Conceptual Meaning , Connotative Meaning, Social Meaning, Affective Meaning, Reflected Meaning, Collocative Meaning, Thematic Meaning

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION.

The subject concerning the study of meaning is called Semantics. The word semantic (from French sémantique) was invented by Michel Bréal during the 19th century.Some people would like semantics to pursue study of meaning in a wider sense of ‘all that is communicated by language’; others (among them most modern writers within the framework of general linguistics) limit it in practice to the study of logical or conceptual meaning. It needs no great insight to see that semantics in the former, wider sense can lead us once again into the void from which Bloomfield retreated with understandable misgivings- the description of all that may be the object of human knowledge or belief. On the other hand, we can, by carefully distinguishing types of meaning, show how they all fit into the total composite effect of a linguistic communication, and show how method of study appropriate to one type may not be appropriate to another.

It has been observed that there is tremendous renewal of interest in semantic theory among linguists in the last few years. The main reason is the development of generative grammar with its emphasis on the distinction between ‘deep structure’ and ‘surface structure’. On the one hand semantics deals with the way words are and sentences are related to objects and processes in the world. On the other hand, it deals with the way in which they are related to one another in terms of such notions as ‘synonymy’, entailment’, and ‘contradiction’. According to John I Saeed, Semantics is the study of meaning communicated through language. He further says that a speaker’s semantic knowledge is an exciting and challenging task.

The semantic analysis, generally, must explain how the sentences of a particular language are understood, interpreted, and related to states, processes and objects in the world.

More specifically, semantics is the study of the meaning of linguistic units, words and sentences in particular.

     Meaning has always been a central topic in human scholarship, though the term "semantics" has only a history of a little over a hundred years. There were discussions of meaning in the works of the Greek philosopher Plato as early as in the fifth century before Christ. In China, Lao Zi had discussed similar questions even earlier. The fact that over the years numerous dictionaries have been produced with a view to explaining the meaning of words also bears witness to its long tradition. Nevertheless, semantics remains the least known area in linguistics, compared with phonetics, phonology, morphology and syntax. Here, the writer focus on the specific of class of word in semnatics.

CHAPTER II

DISCUSSION

A.    Theories of Meaning

A word is the smallest unit of spoken language which has meaning and can stand alone, it is a written representation of one or more sounds which can be spoken to represent an idea, object, action, etc. in order to be understood by the people, a word must have a meaning.

Most words have more than one meaning, it is the characteristic of words that a single word may have several meaning, in fact, words may play an enormous part in our life. Words are used to express something and also conveys feelings about we are describing. Words are used not in isolation but related to human situation. It is through our experience with them in human situation that they take on meaning. If we talk about words, we can not avoid talking about the study of meaning (semantics). The meaning of word is often complex, having such component   as a picture, an idea, a quality, a relationship and personal feelings and association. Lyons 1977:643 in Palmer1981:40-41) suggested that we should draw a distinction between sentence meaning and utterance meaning,

The term “theory of meaning” has figured, in one way or another, in a great number of philosophical disputes over the last half-century. Unfortunately, this term has also been used to mean a great number of different things.

Here we focus on two sorts of “theory of meaning.” The first sort of theory—a semantic theory—is a theory which assigns semantic contents to expressions of a language. Approaches to semantics may be divided according to whether they assign propositions as the meanings of sentences and, if they do, what view they take of the nature of these propositions.

The second sort of theory—a foundational theory of meaning—is a theory which states the facts in virtue of which expressions have the semantic contents that they have. Approaches to the foundational theory of meaning may be divided into theories which do, and theories which do not, explain the meanings of expressions of a language used by a group in terms of the contents of the mental states of members of that group.

B. TYPES OF MEANING

A piece of language conveys its dictionary meaning, connotations beyond the dictionary meaning, information about the social context of language use, speaker’s feelings and attitudes rubbing off of one meaning on the another meaning of the same word when it has two meanings and meaning because of habit occurrence.

Broadly speaking, ‘meaning’ means the sum total of communicated through language. Words, Phrases and sentences have meanings which are studies in semantics.

Geoffrey Leech in his ‘Semantic- A Study of meaning’ (1974) breaks down meaning into seven types or ingredients giving primacy to conceptual meaning.

The Seven types of meaning according to Leech are as follows.

1) Conceptual or Denotative Meaning:

Conceptual meaning is sometimes called denotative meaning or cognitive meaning, it is widely assumed to be the central factor in linguistic communication. Larson noted that denotative meaning is also called as primary meaning, that is the meaning suggested by the word when it used alone. It is the first meaning or usage which a word will suggest to most people when the word is said in isolation. it is the meaning  learned early in life and likely to have reference to a physical situation (Larson, 1984: 100)

      The denotation of word is its agreed-upon sense-what it refers to, stands for, or designates, a part from the feeling it may call up, and this again is able for a good deal on the context the words that appears in.

      It is said that the aim of denotative meaning is to provide, for any given interpretation of a sentence, a configuration of abstract symbols, in which shows exactly what we need to know if we are to distinguish that meaning from all other possible sentence meaning in the language. Conceptual meaning is also called logical or cognitive meaning. It is the basic propositional meaning which corresponds to the primary dictionary definition. Such a meaning is stylistically neutral and objective as opposed to other kinds of associative meanings. Conceptual

Meanings are the essential or core meaning while other six types are the peripheral. It is peripheral in as sense that it is non-essential. They are stylistically marked and subjective kind of meanings. Leech gives primacy to conceptual meaning because it has sophisticated organization based on the principle of contrastiveness and hierarchical structure.

E.g.

/P/ can be described as- voiceless + bilabial + plosive.

Similarly

Boy = + human + male-adult.

The hierarchical structure of ‘Boy’ = + Human + Male-Adult

Or “Boy” =Human – Male/Female-adult in a rough way.

Conceptual meaning is the literal meaning of the word indicating the idea or concept to which it refers. The concept is minimal unit of meaning which could be called ‘sememe’. As we define phoneme on the basis of binary contrast, similarly we can define sememe ‘Woman’ as = + human + female + adult. If any of these attribute changes the concept cease to be the same.

Conceptual meaning deals with the core meaning of expression. It is the denotative or literal meaning. It is essential for the functioning of language. For example, a part of the conceptual meaning of ‘Needle” may be “thin”, “sharp” or “instrument”.

The organization of conceptual meaning is based on two structural principles- Contrastiveness and the principle of structure. The conceptual meanings can be studied typically in terms of contrastive features.

For example the word “woman” can be shown as:

“Woman = + Human, -Male, + Adult”.

On the contrary, word

“Boy” can be realized as:-

“Boy = “+ human, + male, - Adult”.

By the principle of structure, larger units of language are built up out smaller units or smaller units or smaller units are built out larger ones.

The aim of conceptual meaning is to provide an appropriate semantic representation to a sentence or statement. A sentence is made of abstract symbols. Conceptual meaning helps us to distinguish one meaning from the meaning of other sentences. Thus, conceptual meaning is an essential part of language. A language essentially depends on conceptual meaning for communication. The conceptual meaning is the base for all the other types of meaning.

2) Connotative Meaning:

As we experience, words are human situations, they not only take on certain denotation, but also often acquire individual flavors. They have come to have emotive tone, the associations, and suggestiveness of the situation in which they have been a part. For example let us examine the words “brink”. This denotes on “edge”. However in the phrase “The brink of the cliff” or” the brink of disaster”, this word suggest danger and its emotive tone is that of fear.

According to Leech (1974: 40-41) connotative meaning is the communicative value an expression has by virtue of what it refers to, over and above its purely conceptual content. It will be clear if we are talking about connotation, we are in fact talking about the “real word experience”. Someone associates with an expression when someone uses and hears it. The fact that if we compared connotative meaning with denotative meaning is that connotations are relatively unstable; that is they vary considerably we have seen, according to culture, historical period, and the experience of the individual. Although all the speaker of particular language speaks the language exactly the same conceptual framework, actually each of them has individual perception of words. Connotative meaning is indeterminate and open in the same way as our knowledge and belief about the universe are opened-ended. Connotations play a major role in the language of literature, of politics, of advertising, and a greeting card.

Connotative meaning is the communicative value of an expression over and above its purely conceptual content. It is something that goes beyond mere referent of a word and hints at its attributes in the real world. It is something more than the dictionary meaning. Thus purely conceptual content of ‘woman’ is +human + female+ adult but the psychosocial connotations could be ‘gregarious’, ‘having maternal instinct’ or typical (rather than invariable) attributes of womanhood such as ‘babbling’,’ experienced in cookery’, ‘skirt or dress wearing ‘etc. Still further connotative meaning can embrace putative properties of a referent due to viewpoint adopted by individual, group, and society as a whole. So in the past woman was supposed to have attributes like frail, prone to tears, emotional, irrigational, inconstant , cowardly etc. as well as more positive qualities such gentle, sensitive, compassionate, hardworking etc. Connotations vary age to age and society to society.

E.g. Old age ‘Woman’ - ‘Non-trouser wearing or sari wearing’ in Indian context must have seemed definite connotation in the past.

Present ‘Woman’---- Salwar/T-shirt/Jeans wearing.

Some times connotation varies from person to person also

. E.g. connotations of the word ‘woman’ for misogynist and a person of feminist vary.

The boundary between conceptual and connotative seems to be analogous. Connotative meaning is regarded as incidental, comparatively unstable, in determinant, open ended, variable according to age, culture and individual, whereas conceptual meaning is not like that . It can be codified in terms of limited symbols.

3) Social Meaning:

The meaning conveyed by the piece of language about the social context of its use is called the social meaning. The decoding of a text is dependent on our knowledge of stylistics and other variations of language. We recognize some words or pronunciation as being dialectical i.e. as telling us something about the regional or social origin of the speaker. Social meaning is related to the situation in which an utterance is used.

It is concerned with the social circumstances of the use of a linguistic expression. For example, some dialectic words inform us about the regional and social background of the speaker. In the same way, some stylistic usages let us know something of the social relationship between the speaker and the hearer.

E.g. “I ain’t done nothing”

The line tells us about the speaker and that is the speaker is probably a black American, underprivileged and uneducated. Another example can be

“Come on yaar, be a sport. Don’t be Lallu”

The social meaning can be that of Indian young close friends.

Stylistic variation represents the social variation. This is because styles show the geographical region social class of the speaker. Style helps us to know about the period, field and status of the discourse. Some words are similar to others as far as their conceptual meaning is concerned. But they have different stylistic meaning. For example, ‘steed ’, ‘horse and ‘nag’ are synonymous. They all mean a kind of animal i.e. Horse. But they differ in style and so have various social meaning. ‘Steed’ is used in poetry; ‘horse’ is used in general, while ‘nag’ is slang. The word ‘Home’ can have many use also like domicile ( official), residence (formal) abode (poetic) , home (ordinary use).

Stylistic variation is also found in sentence. For example, two criminals will express the following sentence

“They chucked the stones at the cops and then did a bunk with the look”

(Criminals after the event)

But the same ideas will be revealed by the chief inspector to his officials by the following sentence.

“After casting the stones at the police, they abandoned with money.”

(Chief Inspector in an official report)

Thus through utterances we come to know about the social facts, social situation, class, region, and speaker-listener relations by its style and dialect used in sentences.

The illocutionary force of an utterance also can have social meaning. According to the social situation, a sentence may be uttered as request, an apology, a warning or a threat, for example, the sentence,

“I haven’t got a knife” has the common meaning in isolation. But the sentence uttered to waiter mean a request for a knife’

Thus we can understand that the connotative meaning plays a very vital role in the field of semantics and in understanding the utterances and sentences in different context.

4) Affective or Emotive Meaning:

For some linguists it refers to emotive association or effects of words evoked in the reader, listener. It is what is conveyed about the personal feelings or attitude towards the listener. Affective meaning is a sort of meaning which  an effect the personal feeling of speakers, including his/her attitude to the listener, or his/her attitude to something he/she talking about.

E.g. ‘home’ for a sailor/soldier or expatriate

and ‘mother’ for a motherless child, a married woman (esp. in Indian context) will have special effective, emotive quality.

In affective meaning, language is used to express personal feelings or attitude to the listener or to the subject matter of his discourse.

For Leech affective meaning refers to what is convey about the feeling and attitude of the speak through use of language (attitude to listener as well as attitude to what he is saying). Affective meaning is often conveyed through conceptual, connotative content of the words used

E.g. “you are a vicious tyrant and a villainous reprobation and I hate you”

Or “I hate you, you idiot”.

We are left with a little doubt about the speaker’s feelings towards the listener. Here speaker seems to have a very negative attitude towards his listener. This is called affective meaning. But very often we are more discreet (cautious) and convey our attitude indirectly.

E.g. “I am terribly sorry but if you would be so kind as to lower your voice a

little”

Conveys our irritation in a scaled down manner for the sake of politeness. Intonation and voice quality are also important here. Thus the sentence above can be uttered in biting sarcasm and the impression of politeness maybe reversed while –

e.g.

“Will you belt up?”- can be turned into a playful remark between intimates if said with the intonation of a request.

Words like darling, sweetheart or hooligan, vandal have inherent emotive quality and they can be used neutrally.

I.A. Richards argued that emotive meaning distinguishes literature or poetic language from factual meaning of science. Finally it must be noted that affective meaning is largely a parasitic category. It overlaps heavily with style, connotation and conceptual content.

5) Reflected Meaning:

Reflected meaning involves an interconnection on the lexical level of language, it is the meaning, which arises in case of multiple conceptual meaning, when one senses of word forms part of our response to another sense. For instance, on hearing the Church service, the synonymous expressions The Comforter and The Holy Ghost both refer to the Third Trinity, but the Comforter sounds warm and comforting, while the Holy Ghost sounds awesome.

Reflected meaning is also found in taboo words. For examples are terms like erection, intercourse, ejaculation. The word ‘intercourse’ immediately reminds us of its association with sex (sexual intercourse). The sexual association of the word drives away its innocent sense, i.e. ‘communication’. The taboo sense of the word is so dominant that its non-taboo sense almost dies out. In some cases, the speaker avoids the taboo words and uses their alternative word in order to avoid the unwanted reflected meaning. For example, as Bloomfield has pointed out, the word ‘Cock’ is replaced by speakers, they use the word ‘rooster’ to indicate the general meaning of the word and avoid its taboo sense. These words have non-sexual meanings too. (E.g. erection of a building, ejaculate-throw out somebody) but because of their frequency in the lit of the physiology of sex it is becoming difficult to use them in their innocent/nonsexual sense.Thus we can see that reflected meaning has great importance in the study of semantics.

6) Collocative Meaning:

Collocative meaning consists of the associations a word acquire s on account of the meanings of the words, which tends to occur in its environment. For instance the words pretty and handsome share common ground in the meaning of good looking. But may be distinguished by the range of noun in which they are like to occur or collocate; Pretty woman and handsome man. The ranges may well match although they suggest a different kind of attractiveness of the adjectives.

With the other word, collocative meaning is the meaning which a word acquires in the company of certain words. Words collocate or co-occur with certain words only e.g. Big business not large or great.Collocative meaning refers to associations of a word because of its usual or habitual co-occurrence with certain types of words. ‘Pretty’ and ‘handsome’ indicate ‘good looking’.

However, they slightly differ from each other because of collocation or co-occurrence. The word ‘pretty’ collocates with – girls, woman, village, gardens, flowers, etc.

On the other hand, the word ‘handsome’ collocates with – ‘boys’ men, etc. so ‘pretty woman’ and ‘handsome man’. While different kinds of attractiveness, hence ‘handsome woman’ may mean attractive but in a mannish way. The verbs ‘wander’ and ‘stroll’ are quasi-synonymous- they may have almost the same meaning but while ‘cows may wonder into another farm’, they don’t stroll into that farm because ‘stroll’ collocates with human subject only. Similarly one ‘trembles with fear’ but ‘quivers with excitement’. Collocative meanings need to be invoked only when other categories of meaning don’t apply. Generalizations can be made in case of other meanings while collocative meaning is simply on idiosyncratic property of individual words. Collocative meaning has its importance and it is a marginal kind of category.

7) Thematic Meaning:

This is the final category of meaning, thematic meaning is the meaning that is communicated by the way in which the speaker or writer organizes the message, in terms of ordering, focus, and emphasis. It is often felt an active sentence such as (1) below has a different meaning from its passive equivalent (2) although in conceptual content they seem to be the same (Leech. 1974: 19)

1.      Mrs. Bessie Smith donated the first prize.

2.      The first prize was donated by Mrs. Bessie Smith

We can assume that the active sentence answers an implicit question “what did Mrs. Bessie Smith donate?”, while the passive sentence answer the implicit question “who donates the first prize?”, that in other words (1) in contrast to se (2) suggest that we know who Mrs. Bessie Smith.

It refers to what is communicated by the way in which a speaker or a writer organizes the message in terms of ordering focus and emphasis .Thus active is different from passive though its conceptual meaning is the same. Various parts of the sentence also can be used as subject, object or complement to show prominence. It is done through focus, theme (topic) or emotive emphasis. Thematic meaning helps us to understand the message and its implications properly. For example, the following statements in active and passive voice have same conceptual meaning but different communicative values.

e.g.

1) Mrs. Smith donated the first prize

2) The first prize was donated by Mrs. Smith.

In the first sentence “who gave away the prize “is more important, but in the second sentence “what did Mrs. Smith gave is important”. Thus the change of focus change the meaning also.

The first suggests that we already know Mrs. Smith (perhaps through earlier mention) its known/given information while it’s new information.

Alternative grammatical construction also gives thematic meaning. For example,

1) He likes Indian good most.

2) Indian goods he likes most

3) It is the Indian goods he likes most.

Like the grammatical structures, stress and intonation also make the message prominent. For example, the contrastive stress on the word ‘cotton’ in the following sentence give prominence to the information

1. John wears a cotton shirt
2. The kind of shirt that john wears is cotton one.

Thus sentences or pairs of sentences with similar conceptual meaning differ their communicative value. This is due to different grammatical constructions or lexical items or stress and intonations. Therefore they are used in different contents.

“Ten thousand saw I at a glance”

Wordsworth here inverts the structure to focus on ‘ten thousand”

.

Sometimes thematic contrast i.e. contrasts between given and new information can be conveyed by lexical means.

e.g.

1) John owns the biggest shop in London

2) The biggest shop in London belongs to John.

The ways we order our message also convey what is important and what not. This is basically thematic meaning.

Associative Meaning:

Leech uses this as an umbrella term for the remaining 5 types of meanings( connotative, social, affective, reflective and collocative).All these have more in common with connotative than conceptual meaning. They all have the same open ended, variable character and can be analyzed in terms of scales or ranges ( more/less) than in either or contrastive terms. These meanings contain many imponderable factors. But conceptual meaning is stable

Summary of Seven Types of Meaning.

 

CHAPTER III

CONCLUSION

Based on the discussion above, we can conclude that:

1. Conceptual Meaning = Logical, cognitive or connotative content.

2. Connotative Meaning = What is communicated by virtue of what language

refers

3. Social Meaning = What is communicated of the social circumstances of

Language

4. Affective Meaning = What is communicated of the feelings and attitudes of

the Speaker through language.

5. Reflected Meaning = What is communicated through associations with

another Sense of the same world.

6. Collocative Meaning = What is communicated through associations with

words which co-occur with another word.

7. Thematic Meaning = What is communicated by the way in which the

message is organized in terms of order and emphasis.

REFERENCES:

Larson, Mildred, L. 1984. Meaning based Translation. USA: University Press of America.

Leech, G.N. 1979, Semantics. Auxland: Pengin Books.

Palmer, I.R. 1981, Semantics, Cambridge University Press.

Tarigan, Guntur Henry. Prof. Dr. 1993. Pengajaran Semantik. Penerbit Angkasa Bandung.

Beaney, M., (ed.), 1997, The Frege Reader, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Brandom, R., 1994, Making It Explicit, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Paul Cobley, 1993, The Cambridge Companion to Semiotics and Linguistics.