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Indian Streams Research Journal
ISSN 2230-7850
Impact Factor : 3.1560
(UIF)
Volume-4 | Issue-12 | Jan-2015
Available online at www.isrj.org
R. Saranya
Associate Professor , CAS in Linguistics , Annamalai University , Annamalainagar.
Abstract:Today language is an inseparable part of human society. Language has been studied in a scientific way. The structure of language is very complex in nature. It is the network that internally organized by expression and content. It is most probable that the human mind to determining the sense of a word in a particular context actually proceeds by substituting other terms, at either the same or a higher position in the hierarchical structure of meanings. For compiling dictionary of any kind, it may be compiled by manually or by computer. the study of meaning is very essential. In the study of meaning there are three dimensions namely syntax, semantics and pragmatics in the analysis of linguistic units. Thus this paper highlights the different dimensions of meaning of lexical items based on the linguistic semantic approach. It includes the study of meaningful relationships between words and the meanings of linguistic units which are dealt with linguistic semantics as a science of meanings of linguistic components.
Keywords: Structure of language, hierarchical structure of meanings, dimensions of meaning,
Linguistic Semantics.
INTRODUCTION
Everyone acquires the essentials of the natural language like vocabularies and their pronunciations, and also their various dimensions meanings based on their various contexts or uses found in natural languages. The native speaker’s knowledge on his or her language use is largely implicit, because natural languages differ from the communication systems of nonhuman that refers to other animals in being stimulus-free or creative. Thus, the linguists made attempts to construct the grammar, as an explicit description of the language, the grammatical categories of the language and the rules by which they interact. In the grammar, semantics is one of the main parts while phonology, syntax and morphology are other parts. In semantics the study of meaning can be undertaken in various ways. It includes linguistic semantics which is a remarkable attempt to explicate the knowledge of any native speaker of a particular language that allows the speaker or communicator to express the known facts, feelings, intentions and products of the imagination to others who involve in the process of communication and also to understand what they communicate to others. Thus this paper tries to explore various meanings and different dimensions of meaning with special reference to Tamil and English and explain how the notion that linguistic element expresses a single meaning and every meaning may be expressed by just a single linguistic element is utterly wrong, while there is an obstacle to recognizing the complexities in meaningful expressions and in the meanings that they expressed.
The Aim:
The aim of this paper is to study the different aspects of meanings of lexical items based on lexicographic approach for developing bilingual and bidirectional electronic dictionary for school children with special reference to Tamil and English.
R. Saranya , “ASPECTS OF MEANING AND DISAMBIGUATION: A LEXICOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE ” Indian Streams Research
Journal | Volume 4 | Issue 12 | Jan 2015 | Online & Print

Aspects Of Meaning And Disambiguation: A Lexicographic Perspective
OBJECTIVES:
The main objectives of this paper are to make the students:
The dimensions of Meaning:
In view of the fact that we all expected to speak about a staggering variety of experiences with only a limited number of words (lexical units) or semantic units. It would seem that language would be incredibly ambiguous and obscure. Nevertheless, we do succeed quite well in using this very limited inventory of words to identify, to describe and to talk about literally millions of elements in their world, as well as many concepts, ideas, and beliefs which seems to bear no resemblance to anything earthly. The mechanism by which this is accomplished is one of the really remarkable features of natural language.
In most studies of semantics, or science of meaning, the emphasis is upon relative ambivalence of terms. It implies their capacity to have many different meanings. In fact there is no such prevailing ambivalence in the actual usage of language. It is obvious that in most instances the surrounding context points out quite clearly which of the basic meanings of a word is intended. And it is perhaps from this standpoint that we can best understand the true nature of the semantic structure of language.
According to Nida and Taber (1969) when we speak about the contextual specification of the meanings of words, we are not talking in vague nebulous terms. Rather, the linguistic context in the sense in which it is referred to here has two very definite aspects. They are: (1) In many cases, the particular meaning of the word that is intended is clearly specified by the grammatical constructions in which it occurs; this is what we will refer to as syntactic marking. (2) In other cases, the specific meaning of a word which is intended is marked by the interaction of that term with the meanings of the other terms in its environment. That is the fact that ‘A’ is found in the context of term ‘B’ means that only sense ‘x’ of term ‘A’ will fit. This conditioning by the meanings of surrounding terms we call semotactic marking. In each case, we will describe something of the kind of classes and categories which are involved. And, as we shall see, in a great many cases both syntactic and semotactic marking are involved in a single expression.
In many instances, the meaning of the terms is clearly indicated by the syntactic constructions in which they occur. Compare the following sets for examples:
Lexemes stone cloud
Functions
Noun
Verb
Noun
Verb
Examples
1.Kannan picked up a stone.
2.Kannan will stone Priya
3.Sheela saw a cloud .
4.The quarrel will cloud the issue. face Noun
Verb
Noun
5.The child has a beautiful face.
6.Geetha will face the audience.
7.A boy fell in the water.
water
Verb 8.Please
water the plants.
The distinct meanings of the terms stone, cloud, face, and water are very clearly marked by occurrence of these terms in quite different constructions, ie as nouns in contrast with verbs. In this sense the grammar itself points to the correct intended meaning. In some instances, however, the syntactic marking is not simply a distinction in word class. for example the term fox may occur in the following contexts with three quite different meanings:
Indian Streams Research Journal | Volume 4 | Issue 12 | Jan 2015

Aspects Of Meaning And Disambiguation: A Lexicographic Perspective
Lexemes fox
Functions
Noun
Noun
Examples
9. It is a fox.
10.He is a fox
Verb 11.He will fox her.
9). In the first sentence, the presence of third person neuter singular pronoun it (subject of a verb) identifies fox as an animal, because that is the only sense of fox for which it is a legitimate substitute; fox in this sense belongs to the same grammatical class as animal, what the hunters are chasing, that mammal, etc.,
10). In second sentence, the presence of third person nmasculine singular pronoun he forces us to take a sense of fox that applies to a person, since he in this construction, as an anaphoric substitute for a ‘male human’ is a legitimate substitute only for a class of terms, including the man, the young fellow, that politician, etc., which identify male persons; and the only sense of fox that applies to a person is ‘cunning person’.
11). In the third sentence, fox is a verb, as can be seen from its position between the auxiliary will and the object pronoun him; the verbal sense of fox is ‘deceive by clever means’.
Another frequently occurring grammatical marker of meaning is the intransitive and transitive contrast as follows:
Lexeme run
Functions
Verb
(transitive)
Verb
(intransitive)
Examples
12.He ran her.
13.He ran fast.
Certainly ‘run’ as an intransitive verb has quite different meanings from those situations in which it occurs as transitive.
According to Charles W. Kreidler (2006) a semantician one can identify different kinds of meaning of a lexeme. Some small pieces of any kind of human language refers to something, real or fictitious, outside of language.
Any such linguistic element or component or form is a referring expression and what it refers to is its referents (ie a concrete object or an abstract). Some linguistic elements used to make comments about referents; they are termed as predicates to the referents. In addition to these, there are some grammatical meanings that expressed by bound morphemes (affixes), and by function words in a sentence. Referring expressions (ie nouns and complements) and predicates (verbs and adverbials) express different lexical meanings, even though their grammatical category is changed or not; while grammatical morphemes and function words may express various grammatical meanings. The totality of lexemes in the language constitutes the lexicon of the language, whereas the totality of lexemes that one individual knows constitutes his or her personal lexicon. Every meaningful element of language is a linguistic expression. A minimal linguistic element is a morpheme, which may be a free form or a bound form (an affix). In a sentence certain forms may have references and other forms make predication about references. The minimal form that can have referent or can predicate is known as a lexeme. A set of paradigmatic forms with grammatical morphemes is a single lexeme. A non-minimal form with a single meaning is a single lexeme termed as an idiomatic expression.
It is generally noted that there are three ‘aspects’ in the meaning of a lexeme. The first one refers to denotation that is the relation to outside of language phenomena which includes imaginary; the second one denotes the cluster of attitudes that the lexeme may evoke is known as connotation; the third one is various potential relations of the lexeme to others with which it occurs in utterances ie.,the sense.
The lexical units which are identical in speech but different in their meanings are called homonyms whereas lexical units which are identical in writing but not in speech nor in meaning are called homographs. Both homonyms and homographs are treated as different lexemes. Since a lexeme has a range of meanings based on its application, it is very difficult to decide whether more than one meanings attached to a single form constitute more than one homonyms or a single polysemous lexeme. When the two homonyms may occur in the same position in an utterance, it results the lexical ambiguity. In lexical disambiguation, linguistic information in particular syntactic and semantic information.
DISAMBIGUATION OF WORD SENSE:
According to Mark Stevenson (2003), the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic information are potentially
Indian Streams Research Journal | Volume 4 | Issue 12 | Jan 2015

Aspects Of Meaning And Disambiguation: A Lexicographic Perspective useful for disambiguating meaning of lexical items. It may be manually or by computer. This can be demonstrated by considering the following sentences:
Lexemes Functions Examples well port.
adjective noun noun
14.Kavitha does not feel well .
15.She tripped near the well.
16.Kannan drinks the port
17.The ship sailed past the port
18.Kannan likes the port
The first two sentences consists of the ambiguous word ‘well’.In sentence (14), it is an adjective where it used in its ‘state of health’ sense, and in sentence (15),as a noun it expresses the meaning of ‘water supply’. This sentence could be disambiguated if the part of speech was known. Therefore these usages are disambiguated by their syntactic behavior. This information source may be used for disambiguation where two meanings of a word have different parts of speech and the grammatical category of a particular usage can be determined.
Sentence (16) contains the word ‘port’ which is ambiguous between the name of place ‘town’ and the action verb ‘drink’. The part of speech information cannot disambiguate the meaning in this case since both senses are nominal usages. However, this sentence can be disambiguated using semantic information, more specifically selectional restrictions. The transitive verb ‘drink’ takes a direct object which is a liquid and only the ‘drink’ sense of
‘port’ has the property of being a liquid. So (16) can be effectively disambiguated by its semantic behavior but not its syntax.
Selectional restrictions will not disambiguate (17). It is possible to sail past and physical object, but be it something small, like a bottle or glass of port, or large like a town. So the restriction on the direct object slot of a verb to sail would accept either of the senses, since both refer to physical objects. The sentence can be disambiguated on topical or pragmatical grounds because it is far more likely that a sentence which mentions ships will use other words with related senses. Thus one can use pragmatic information to disambiguate ‘port’ to its maritime sense.
The final example (18), is genuinely ambiguous. Given the limited context, ‘port’ could mean either of the two senses. Although the context here is insufficient to tell which sense was meant, it is almost certainly possible if a wider context, such as paragraph, were known.
CONCLUSION:
As can be seen from the above examples, the syntactic classes which help in the selection of specific meanings of words are determined by grammatical functions. These syntactic classes such as noun, verb, and adjective, animate or inanimate, transitive or intransitive, etc., are generally large, comprehensive, and clearly contrastive; they are often called formally marked, by the presence of certain endings, typical of such a grammatical class of words. It is concluded that every linguistic element has more than one meaning and every meaning is expressed by just not only one linguistic element. There is an obstacle to recognizing the complexities in meaningful expressions and in the meanings that they expressed. In general words are only ambiguous in text when the author intends them to be.
REFERENCES:
1.Charles W. Kreidler (2006) Introducing English Semantics, Routledge, London.
2.Mark Stevenson (2003) Word Sense disambiguation: The case for combinations of Knowledge sources,CSLI Publication, Stanford, Califonia
3.Nida, E.A and Taber, R (1969) The Theory and practice of Translation: Brill, Leiden
4.---------------(1975) Linguistic and Semantic Structure, In Dil, A.S. (ed) Language Structure and
Translation Essays by Eugene A. Nida, Stanford University Press, Stanford.
R. Saranya
Associate Professor , CAS in Linguistics , Annamalai University , Annamalainagar.
Indian Streams Research Journal | Volume 4 | Issue 12 | Jan 2015