1.The subject concerning the study of meaning is called semantics, more specifically: semantics is the study of the meaning of linguistic units, words, and sentences in particular.
2.G.Leech recognizes 7 types for meaning in his semantics
1.Conceptual meaning: logical, cognitive, or denotative content
2.Connotative meaning: what is communicated by virtue of what language refers to.
3.Social meaning: what is communicated of the social circumstances of language use.
4.Affective meaning: what is communicated of the feelings and attitudes of the speaker/writer.
5.Reflected meaning: what is communicated through association with another sense of the same expression.
6.Collocative meaning: what is communicated through association with words which tend to occur in the environment of another word.
7.Thematic meaning: what is communicated by the way in which the message is organized in terms of order and emphasis.
3.The referential theory: is the theory of meaning, which relates the meaning of a word to the thing it refers to, or stands for. It is especially true in the case of proper nouns and definite noun phrases. But it cannot refer to the abstract concepts. According to the “semantic triangle” theory, the relation between a word and a thing it refers to is not direct. It is meditated by concept. Leech’s conceptual meaning has two sides: sense and reference. The distinction between sense and reference is similar to that between connotation and denotation. The former refers to the abstract properties of an entity, while the latter refers to the concrete entities having these properties. Every word has a sense, but not every word has a reference.
4.Sense relations
1)Synonymy is the technical name for the sameness relation. English is said to be rich in synonyms. Its vocabulary has two main sources: Anglo-Saxon and Latin. There are many pairs of words of these two sources which mean the same, e.g. buy and purchase , world and universe, brotherly and fraternal.
But total synonymy is rare. The so-called synonyms are all context dependent.
ⅰthey differ in style
ⅱthey may also differ in connotations.
ⅲthere are dialectal differences.
2)Antonymy is the name for oppositeness relation, there are 3 main sub-types: gradable antonymy, complementary antonymy, and converse antonymy.
1Gradable antonymy: good-bad, long-short, big-small
They have three characteristics: firstly, they are gradable; the members of a pair differ in terms of degree. The denial of one is not necessarily the assertion of the other; the can be modified by “very” and they have comparative and superlative degree. Secondly, antonyms of this kind are graded against different norms. A big car is in fact smaller than a small plane. Thirdly, one member of a pair, usually the term for the higher degree, serves as the cover term.
②Complementary antonymy: alive-dead, male-female, present-absent, boy-girl.
Firstly, not only the assertion of one means the denial of the other, the denial of one also means the assertion of the other. The adjectives in this type can not be modified by “very”, and don’t have comparative or superlative degrees either.
Secondly, the norm in this type is absolute. It does not vary with the thing a word is applied to.
Thirdly, the norm in this type is absolute. It does not vary with the thing a word is applied to.
Exception: true-false though in many cases they are considered complementary. But there is a cover term. You can say, “How true is this story?” we can also use “very” to modify “true”, it even has comparative and superlative degrees. A description may be truer than another, or is the truest among a number of descriptions, though false can not be used in this way.
2Converse antonymy: buy-sell, husband-wife, give-receive, parent-child, teacher-student
It is known as relation opposites, there are always two entities involved. One presupposes the other. They are typically seen in reciprocal social roles, kinship relations, temporal and spatial relations.
3)Hyponymy, refers to the sense relations between a more general , inclusive word and a more specific word. The word that is more general in meaning is called superordinate, and the more specific words are called hyponyms. Hyponyms of the same superordinate are cohyponyms to each other. Hyponymy is a relation of inclusion, in terms of meaning, the superordinate inclues all its hyponyms.
5.Componential analysis: the meaning of a word is not an unanalysable whole. It may be seen as a complex of different semantic features. There are semantic units smaller than the meaning of a word. i.e. semantic components. Componential analysis gives a better account for sense relations and those between sentences.
Father=parent(x,y)&male(x)
Mother=parent(x,y)&~male(x)
Son=child(x,y)&male(x)
Daughter=child(x,y)&~male(x)
Verbs can also be analyzed in this way, for example:
Take=cause(x,(have(x,y)))
Give=cause(x,(~have(x,y)))
Die=become(x,(~alive(x)))
Kill=cause(x,(become(y,(~alive(y)))))
Murder=intend(x,(cause(x,(become(y,(~alive(y))))))
Two words, or two expressions, which have the same semantic components, will be synonymous with each other.
Words, which have a contrasting component, on the other hand, are antonyms.
Words, which have all semantic components of another, are hyponyms of the latter.
6. A more important sense relation between sentences is entailment, e.g.
a. John killed bill
b. Bill died.
The member sentences of this pair are in such a relationship that the truth of the second sentence necessarily follows from the truth of the first sentence, which the falsity of the first follows the falsity of the second.
6.Setence meaning
The meaning of a sentence is the result of the meaning of the words used in it and its syntactic structure. According to J.Katz and Fodor in 1960s, it depends on the meaning of its constituent words and the way they are combined. A semantic theory consists of two parts: a dictionary providing the grammatical classification and semantic information of words and a set of projection rules.
7. Logical semantics studies how the truth of a composite proposition is determined by the truth value of its constituent propositions and the connections between them.
8. A proposition is what is expressed by a declarative sentence when that sentence is uttered to make a statement.
Truth table of the composite propositions:
| P Q | P & Q | P ˇ Q | P→Q | P≡Q |
| T T | T | T | T | T |
| T F | F | T | F | F |
| F T | F | T | T | F |
| F F | F | F | T | T |
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