1.Apriana Diana2.Ima Nurhanida3. Sri Haryati4. Nurmawaty

THE DIMENTION OF MEANINGI. Reference and denotationII. ConnotationIII.Sense RelationsIV.Lexical and grammatical meaningsV. MorphemesVI.Homonymy and polysemyVII.Lexical ambiguityVIII.Sentence meaning

REFERENCE Reference is the relation between a

language expression such as this door, both doors, the dog, another dog and whatever the expression pertains to in particular situation of language use, including what a speaker may imagine.

Reference is the way speakers and hearers use an expressions successfully.

DENOTATION Denotation is the potential of a word like

door or dog to enter into such language expressions.e.g: 1. This dog is a Dalmatian. 2. My children have just acquired a dog. 3. Several dogs were fighting over a bone.

Denotation is the knowledge they have that makes their use successful.

DENOTATION Denotation is usually given priority of

treatment in semantics because it often has a complex organization that lends itself to semantics analysis.

e.g: the relations between dependency between armchair and seat and

contrast between sofa and bench.

TENTATIVE DIAGRAM FOR SEAT DOMAIN

Seat

chair armchair stool sofa bench

(‘for one person’) (‘for more than one person’)

chair armchair stool sofa bench

(‘with a back) (‘without back’) (‘with a back’) (‘without back’)

CONNOTATION The affective or emotional associations

it elicits, which clearly need not to be the same for all people who know and use the word.

Connotation refers to the personal aspect of meaning, the emotional associations that the word arouses.

CONNOTATION EXAMPLES Hjelmslev (1971 : 109-10) pointed out that (about a dog)

1. Among Eskimos a dog is an animal that is use for pulling a sled.

2. Parsees regard dogs nearly sacred.3. Hindus consider them a great pest.

CONNOTATION EXAMPLES 4. Western Europe and America some

members of the species still perform the original chores of hunting & guarding while others are merely ‘pets’.

5. Certain societies, the flesh of dogs is part of a human diet and others it is not.

The meaning of dog includes the attitudes of a society and of individuals, the pragmatic aspect.

CONNOTATIONConnotations vary according to the

experience of individuals but because people do have common experiences, some words have shared connotation or similar relation.e.g: 1. that violin and that fiddle

2. automobile and car3. building and edifice4. fire and conflagration5. thin or slender or svelte or skinny.

SUMMARY Connotation can have the same

referent; can refer the same object on a particular occasion but they do not have the same meaning, they differ in connotation.

The connotative meanings of a word exist together with the denotative meanings.

3.3 SENSE RELATIONS What a word means depends in part on

its associations with other words, the relational aspect.

Lexemes do not merely ‘have’ meanings: they contribute meanings to utterances in which they occur, and what meanings they can contribute depends on what other lexemes they are associated with in these utterances

The meaning that a lexeme has because of these relationships is the sense of that lexeme.Example:a. John walked. An hour elapsed.b. John elapsed. An hour walked.

Part of the relationship is seen in the way word meanings vary with context.Example:a. Professor Jones has a rather large library.b. The library is at the corner of Wilson and Adams Street.

A number of English verbs can be used in two different ways - different grammatical association – and then have slightly different meanings.Example:a. A window broke.b. Tom broke a window.

A lexeme does not merely ‘have’ meaning; it contributes to the meaning of a larger unit, a phrase or sentence.Example:a. a happy child, a happy familyb. a happy accident, a happy experiencec. a happy story, a happy report

Each lexeme is linked in some way to numerous other lexemes of the language. There are two kinds of linkage. 1. Syntagmatic relations, the mutual associations of two or more words in a sequence (not necessarily right next to one another) so that the meaning of each is affected by the other(s) and together their meaning of the larger unit, the phrase or sentence.

Example of syntagmatic relations

happy + child = happy child, happy + accident = happy accidentsit + chair = sit chairread + book = read book , read +newspaper = read newspaper

2. Paradigmatic relation, a relation of choice. We choose from among a number of possible words that can fill the same blank: the words may be similar in meaning or have a little in common but each is different from others. Example of paradigmatic relation:

The judge was arbitrary.The judge was cautious.The judge was careless.

Since we are used to writing system that goes from left to right, syntagmatic relation as horizontal and paradigmatic relations as vertical.

3.4 LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL MEANINGS A dog barkeda refering expression predicateA dog is the phrase which refers to a certain animals and is called as a referring expression (is a piece of language that is used AS IF it is linked to something outside language, some living or dead entity or concept or group of entities or concepts). The entity to which the referring expression is linked is its referent.The verb bark is linked to an activity associated with the referring expression dog and is called as a predicate (The use of language generally involves something about that entity, entity and saying, or predicating, something about that entity.

Every language has a grammatical system and different languages have somewhat different grammatical systems. We can explain what grammatical meanings by showing how the sentence A dog barked differs from other sentences that have the same referring expression and the same predicate.The grammatical system of English make possible the expression of meaning like these:

statement vs questionA dog barked. Did a dog bark?

affirmative vs negative:A dog barked. A dog did not bark. No

dog barkpast vs present:

A dog barked A dog barks.singular vs plural:

A dog barked. Some dogs barked.indefinite vs definite:

A dog barked . The dog barked.

Grammatical meanings, are expressed in various ways: the arrangement of words (referring expression before the predicate, by grammatical affixes like the –s attached to the noun dog and the –ed attached to the verb bark, and by grammatical words, or function words, like in these sentences: do (in the form did), not, a, some and the.

The meanings of dog and bark are not grammatical but lexical, with association outside language. They are lexemes. A lexeme is a minimal unit that can take part in referring or predicating. Example:a. Go, going, went, goneb. Put up with, kick the bucket, dog in the mangerIn group (a) there are 4 forms and the forms have four different meaning, but they have a shared meaning, which is lexical, and other meanings of a grammatical nature added to the lexical meaning. These four forms constitute one lexeme – which we designate as go

In group (b) presents a different sort of problem. The expression put up with combines the porms put and up and with, but its meaning is not combination of the separate meanings. Therefore put up with , in the sense of ‘endure, ‘tolerate,’ is a single lexeme. Kick the bucket means ‘die’ and dog in the manger refers to a person who will not let others share what he has, even though he does not use it himself

SUMMARYWe recognize several kinds of meaning. Some pieces of language refer to something, real or fictitious, outside of language. Some linguistic forms make comments about referents; these are predicates. In addition there are grammatical meanings, expressed by bound morphemes (affixes), by function words, and by arrangement of forms in a sentence. Referring expressions and predicates have lexical meaning while grammatical morphemes and function words express grammatical meanings. The totality of lexemes in the language constitute the lexicon of the language, and all the lexemes that one individual knows are his or her personal lexicon.

3.5 MORPHEMES

DEFINITION A morphemes is the smallest meaningful unit in the

grammatical of a language . A single word may be composed of one or more

morphemes Examples :

She looked unhappier than the day before.The word “unhappier” consist s of :

un + happy + er (can be analyzed into 3 morphemes)

un- (a unit of grammatical function in indicating negative) happy ( one minimal unit)

er ( a unit of grammatical function in indicating comparison)

MORE EXAMPLES OF MORPHEMES

guitarist : guitar ( one minimal unit) -ist (meaning “ person who

does something)dogs : dog (one minimal unit)

-s (a unit of grammatical function in a plural marker on nouns)

CLASSIFICATION OF MORPHEMES

free morphemes bound morphemes(basic word forms) (prefixes and suffixes)

Free Morphemes:morphemes which can be used as a word on their own.They generally consist of separate English word forms such as nouns,verbs and adjectives.

EXAMPLES : girl,system,happy,act,plane,etc.

BOUND MORPHEMES: • morphemes which can not occur on their

own as an independent word.They are generally prefixes and suffixes like re-,-ist,-ed,-s in the words reprint,typist,talked and boys,for example and are attached to other forms which are described as stems-basic word forms

EXAMPLES : un + happy + er(unhappier) prefix stemsuffix bound free bound

EXAMPLES OF INFECTIONAL AND DERIVATIONAL AFFIXES

Dog 1 morpheme Dogs 2 morphemes dog + -s (pl) Bulldog 2 morphemes bull + dog Walk 1 morpheme walk Walks 2 morphemes walk +s (3rd per sing) Walked 2 morphemes walk+ ed (past tense) Red 1 morphemered Reddish 2 morphemes red+-ish (deriv.adj) Redder 2 morphemes red +-er (comparative)

3.6 HOMONYMY AND POLYSEMY

HOMONYMY sense relation in which one form has different meaning ; different words with the same form (treated as such in dictionaries) no relatedness in meaninge.g. bank1‐side of a river bank2‐financial institution

Pronunciation is identical but meaning are unrelated

MORE EXAMPLES OF HOMONYMYsteak

stakepronunciation is identically but spelling is different (different in phonology)so

POLYSEMY One word having several closely related senses (a word or phrase with multiple

meanings) Native speaker has clear intuition that the

different senses are related to each other Polysemy‐close relatedness in m. which is usually connected to metaphorical

extension

EXAMPLES : head

seems to have related meanings when we speak of the head of a person, the head of company, the head of a table or bed, head of lettuce or cabbage

pupil =part of eye, school child

NOTE The distinction between homonymy

and polysemy is not an easy one to make.

See the following sentences :1. Fred asked Betty where his golf clubs

were2. Fred asked Donna if she had seen his

clubs3. Fred asked Charles to help him find his

clubs

NOTE Sentence 1 & 2 are about questions,

requests for information. The utterances behind sentence 1 & 2 would be something like “Where are my golf clubs, Betty?”

Sentence 3 is not a request for information but a request for a kind of action. The utterance behind sentence 3 might be something “ Help me to find my clubs, Charles.”

CONCLUSION A morpheme is the minimal meaningful

unit, possessing both sound and meaning Morphemes can be classified into free

morphemes and bound morphemes Criteria for absolute homonymy are :1. Their forms must be unrelated2. all their forms must be identically The distinction between homonymy and

polysemy is not an easy one to make.

LEXICAL AMBIGUITYWhen homonyms can occur in the same position in utterances, the result is lexical ambiguity, for example, “I was on my way to the bank.”

Homonyms belong to different lexical categories and therefore do not give rise to ambiguity.

For instance, seen is a form of the verb see while scene is an unrelated noun; feet is a plural noun with concrete reference, feat is a singular noun, rather abstract in nature;

Ambiguity occurs also because a longer linguistic form has:

a literal sense and a figurative sense.

There’s a skeleton in our closet. Skeleton in the closet can mean ‘an

unfortunate event that is kept a family secret.’ With this meaning skeleton in the closet is a single lexeme;

with its ‘literal’ meaning it is a phrase composed of several lexemes.

SENTENCE MEANINGThere are two points which are

obvious about ‘sentence meaning’ the meaning of a sentence derives

from the meanings of its constituent lexemes and from the grammatical meanings it contains.

Second, at least if the sentence is a statement

‘Albert Thompson opened the first

flour mill in Waterton.’

true or not (contradiction)??

Truth-conditional semantics is based on the notion that the core meaning of any sentence (any statement) is its truth conditions.Any speaker of the language knows these conditions.

If a sentence is true (or false), what other sentences, expressing partly the same,partly different conditions, can be judged by this sentence?

In SEMANTIC we are interested in the instances when the language of the message implicates some additional meaning that accounts for our inference.examples.a) One team consisted of six students

from Felman College.b) One team consisted of the six students

from Felman College.

SUMMARY If two homonyms can occur in the same

place in an utterance, the result is lexical ambiguity.

Truth-conditional semantics is the study of meaning through a consideration of the conditions that must exist for a sentence to be true, and how the truth of one sentence relates to the truth or falsity of other sentences.

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