Main Points
 Reference and Denotation
 Connotation
 Sense Relation
 Lexical and Grammatical Meanings
 Morphemes
 Homonymy and Polysemy
 Lexical Ambiguity
 Sentence and Meaning
1. Reference and Denotation
 … a language consists of a large number of words and
each of these words has a direct correlation with
something outside of language, which is its meaning.
And since, if we communicate with one another
through language, it must be that we all have the same
‘idea’ or ‘concept’ associated with each word…….. A
mentalistic theory about meaning (Ogden and
Richards (1923)
concept
association
reference
Word
object
meaning
 Concept …… a mental picture of what the word
represents.
 Reference … the relation between a language
expression and whatever the expression pertains to in
a particular situation of language use including what a
speaker may imagine or it is the way speakers and
hearers use an expression successfully.
 Denotation … the knowledge they have that makes
their use successful.
Some considerations
 Meaning is more than denotation.
 People not only talk and write to describe things and
events and characteristics; they also express their
opinions, favorable and unfavorable……connotation
and sense relations.
2. Connotation
 Connotation …. the affective or emotional
associations elicited by a word, which clearly need to
be the same for all people who know and use the word.
 A denotation identifies the central aspect of word
meaning which every body generally agrees about.
 Connotation refers to the personal aspect of
meaning, the emotional associations that the word
arouses.
 Connotation ….the degree of formality, the style or
‘flavor’.
3. Sense Relations
 The meaning that a lexeme has because of its relationships
with other lexemes they are associated with in an utterance
is the sense of that lexeme.
 E.g :
1. A window broke.
Tom broke window.
2. A happy child, a happy family…. Who enjoys
A happy accident, a happy experience…..
That produces
A happy story, a happy report…. Containing
a happy event
Sense Relation
 Syntagmatic…the relation of the lexeme with other
lexemes with which it occurs in the same phrases or
sencences.
 Syntagmatic ---the mutual association of two or more
words in a sequence so that the meanings contribute
to the meaning of the larger unit, the phrase, or
sentence.
 Paradigmatic…. A relation of choice.
4. Lexical and Grammatical
Meanings
 A referring Expression…. 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. The entity is called referent.
 Grammatical Meanings are expressed by bound
morphemes, by function words, and by arrangement
of forms in a sentence.
 Referring expressions and predicates have lexical
meaning while grammatical morphemes and function
words express grammatical meaning.
5. Morphemes
 Morpheme …. A minimal meaningful part.
 Free morphemes … which can occur by themselves.
 Bound Morphemes… the ones which are always
attached to something else.
 The minimal form that can have reference or can
predicate is a lexeme. A set of forms with grammatical
affixes is a single lexeme. A non-minimal form with
single meaning is a single lexeme, an idiom.
6. Homonymy and Polysemy
 Homonyms …two or more forms that are identical in
speech (pronunciation and spelling) but have different
meanings…. different lexeme.
 Homographs …. forms identical in writing (spelling)
but not in speech (different pronunciation) nor in
meaning and also different lexemes.
 A polysemous lexeme has several (apparently)
related meanings.
7. Lexical Ambiguity
 When homonyms can occur in the same position in
utterances, the results is lexical ambiguity.
 E.g : I was on my way to the bank.
 Ambiguity occurs also because a longer linguistic form
has a literal sense an a figurative sense.
8. Sentence Meaning
 What sentence meaning is?
 First, the meaning of a sentence derives from the
meanings of its constituent lexemes and from the
grammatical meanings it contains.
 Second, at least if the sentence is a statement, if you
know the meaning of the sentence, you know what
conditions are necessary in the world for that sentence
to be true.
 In semantics, we are not interested in intuitions or
hints but we are interested in the instances when the
language of the message implicates some additional
meaning that accounts for our inference.
 Truth-conditional semantics is the study of meaning
through a consideration of the conditions that must
exist for a sentence to be true, and how the truth of
one sentence relates to the truth or falsity of other
sentences.