Meaning (linguistics)
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"Two twentieth-century American linguists have been particularly influential in shaping a "linguistics without meaning": Leonard Bloomfield and Noam Chomsky." --Semantics: Primes and Universals, 1996, Anna Wierzbicka, see meaning (linguistics) |
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In linguistics, meaning is what the source or sender expresses, communicates, or conveys in their message to the observer or receiver, and what the receiver infers from the current context.
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The sources of ambiguity
Ambiguity means confusion about what is conveyed, since the current context may lead to different interpretations of meaning.
Pragmatic meaning
Pragmatics is the study of how context affects meaning. The two primary forms of context important to pragmatics are linguistic context and situational context.
Linguistic context is how meaning is understood without relying on intent and assumptions. In applied pragmatics, for example, meaning is formed through sensory experiences, even though sensory stimulus cannot be easily articulated in language or signs. Pragmatics, then, reveals that meaning is both something affected by and affecting the world. Meaning is something contextual with respect to language and the world, and is also something active toward other meanings and the world. Linguistic context becomes important when looking at particular linguistic problems such as that of pronouns.
Situational context refers to every non-linguistic factor that affects the meaning of a phrase. An example of situational context can be seen in the phrase "it's cold in here", which can either be a simple statement of fact or a request to turn up the heat, depending on, among other things, whether or not it is believed to be in the listener's power to affect the temperature.
Semantic meaning
Semantics is the study of how meaning is conveyed through signs and language. Linguistic semantics focuses on the history of how words have been used in the past. General semantics is about how people mean and refer in terms of likely intent and assumptions. These three kinds of semantics: Formal, Historical, and General-Semantics are studied in many different branches of science (methods of studying meaning vary widely). Understanding how facial expressions, body language, and tone affect meaning, and how words, phrases, sentences, and punctuation relate to meaning are examples of Semantics. Denotations are the literal or primary meaning[s] of [a] word[s]. Connotations are ideas or feelings that a word invokes for a person in addition to its literal or primary meaning. during the 19th century Philosopher John Stuart Mill defined semantic meaning with the words "denotation" and "connotation". The original use of "meaning" as understood early in the 20th century occurred through Lady Welby, after her daughter translated the term "semantics" from French.
Conceptual meaning
Languages allow information to be conveyed even when the specific words used are not known by the reader or listener. People connect words with meaning and use words to refer to concepts. A person's intentions affect what is meant. Meaning (in English) as intent harkens back to the Anglo-Saxon and is associated today still, with the German verb "meinen" as to think or intend.
Semiotics
Ferdinand de Saussure described language in terms of Signs, which he in turn divided into signifieds and signifiers. The signifier is the sound of the linguistic object. The signified is the mental construction, or image associated with the sound. The sign, then, is essentially the relationship between the two.
Signs themselves exist only in opposition to other signs, which means that "bat" has meaning only because it is not "cat" or "ball" or "boy". Signs are essentially arbitrary, as any foreign language student is well aware: there is no reason that bat couldn't mean "that bust of Napoleon over there" or "this body of water". Since the choice of signifiers is ultimately arbitrary, the meaning cannot somehow be in the signifier. Saussure instead defers meaning to the sign itself: meaning is ultimately the same thing as the sign, and meaning means that relationship is between signified and signifier. All meaning is both within us and communal. Signs "mean" by reference to our internal lexicon and grammar, and despite their being a matter of convention, signs can only mean something to the individual (what red means to one person may not be what red means to another). However, while meanings may vary to some extent from individual to individual, only those meanings which stay within a boundary are seen by other speakers of the language to refer to reality: if one were to refer to smells as red, most other speakers would assume the person is talking nonsense (although statements like this are common among people who experience synesthesia).
See also
Fields
Perspectives
Theories
Considerations
Important theorists
- J. L. Austin
- Roland Barthes
- Rudolf Carnap
- Noam Chomsky
- Eugenio Coseriu
- Umberto Eco
- Viktor Frankl
- Gottlob Frege
- Paul Grice
- Roman Jakobson
- Saul Kripke
- Claude Lévi-Strauss
- Charles Sanders Peirce
- Bertrand Russell
- Ferdinand de Saussure
- John Searle
- P. F. Strawson
- Willard Van Orman Quine
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
