Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Word Meaning
• Two approaches to word meaning
• Meaning and Notion
• Types of word meaning
• Types of morpheme meaning
• Motivation
Semantics
types of
meaning
grammatical
lexico-grammatical
meaning lexical meaning
meaning
denotational connotational
Grammatical Meaning
• component of meaning recurrent in
identical sets of individual forms of
different words
e.g. girls, winters, toys, tables –
grammatical meaning of plurality
asked, thought, walked – meaning of tense
Lexico-grammatical meaning
• denominator of all the meanings of
words belonging to a lexico-
grammatical class
e.g. action – generic term for verbs
• words of one lexico-grammatical
class have the same paradigm
Lexical Meaning
• component of meaning proper to a
word as a linguistic unit met in all
word-forms
e.g. go-goes-went
lexical meaning – process of
movement
grammatical meaning – tense and
person
Denotational Meaning
• expresses the conceptual content of a
word
• makes communication possible
e.g. notorious, adj. – widely known
celebrated, adj. – widely known
Connotational Meaning
• emotive charge or stylistic
reference of a word
• it is optional – a word either has it
or not
Connotation
• stylistic connotation – associations
concern the situation in which the word is
uttered, the social circumstances (formal,
informal, etc.), social relationships
between the interlocutors (polite, rough,
etc.), the type and purpose of
communication (poetic, official, etc.)
e.g. horse (neutral) – steed (poetic) – nag
(slang) – gee-gee (baby language)
Connotation
• Emotional connotation – emotive charge
of words that does not depend on the
“feeling” of the individual speaker but is
true for all speakers of English
• varies in different word-classes
e.g. in interjections - it prevails
in conjunctions – non-existant
Connotational Meaning
notorious + for criminal
widely acts or bad
known traits of a
character