Diana Mazen Gharaibeh
2012300018
Q1 Answer:
Language is used to communicate about things happening and states of affairs in the world.
A sentence is a grammatical unit, that is, it is a string of words of a particular type whose wellformedness conditions are specified in the grammar of the language.
Every sentence has lexical and grammatical meaning but sometimes it is borne in the mind that
in reality there is a varying scale of what might be termed lexicality and grammaticality. A
convenient way of presenting the distinction is in terms of the sorts of element which carry the
meaning in question.
We can divide grammatical units into closed-set items and open-set items. The closed-set items
have the following characteristics:
They belong to small substitution sets
Their principle function is to articulate the grammatical structure of sentences
They change at relatively slow rate through time, so that a single speaker is unlikely to
see loss or gain of items in their lifetime
These maybe contrasted with open-set items, which have the following characteristics:
They belong to relatively large substitution sets
There is a relatively rapid turnover in membership of substitution classes and a single
speaker is likely to encounter many losses and gains in a single lifetime
Their principal function is to carry the meaning of a sentence
Both closed and open-set items carry meaning, but their different functions mean that there are
differences in the characteristics of the meanings that they typically carry.
A closed-set item has to be able to combine without anomaly with a wide range of roots and for
this to be possible it must have a meaning which is fixable or broad enough or sufficiently
attenuated not to generate clashes too easily, and it must signal contrasts which recur
frequently.
In contrast, there is no limit to particularity or richness of the meaning and open-set elements
may carry, as there are no requirements for recurrent meanings or wide co-occurrence
possibilities. Hence, open-set items typically carry the burden of the semantic content of
utterances.
What are called content words prototypically have one open-set morpheme and may also have
one or more closed-set items in the form of affixes Lexical semantics is by and large the study of
the meanings of content words and is oriented principally to the contribution that open-set
items make to these. Grammatical semantics concentrates on the meanings of closed-set items.
However, sometimes a strict separation between grammatical and lexical semantics is not
possible because they interact in complex ways.
According to Lynos (1995) a lexeme may have different word-forms which differ in their
grammatical meaning e.g. ‘student’ and ‘students’ one is the singular form and the other is
plural form. The different between them is semantically relevant: it affects a sentence-meaning.
Lynos introduce the term “grammatical meaning”: it is that part of the meaning of lexeme which
derives from their being members of one category of major parts of speech rather than another
(nouns rather than verbs, the verb rather than adjective and so on). For example, ‘easy’ and
‘difficult’ have the same categorical meaning, they are adjectives, and each lexeme has certain
semantically relevant grammatical properties. The two words ‘easy’ and ‘easier’ of the lexeme
‘easy’ differ grammatically.
But lexical meaning is the most outstanding individual of the word that makes it different from
any other word. The lexical meaning of a lexeme may be analyzed into descriptive and nondescriptive meaning.
The descriptive meaning of a lexeme is widely assumed to be the central factor in linguistic
communication. The non-descriptive meaning provides additional affects to its central meaning.
For example, “shirt which denotes to a class of pieces of clothing worn on the upper part of the
body” which is descriptive meaning, but “nick” it could be a part of a body or a part of bottle or
a part of a shirt etc…, it is non-descriptive meaning.
“A dog barked” this meaningful sentence is consists of a “dog” which is referring expression and
the verb “bark” which is also linked to something outside language, an activity associated with
the referring expression “a dog”. This meaningful part called a predicate. As well as the sentence
has several kinds of grammatical meaning.
It is known that the grammatical meanings are expressed by various ways: the arrangement of
words, by grammatical affixes like “s” or “ed” like in the verb “barked”, and by grammatical
words like “not”, “a”, “the” and ‘and’.
So we can say that the sentence “a dog barked” has lexical meaning not grammatical because it
consists of lexemes that can take part in referring or predicating. Also if we have
a) Drink, drank, drunk, drinking
b) Put up with, kick the bucket, dog in the manner
The group “a” consists of four forms which have different meanings but they have shared
meaning which is lexical, so the grammatical nature added to the lexical meaning. We can say
that these four forms constitute one lexical meaning which is “drink”. But in group “b” “kick the
bucket” means “die” is single lexeme.
References:
Cruse Alan, Meanings in Language An introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics (2000). Oxford
University Press.
Lyons, John (1963), structural Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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