Types of Meaning

Semantics is the study of meaning of language. It is important to study semantics because this subject covers all aspects of how people deal with language related to how people get a sense of meaning (language acquisition) and how meaning change over time (language change). According to John I Saeed, Semantics is the study of meaning which is communicated through language. He further says that a speaker’s semantic knowledge is an exciting and challenging task. In other words, study semantics means that we study about meaning of language. It becomes important to study meaning of language because everyday we communicate (spoken and written form), we transfer or convey the meaning or message to the readers or hearers. We can call meaning as the most vital part of communication which built the understanding between speakers and hearers and between writers and readers. Without understand the meaning, a communication through language cannot be called as communication.

Based on the activities in our daily life, we always do a communication with others using language. To understand language in social contexts is vey important, as these are likely to affect meaning, and for understanding varieties of English language and effects of style. It is one of the most basic concepts in linguistics, especially in semantics. When we study about semantics, we study the scope of semantics that covers all aspects of studying meaning of language. The semantic analysis, generally, explain how the sentences of language are understood, interpreted, and related to states, processes and objects in the world.

The study of semantics includes the study of how meaning is constructed, interpreted, clarified, obscured, illustrated, simplified negotiated, contradicted and paraphrased. There are some important areas of semantic theory or related subjects: symbol and referent, conceptions of meaning, words and lexemes, denotation, connotation, implication, pragmatics, ambiguity, semantic fields, synonym, antonym, hyponym, collocation, polysemy, homonymy, homophones and homographs.

Dealing with communication through laguage means that there will be many interpreted meanings from what the speakers say. To avoid unexpected interpretation of meaning that the speakers convey to us, we should know the type of meaning. In this paper, I will give some explanations about types of meaning. However, for a basic uderstanding about meaning, we should know the conception of meaning itself. There are some conceptions of meaning:

Word --> things: This theory was found in the Cratylus of Plato (427-347 BC). It means that words “name” or “refer to” things. This appears in proper nouns, for examples: Jogja, Avanza, Bali, etc. This concept will not clear when applied to abstraction nouns, adjectives, and verbs because there are no real existing things in the world to correspond to that words.

Words --> concepts --> things: This theory was expressed by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards in The Meaning of Meaning (1923). It states that there is no direct connection of words and things, but an indirect connection in our minds, that is called concepts. For each word there is a related concept.

Stimuli --> words --> responses: This theory was expressed by Leonard Bloomfield in Language (1933). A stimulus (S) leads someone to a response (r), which is a called speech act. To the hearer the speech act is also a stimulus (s), which leads to a response (R), which may be an action or understanding.
S --> r.................s --> R
Example: The room is dark, John needs much light (S) and asks to George to switch the lamp on (r). This new language stimulus, George’s hearing John (s) leads to his action (R) of switching the lamp on.

Seven Types of Meaning

A part of language conveys its dictionary meaning, connotations beyond the dictionary meaning, information about the social context of language use, and speaker’s feelings and attitudes. Further discussion, ‘meaning’ means the sum total of communicated through language. Words, phrases and sentences have meanings which are studies in semantics. Geoffrey Leech in his Semantic- A Study of meaning (1974) divides meaning into seven types. The seven types of meaning according to Leech are:

1) Conceptual or Logical Meaning
Conceptual meaning is also called logical or cognitive meaning. It is the literal meaning of the word indicating the idea or concept to which it refers. Conceptual meaning is the basic propositional meaning which corresponds to the primary dictionary definition. Such a meaning is stylistically neutral and objective as opposed to other kinds of associative meanings. Leech stated that conceptual meaning has sophisticated organization based on the principle of contrastiveness and hierarchical structure.

At the lexical level, conceptual meaning is represented as a set of distinctive features. For example, the operant features for “woman” are [human], [male], [adult]. The application of these features uses a binary notation where the value of a feature is specified as either positive [+], negative [-], or neutral [±].
Examples of conceptual meaning:
“woman” can be described as +human -male +adult
“hen” can be described as -human -male ±adult +wings

Conceptual meaning deals with the core meaning of expression. It is the denotative or literal meaning. It is essential for the function of language. For example, a part of the conceptual meaning of “needle” may be “thin”, “sharp” or “instrument”.
The purpose of conceptual meaning is to provide an appropriate semantic representation to a sentence or statement. Conceptual meaning helps us to distinguish one meaning from the meaning of other sentences. A language essentially depends on conceptual meaning for communication. So, it can be said that conceptual meaning is the base for all the other types of meaning.

The next five types of meaning are grouped under the umbrella of assosiative meaning: connotative meaning, social/stylistic meaning, affective meaning, reflected meaning, and collocative meaning. Associative meaning describes a group of six modes of language usage, which draw on certain mental connections. All these five types of meaning have more in common with connotative than conceptual meaning. They all have the same open ended, variable character and can be analyzed in terms of scales or ranges (more/less) than in either or contrastive terms.

2) Connotative Meaning
Connotative meaning is the communicative value of an expression over and above its purely conceptual content. It is something more than the dictionary meaning (lexical/logical meaning). The purely conceptual content of “woman” is +human +female +adult but the psychosocial connotations could be ‘gregarious’, ‘having maternal instinct’ or typical (rather than invariable) attributes of womanhood such as ‘babbling’, ‘experienced in cookery’, ‘skirt or dress wearing’. Still further connotative meaning can embrace putative properties of a thing due to viewpoint adopted by individual, group, and society as a whole. Thus, in the past woman was supposed to have attributes like frail, prone to tears, emotional, irrigational, inconstant , cowardly etc. as well as more positive qualities such gentle, sensitive, compassionate, hardworking etc. Connotations vary age to age and society to society.
Examples:
connotations of the word “woman” = soft, caring, gregarious, having maternal instinct, skirt or dress wearing, etc.
connotations of the word “man” = powerful, egoism, strong, brief, etc.

The boundary between conceptual and connotative looks to be analogous. Connotative meaning is regarded as incidental, comparatively unstable, in determinant, open ended, variable according to age, culture and individual, whereas conceptual meaning is not like that . It can be codified in terms of limited symbols.

3) Social Meaning
Social meaning is the meaning conveyed by the piece of language about the social context of language use. The interpretation of a text is dependent on our knowledge of stylistics and other variations of language. We recognize some words or pronunciation as being dialectical that is as telling us something about the regional or social origin of the speaker. Social meaning is related to the situation in which an utterance is used.

Social meaning is concerned with the social circumstances of the use of a linguistic expression. For example, some dialectic words inform us about the regional and social background of the speaker. In the same way, some stylistic usages let us know something of the social relationship between the speaker and the hearer.
Examples:
“I ain’t done nothing”.
The line tells us about the speaker and that is the speaker is probably a black American, underprivileged and uneducated.

Stylistic variation represents the social variation. This is because styles show the geographical region social class of the speaker. Style helps us to know about the period, field and status of the discourse. Some words are similar to others as far as their conceptual meaning is concerned. But they have different stylistic meaning.
For example:
Steed, horse and nag are synonymous. They all mean a kind of animal, that is horse. But they differ in style and so have various social meaning:
steed = used in poetry
horse = used in general
nag = slang
The word “home” can have many use:
domicile = official
residence = formal
abode = poetic
home = ordinary use
The word “teacher”, in the past had meaning as person who gives/shares their knowledge. However, today, in logical or real meaning, it means person who works as teacher in an institutionary.

The illocutionary force of an utterance also can have social meaning. According to the social situation, a sentence may be uttered as request, an apology, a warning or a threat, for example, in the sentence “I haven’t got a knife” has the common meaning in isolation. However, this sentence uttered to waiter mean a request for a knife.

4) Affective or Emotive Meaning
Some linguists describe it as emotive association or effects of words evoked in the reader or listener. It is what is communicated of the feelings and attitudes of the speaker or writer towards the listener or reader. Some feelings or attitudes are usually negative or insincere in nature. They are normally expressed through such forms of language use as insults, flattery, hyperbole or sarcasm.

In affective meaning, language is used to express personal feelings or attitude to the listener or to the subject matter of his discourse. Affective meaning is often conveyed through conceptual, connotative content of the words used.
Examples: “You are a vicious tyrant and a villainous reprobation and I hate you” Or “I hate you, you idiot”.

Here speaker seems to have a very negative attitude towards his listener. This is called affective meaning.

However, very often we are more discreet (cautious) and convey our attitude indirectly.
Example: “I am terribly sorry but if you would be so kind as to lower your voice a little”

Intonation and voice quality are also important here.
For example: when we ask somebody to open the door = “Would you open the door?” (in this term we use low intonation)
Words like darling, sweetheart or hooligan, vandal have inherent emotive quality and they can be used neutrally. I.A. Richards argued that emotive meaning distinguishes literature or poetic language from factual meaning of science. Finally it must be noted that affective meaning is largely a parasitic category. It overlaps heavily with style, connotation and conceptual content.

5) Reflected Meaning
It is what is communicated through assosiation with another sense of the same expression. At the lexical level of language, reflected meaning arises when a word has more than one conceptual meaning or multiple conceptual meaning. In some cases while responding to one sense of the word we partly respond to another sense of the word too. One sense of the word seems to rub off on another especially through relative frequency and familiarity.

In poetry, we have reflected meaning as in the following lines:
Are limbs so dear achieved, are sides
The writer here uses ‘dear’ in the sense of ‘expensiveness’. But, the sense of beloved is also avoided.
The could not but be gay in such jocund company
The word ‘gay’ was frequently used in the time of William Wordsworth but the word now is used for ‘homosexuality’.
Other example occurs in the word ‘bird’ is usually used as the name of an animal. However, it also can be used as ‘man’ and ‘freedom’.

In some type cases of multiple meaning, one meaning of the word pushes the other meaning to the background. Then the dominant suggestive power of that word prevails. This may happen because of the relative frequency or familiarity of the dominant meaning. This dominant meaning which pushes the other meaning at the background is called the reflected meaning.

6) Collocative Meaning
Collocative meaning is what is communicated through association with words which tend to occur in the environment of another word. Words collocate or co-occur with certain words only, for example “big business” not large or great. Collocative meaning refers to associations of a word because of its usual or habitual co-occurrence with certain types of words.
Examples:
The words ‘pretty’ and ‘handsome’ indicate ‘good looking’. However, they slightly differ from each other because of collocation or co-occurrence.
The word ‘pretty’ collocates with girls, woman, village, gardens, flowers, etc. On the other hand, the word ‘handsome’ collocates with boys, men, etc. so ‘pretty woman’ and ‘handsome man’. While different kinds of attractiveness, hence ‘handsome woman’ may mean attractive but in a mannish way. Other example also occur in the word phrase ‘short time’ and ‘short hair’.

Collocative meanings need to be invoked only when other categories of meaning don’t apply. Generalizations can be made in case of other meanings while collocative meaning is simply on idiosyncratic property of individual words. Collocative meaning has its importance and it is a marginal kind of category.

7) Thematic Meaning
It refers to what is communicated by the way in which a speaker or a writer organizes the message in terms of ordering focus and emphasis .Thus, active is different from passive though its conceptual meaning is the same. Various parts of the sentence also can be used as subject, object or complement to show prominence. It is done through focus, theme (topic) or emotive emphasis. Thematic meaning helps us to understand the message and its implications properly. For example, the following statements in active and passive voice have same conceptual meaning but different communicative values.
Example:
1) Mrs. Smith donated the first prize
2) The first prize was donated by Mrs. Smith.
In the first sentence “who gave away the prize” is more important, but in the second sentence “what did Mrs. Smith gave is important”. Thus the change of focus changes the meaning also.

Alternative grammatical construction also gives thematic meaning.
For example:
1) He likes Indian good most.
2) Indian goods he likes most.
3) It is the Indian goods he likes most.
Like the grammatical structures, stress and intonation also make the message prominent. For example, the contrastive stress on the word ‘cotton’ in the following sentence give prominence to the information.

1. John wears a cotton shirt.
2. The kind of shirt that john wears is cotton one.

Dealing with communication through laguage means that there will be many interpreted meanings from what the speakers say. To avoid unexpected interpretation of meaning that the speakers convey to us, we should know the type of meaning. After the discussion above, we know that generally, there are seven types of meaning. They are conceptual or logical meaning, connotative meaning, social/stylistic meaning, affective meaning, reflected meaning, collocative meaning, and thematic meaning.



sources:

Aitchison, J. 2003. Teach Yourself-Linguistics. London: Contemporary Books.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/329791/language/27171/Types-of-meaning

http://www.teachit.co.uk/armoore/lang/semantics.htm

http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2009/01/types-of-meaning.html