DESCRIPTIVE MEANING

CHAPTER II

DISCUSSION

A.    Descriptive

According to Oxford Advanced Learner’s, descriptive is saying what something is like; describing something: the descriptive passages in the novel.[2]

Meaning of descriptive in English:

• serving to describe or inform or characterized by description; "the descriptive variable"; "a descriptive passage"
• concerned with phenomena (especially language) at a particular period without considering historical antecedents; "synchronic linguistics"; "descriptive linguistics"
• describing the structure of a language; "descriptive linguistics simply describes language"[3]

B.     Meaning

According to Oxford Advanced Learner’s, Meaning is the thing or idea that sounds, word, sign, etc. represent: what’s the meaning of this word? Words often have several meaning ‘Honesty’? He doesn’t know the meaning of the word![4]

Descriptive meaning isa dimension of expression meaning. The descriptive meaning of a sentence, its proposition, is a concept that provides a mental description of the kind of situations it potentially refers to. The descriptive meaning of a word or a grammatical form is its contribution to the descriptive meanings of the sentences in which the word or grammatical form may occur. (Alternative terms: propositional meaning, truth-conditional meaning.)According to truth-conditional theories, an adequate descriptive semantic theory needs to provide a recursive and compositional characterization of values for sentences which determine the truth conditions of each sentence.[5]

Descriptive meaning is contained in the meaning of each word. Meaning indicated by the symbol itself. So, if someone says water, then the issue is a liquid substance that is used for bathing, washing or drinking. Water that the meaning is that there is water in the bucket, in the bath, or in a baking dish. If someone said, "Take a glass of water," then surely brought water instead of juice or mercury. Understand the meaning of the word water, because it brings the water as we wish.[6]

C.  Dimensions of Descriptive Meaning

1.      Intrinsic dimension

Intrinsic dimensions are semantic properties an element possesses in and ofitself, without (overt) reference to other elements.

a.       Quality

What we shall call quality is at one and the same time the most obvious and important dimension of variation within descriptive meaning, and the one about which we shall say the least. It is this which constitutes the difference between red and green, dog and cat, apple and orange, run and walk, hate and fear, here and there. Pure differences of quality are to be observed only between items which are equal on the scales of intensity and specificity.

b.      Intensity

Descriptive meaning may vary in intensity, without change of quality. For instance, one would not wish to say that large and huge differ in quality: they designate the same area of semantic quality space, but differ in intensity. It is characteristic of intensity differences that they yield normal results in the following test frame.

c.       Specificity

Differences of descriptive specificity show up in various logical properties. These differ according to the exact type of specificity involved (see below). For one major type of specificity, these properties include, for instance, unilateral entailment.

For examples :

It's a dog unilaterally entails It's an animal.

It's not an animal unilaterally entails It's not a dog.

Note also that dogs and other animals is normal, but not ?animals and other dogs.

From all this, we can conclude that dog is more specific than animal (alternatively, animal is more general than dog). Similarly, slap is more specific than hit, scarlet is more specific than red, woman is more specific than person .

d.      Vagueness

We shall say that the meaning of a word is vague to the extent that the criteria governing its use are not precisely statable. Before examining this notion in greater detail, it is necessary to make as clear a distinction as possible between it and certain other notions with which it is often coupled in discussions, if not actually confused. The first of these is generality. Although someone who says I saw a reptile is not giving as much information as someone who says I saw a snake, they are not being any more vague. That is to say, the notion "reptile" is as clearly delimitable as the notion "snake", it is just that it denotes a more inclusive class. Another notion which must be distinguished from vagueness is abstractness. For instance, the notion of "entailment" is abstract, but is relatively well defined, and therefore not vague.

e.       Basicness

Another dimension along which descriptive meanings can vary is that of basicness: some meanings are considered more basic than others. This is a complex topic and cannot be fully explored here. There are several differentinterpretations of the notion. We shall look at three broad ways of thinking of a basicness.

In many, extremely varied, approaches to language and meaning a distinction is made between words or features which are close to concrete everyday experience, and those which, though in some way ultimately derived from these, are to various degrees remote from actual bodily experience. For instance, the meaning of cold can be directly experienced through the senses, but the meaning of gradable as applied to adjectives (e.g. a little bit/slightly/ quite/rather/very/extremely cold) cannot, though there is undoubtedly a connection of some sort between bodily experiences of coldness and the abstract notion of gradability.

f.       Viewpoint

A number of linguistic expressions encode as part of their meaning a particular viewpoint on the events or states of affairs designated. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is provided by deictic expressions such as this, that, here, there, now, then, and so on, which are usually claimed to encode the viewpoint of the speaker at the moment of utterance. So, for instance, the book on the table, if it was valid for one speaker in a particular context, would be valid for anyone present; however, the validity of this book here, as a description of the same book, would clearly depend on the position of the speaker relative to the book in question.

2.      Relative dimensions

Under the next three headings, we shall look at parameters which relate not so much to complete meanings, but to semantic features which form part of a complete lexical sense.

a.       Necessity and expectedness

The first parameter is necessity. The simple view of this parameter is to make a sharp dichotomy between necessary and contingent logical relationships, and use entailment to determine whether or not a feature is necessary. On the basis of the following we could say that "being an animal" is a necessary feature of dog.

b.      Sufficiency

Sufficiency is a kind of converse of necessity. We normally speak of the joint sufficiency of a set of features (for instance, the features MALE and HORSE are jointly sufficient to guarantee that anything possessing them is a stallion). We may interpret the notion as it applies to a single feature in terms of diagnosticity, an obviously gradable notion. Salience Things which are salient stand out from their background in some way, and have a superior power of commanding attention. This property may be shown by one linguistic element vis-a-vis other elements in a larger expression, or by one feature of the meaning of a word vis-a-vis other features of the same word. I would like to distinguish two types of saliency (without, however, wishing to deny their interrelationships). One way of interpreting the notion of salience is in terms of the ease of access of information. Obviously, features which are easy to get at are going to play a larger role in semantic processing in real time than those which are harder to get at. Certainly, many of the so-called prototype effects observable between items and categories seem to depend on ease of access, and it would be reasonable to expect the same to be true of features.[7]

CHAPTER III

CONSLUSION

According to Oxford Advanced Learner’s, descriptive is saying what something is like; describing something: the descriptive passages in the novel. While, Meaning is the thing or idea that sounds, word, sign, etc.

Descriptive meaning is a dimension of expression meaning or descriptive meaning is contained in the meaning of each word. Meaning indicated by the symbol itself. Intended meaning is the meaning that is still happening in the community of languages.Descriptive meaning contributes to a bare presentation of facts.If someone said, "Take a glass of water," then surely brought water instead of juice or mercury. Understand the meaning of the word water, because it brings the water as we wish.

REFERENCES

Mansoerpateda, Semantic Leksikal, (Jakarta: RinekaCipta, 2010)

Mark Schroeder, ‘Semantics, Moral Forthcoming in the International Encyclopedia of Ethics. (University of Southern California, 2008)

Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary.

Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy:

Review of lobner, Sebastian, understanding semantics, (London: Arnold publisher: 2002)

Cruse Alan D, Meaning in language An introduction to semantics and pragmatics, (Oxford University Press, New york, 2000).

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[1]Review of Löbner, Sebastian, Understanding Semantics.(London:Arnold Publishers.2002), p 38.

[2] Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. P.395.

[3]Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy:

[4]Ibid., P. 920.

[5] Mark Schroeder,‘Semantics, MoralForthcoming in the International Encyclopedia of Ethics.(University of Southern California, 2008)16: 447-465.

[6]Mansoerpateda, Semantic Leksikal, (Jakarta: RinekaCipta, 2010), p 99.

[7] Cruse Alan D, Meaning in language An introduction to semantics and pragmatics, (Oxford University Press, New york, 2000), p. 46