Introduction
Meaning in English is treated under Semantics. Semantics, an aspect of linguistics, is the scientific study of meaning. Semantics is a term from a Greek verb meaning “to signify.” It gained currency in the late 19th century. Semantics is preoccupied with seeking meaning to all words in natural languages. There is no word without meaning.
For this reason, we need to understand the meaning of morphemes that combine to form words and how words merge to form sentences with varying meanings in any given language for us to use them to communicate with one another.
In other words, learning a language involves learning the conventional meanings of the strings of sounds and words and how these combine to form larger units that convey meaning.
Basic Concepts in Semantics
Context and Meaning
All languages contain expressions with varying meanings that depend on who uses them, where, and when they are used. The context of the situation is an abstracted concept used by linguists to link up linguistic expressions and the social and situational constructs of language use.
It is very useful in determining the meaning of words and sentences. The context of utterance subsumes verbal, cultural, and situational contexts.
Verbal context has to do with the environment within which a particular word occurs—collocation. In other words, it means the linguistic elements (words or sentences) accompanying the word. When using the linguistic context of a word to determine its meaning, the reader uses other words or sentences that accompany the word and the situation described in the text to unravel the meaning of the word. This reduces the problem of ambiguity.
Cultural context defines the conventional or social rules of behavior which lead to effective communication between interlocutors. The culture of the individuals helps in determining the meaning of the words/sentences. Cultures differ in assigning meaning to words. That is the reason we say that words are conventional symbols with peculiar meanings.
This peculiarity arises from the experiences of the particular culture in question. The meaning assigned to words by the culture helps in understanding the meaning of words in certain situations. The situational context describes the prevailing circumstances under which a word is uttered, and this affects its meaning.
SPEAKING is a proposed taxonomy used to itemize the prevailing factors which affect utterance meaning.
S stands for setting and scene, that is, the physical circumstances like time, place, weather condition, and cultural view of the setting.
P is the participants (speaker/sender/addresser and hearer/receiver/addressee) — their roles, statuses, and relationships between them.
E stands for Ends – the expected outcome (intended/unintended) of the speech event.
A stands for Act sequence, and it concerns the form and content of the intended message. In other words, how the message is organized and what is said.
K is Key which is the manner in which the message is delivered.
I stands for Instrumentalities which refers to the channels and forms of speech used in communicating the message, e.g., telephone, face-to-face, e-mail, etc.
N refers to Norms, conventional rules of social and speech behavior which include linguistic, paralinguistic, and kinesics (nodding, smiles, etc.).
G is genre which is identifiable through the linguistic forms used, e.g., story, poem, letter, and so on.
Other factors that affect meaning include presupposition and polysemy. A presupposition is an implicit assumption or background belief relating to an utterance that must be mutually known to both speaker and hearer for the utterance to be considered contextually appropriate. Polysemy is a Greek word meaning “many signs.”
Linguistically, it refers to a word or phrase having multiple meanings. Specialization and figurative language are the two conditions that determine the polysemic nature of a word. Specialization arises as a result of different registers giving different meanings to the same word. The following words illustrate this feature:
Company– business enterprise, state of being together, a gathering of people, performing art troupe, military troop, Navy Nautical crew, unit of firefighters, etc.
Interest– curiosity/concern, quality that attracts attention, enjoyable thing, benefit/advantage, involvement, etc.
Stage – area in theatre, dramatic profession, platform, period/step during a process, setting in which something happens, significant phase, etc.
Figurative usage relates to a situation where a word takes one or more meanings without losing its original meaning. A widely used example is the word “eye” which is applied to a wide range of objects that remind one of the human organ for seeing.
The following entries are found in the dictionary for such metaphorical uses of the word:
- Organ of vision
- The hole in a needle
- New shoot of a potato
- Calm centre of a storm
- A loop of a metal, thread, rope, cord
Sense and Reference
Sense and reference are two different but related aspects of meaning. Sense deals with relationships within the language, while reference deals with relationships between language and the world. Reference indicates what in the real world is being talked about. In other words, a referring expression is used to refer to something or someone. For instance:
1. Kate is in the car.
2. The book on the table is mine.
3. The soldiers have gone for recreation.
Kate, the car (sentence 1), the book, the table (sentence 2), the soldiers (sentence 3) are referents, objects in the real world that we can point at. It is what a word stands for on the occasion of its use.
Some referring expressions do not have objects in the real world that we can point at, and some can have more than one object that they refer to. Sense deals with the relationships existing between linguistic elements or expressions (intra-linguistics) with respect to the words or sentences being synonymous, antonymous, polysemic, or hyponymous. For instance:
4. He greeted the girl with a smile.
This sentence has more than one signification or sense. The sense of the expression depends on whether the man greeted the girl smiling or that he greeted the smiling girl.
The sense of an expression is an abstraction which the user of the expression realizes in his/her mind. Every word/expression that has meaning has sense but not every expression has reference.
