The dimensions of meaning

                        

1. Reference and denotation

     In every language there are words like tree and run and red which seem to have an obvious relation to objects and events and descriptions of things in the world around us. Children learning their native language first learn words in association with observable items and situations and events. This simple fact can give rise to an overly simple idea about what ‘meaning’ is. The best known elaboration of this view was made by Ogden and Richards (1923), who developed a mentalistic theory about meaning, an attempt to explain meaning in terms of what is in people’s minds. Their explanation centers around this scheme: Ogden and Richards called the bond between word and concept an ‘association,’ the bond between concept and object ‘reference,’ and the bond between object and word ‘meaning.’

      Just as we distinguished between ‘utterance’ and ‘sentence,’ we need to draw a distinction between reference and denotation. 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 a particular situation of language use, including what a speaker may imagine. Denotation is the potential of a word like door or dog to enter into such language expressions. Reference is the way speakers and hearers use an expression successfully; denotation is the knowledge they have that makes their use successful.

       The trouble with a mentalistic theory of meaning is, first, that not all words can be associated with mental images and some words have a range of meaning greater than any single association. The bigger problem with a mentalistic theory is that we have no access to other people’s minds.

 

2. Connotation

    The word dog has a certain denotation, the possibility of entering into numerous referring expressions such as the underlined expressions in the following.

1 This dog is a Dalmatian.

2 My children have just acquired a dog.

3 Several dogs were fighting over a bone.

     Hjelmslev (1971:109–10) pointed out that among the Eskimos a dog is an animal that is used for pulling a sled, the Parsees regard dogs as nearly sacred, Hindus consider them a great pest and in Western Europe and America some members of the species still perform the original chores of hunting and guarding while others are merely ‘pets.’ Hjelmslev might have added that in certain societies the flesh of dogs is part of the human diet and in other societies it is not. The meaning of dog includes the attitudes of a society and of individuals, the pragmatic aspect. It would be wrong to think that a purely biological definition of the lexeme dog is a sufficient account of its meaning. Part of its meaning is its connotation, the affective or emotional associations it elicits, which clearly need not be the same for all people who know and use the word. 

    A denotation identifies the central aspect of word meaning, which everybody generally agrees about. Connotation refers to the personal aspect of meaning, the emotional associations that the word arouses. Connotations vary according to the experience of individuals but, because people do have common experiences, some words have shared connotations.

 

3. Sense relations

    Meaning is more than denotation and connotation. What a word means depends in part on its associations with other words, the relational aspect. The meaning that a lexeme has because of these relationships is the sense of that lexeme. Part of this relationship is seen in the way words do, or do not, go together meaningfully.

     The meaning of a lexeme is, in part, its relation to other lexemes of the language. Each lexeme is linked in some way to numerous other lexemes of the language. We can notice two kinds of linkage, especially. First, there is the relation of the lexeme with other lexemes with which it occurs in the same phrases or sentences. These are syntagmatic relations, the mutual association 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 meanings contribute to the meaning of the larger unit, the phrase or sentence.

     Another kind of relation is contrastive. Instead of saying The judge was arbitrary, for instance, we can say The judge was cautious or careless, or busy or irritable, and so on with numerous other possible descriptors. This is a 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 little in common but each is different from the others.

 

4. Lexical and grammatical meanings

   The above is a meaningful sentence which is composed of smaller meaningful parts. One of the smaller parts is the phrase a dog which refers to a certain animal. We call this phrase a referring expression. 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. Most of the next chapter is about referring expressions. The entity to which the referring expression is linked is its referent.

    Another meaningful part is the verb bark, which is also linked to something outside of language, an activity associated, here, with the referring expression a dog. We call this meaningful part a predicate. The use of language generally involves naming or referring to some entity and saying, or predicating, something about that entity.

      The sentence also has several kinds of grammatical meanings. Every language has a grammatical system and different languages have somewhat different grammatical systems. We can best explain what grammatical meanings are by showing how the sentence A dog barked differs from other sentences that have the same, or a similar, referring expression and the same predicate.

 

5. Morphemes

A lexeme may consist of just one meaningful part like these:

        arm chair happy guitar lemon shoe

or of more than one meaningful part like these

         armchair unhappy guitarist lemonade shoehorn

 

      The technical term for a minimal meaningful part is morpheme. Arm, chair, happy, guitar, lemon, shoe and horn are all morphemes; none of them can be divided into something smaller that is meaningful. They are free morphemes because they occur by themselves. The elements un-, -ist and -ade in unhappy, guitarist and lemonade respectively, are also morphemes; they are bound morphemes which are always attached to something else, as in these examples.

 

6. Homonymy and polysemy

   A lexeme is a conjunction of form and meaning. The form is fairly easy to determine: in writing it is a sequence of letters, in speech a sequence of phonemes. But meaning is more difficult to determine. In homonyms, such as bank ‘a financial institution’ and bank ‘the edge of a stream,’ pronunciation and spelling are identical but meanings are unrelated. English also has pairs of homographs, two words that have different pronunciations but the same spelling; for example, bow, rhyming with go and referring to an instrument for shooting arrows, and bow, rhyming with cow and indicating a bending of the body as a form of respectful greeting.

     Lexicographers and semanticists sometimes have to decide whether a form with a wide range of meanings is an instance of polysemy or of homonymy. A polysemous lexeme has several (apparently) related meanings. The noun head, for instance, seems to have related meanings when we speak of the head of a person, the head of a company, head of a table or bed, a head of lettuce or cabbage.